Trapped miners. Taylor Swift. Tom Brady. Binary death star.

Now that I've gotten your attention, Robert Lerose wrote a fascinating article in the August Hotline that deserves a second look. It’s about a new book titled The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr—and it wonders if all writers will soon, as Carr puts it, have to “tailor their words to search engines.”

Now, of course, there are numerous times when we want to do this. Matt Bailey, who will be leading three sessions at the November 10-12 Marketing Conference in Miami, speaks eloquently on SEO strategies and our use of words to attract eyeballs and mouse-clicks.

But that’s marketing. Lerose is talking about content—the very essence of what SIPA members deliver so ably to their customers—and long articles, special reports and even novels and books.

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More Dumb Things and Their Successful Solutions

Complicated spread sheets, over-crowded Websites and courtesy-reply envelopes are just three of the next 10 of 50 Dumb Things Publishers Stopped Doing and So Should You that we started in this space last month—based on a popular session at SIPA 2010.

Denise Elliott and Greg Krehbiel, both from The Kiplinger Washington Editors, led this session and will also be speaking at the Marketing Conference in Miami, Nov. 10-12—Elliott leading the Marketing Directors Roundtable on the first afternoon and Krehbiel leading a session called Top 10 Things Marketers Need to Know About IT. A couple other experts in this listing will be speaking in Miami as well.

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In other words, their Alex Trebek would ask, “Barcelona to St. Petersburg,” and a contestant would ring in, “take the 6:11 to Paris, then the 11:40 to Frankfurt” and so on. At the time, it seemed a bit preposterous, though now, that word may not even exist--this from someone who grew up on the “Jersey Shore.”

The point here is that the film actually did portray this game show in the end, in all its bells, whistles and departure boards. And it was amazing to see! Our protagonist won and left with his new girlfriend to some frigid outpost pub in the snowbound wilderness.

Flash forward to the warmth of Miami Beach and the brainpower that will be in attendance at SIPA’s 27th Annual Marketing Conference, Nov. 10-12 at the Ritz-Carlton. We’ve been hard at work organizing an event that I will call IdeaSlam I because it will undoubtedly be the first of many.

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“It fit into this whole philosophy of improving our relationship with the community,” the marketing director said. “It was an important first step in the process.”

At that time, 2004, a community was still mostly measured in physical terms. Today, of course, an online community is probably more appropriate for our marketing directives. But that doesn’t mean strategies have to change all that much. Improving your relationship with your online community should remain a major goal.

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Last week, 3D, the DMA Daily Digest, led us to a website called Target Marketing that published a nice piece on “Creating and Promoting a Viral Video.” (More on that below.)

Fortunately—since you definitely need some equipment before undertaking these videos—SIPA’s June Hotline published an article by Alan Prochoroff, editor and publisher of Insurance Compliance Insight for ProBusiness Publishing LLC, to help get you started in the video realm. The article compared the Flip Ultra HD camcorder and the Kodak vi8 (now available as the zi8 HD).
Here were some of his findings:

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Karen Piontkowski, Founder and President, Direct Answer, Inc.
Katie Rogers, Vice President, Direct Answer, Inc.

Editor’s Note: We give you a pre-Labor Day special today of two-for-the-price-of-one.

SIPA: What was your first job out of college and how did you get into this business?
Karen Piontkowski: Printing broker...doesn't everyone in direct marketing start in printing? Once the ink is in your blood and the feel of the different paper textures, you cannot get it out so it seems! Throughout the years, I find most of my colleagues who began with me in the late ’70s and early ’80s are connected to printing in some sort of fashion...however, I fear we may be losing those wonderful smells of a web press running at full speed!

Katie Rogers: I was being recruited to work for a certain three-letter government agency, but when I found out that I could and would be called at a moment’s notice to head overseas for an undetermined amount of time, I and my soon-to-be husband, decided it might not be the best environment to raise a family. As for how I got into this business, I don’t think I ever was NOT in this business. I started folding T-shirts for premiums and doing data entry before I was legally allowed to work: my friends are still impressed with my 100 wpm! Growing up surrounded by this industry, I swore I would never work in it when I “grew up”—I wanted to break the mold. Do something different! However, the passion must run in my blood as I kept being drawn back to it—it seemed to come naturally. After completing my EMBA, I realized this was what I was made to do and haven’t looked back since.

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Tips From SIPA UK Conference Become
Session Starters for Miami Meeting

by Ronn Levine

David Foster, CEO of BVR in Portland, Ore., sat in on the marketing directors' roundtable at July’s SIPA UK Conference in London, and sent back some thoughts from the participants. We've now added interesting tie-ins to sessions at the Annual Marketing Conference in Miami. It’s exciting when Conferences build off each other.

1. When hiring, be sure to check the prospective staff member’s use of social media.

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New-Product Ideas Range From
a Relaunching to a Repurposing

Here are 10 new-product development ideas to put on your gold-seeking plate (from SIPA 2010).

From Torry Burdick, senior vice president, Marketing, Mortgage Success Source

1. Webinars are not new, but they have taken on a new flavor at MSS. We have used free webinars in the past to provide content to our audience, but recently we began using them in our marketing. They are proving to be an excellent way for us to showcase our expertise to our prospect audience as well as cross sell our existing subscribers new products.(Examples: Legislative updates and trial promotions.)

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SIPA: What was your first job out of college and how did you get into this business?
KHOSRODAD: My first job out of college was with a small local publisher called AKA publishing that produced a foreign-language weekly dealing with political events in the Middle East. I initially started as a lowly programmer building “green-screen” applications to help manage subscribers but soon got involved with setting up elaborate ways to gather and compile news and information from reporters abroad using dial-up networks.

Has there been a defining moment in your career? Perhaps when you knew you were on the right road.
The one that clearly stands out occurred in 2001 when Hitachi acquired Virtual Logic (the company I was working for at the time) and started breaking it up into smaller pieces. My team and I separated away and started Cranium Softworks that year.

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Examining the Ties That Bind Between
Marketers, IT, Copywriters and Customers 

At the much-anticipated Marketing Conference in Miami, Nov. 10-12, Greg Krehbiel of The Kiplinger Washington Editors will lead a session titled Top 10 Things Marketers Need to Know About IT. “With online marketing more important than ever,” the description reads, “marketing managers need to have a strong working relationship with the IT department…This very practical session delves into the most common and vexing problems in the IT-marketing relationship, and offers proven solutions from interviews with professionals on both sides.”

Krehbiel raised this very interesting topic on the SIPA online marketing forum a couple months ago, and the responses gave a glimpse of just how good a session this will be.

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Change-Up of Delivery and Content May Be
Just the Pitch to Sell at a Higher Price Point

During a roundtable titled How to Market High-Priced Products at the SIPA 2010 Conference, Robin Crumby, managing director, Melcrum Publishing Ltd., presented a very interesting case study. Here was the challenge: How do you turn a 300 euro ($387) print-subscription newsletter with poor renewal rates into a 20,000 euro ($25.768) “Forum” membership service with renewal rates over 90%?

The plan hinges upon the fact that although you have to work much harder to sell at a higher price point, it is far worth it.

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Kaiser’s Advice to the Arts World
Also Travels Well for Publishers

You’ve heard of Around the World in 80 Days? Michael Kaiser, the highly accomplished and admired president of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., recently went around the United States in 450 days. Normally no great feat, but in this case his Arts in Crisis Tour hit all 50 states, finishing with totals of 69 cities, 83,000 miles, and forums with 11,000 artists, arts administrators and board members.

The purpose of Kaiser’s trip was to listen to the economic challenges faced by arts organizations and offer strategies and solutions to help them overcome those challenges.

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Anne Holland, Publisher, Anne Holland Ventures Inc.

SIPA: What was your first job out of college and how did you get into this business?
HOLLAND: Data entry operator for the World Aviation Directory, which is when I first became obsessed with order form design and how simple changes can increase publication sales. I then weaseled my way into my supervisor’s heart and got her to take me with her as a marketing assistant when she landed a gig at The Oil Daily.

Has there been a defining moment in your career? Perhaps when you knew you were on the right road.
For me it was in early 1999 when a 22-year old tried to convince me to leave Phillips Publishing to help with his dot-com subscription start-up.

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The Heat Isn’t the Only All-Star Team
in Miami; Check Out These Speakers!

Reach out to bloggers, evaluate your renewal series, find the most successful direct marketing material and read it. With the speakers assembled for this November’s Marketing Conference in Miami, tips and solutions will be flying. Here are a few:

1. Copywriter Robert Lerose will co-lead a session on Renewals.

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BLR Profile Gives You ‘Backstage’ Information
To a Very Audience-Friendly Company

“We do everything we can think of to get visitors to the site,” says Bob Brady, founder and president of BLR—Business and Legal Resources. “We use paid search, organic search optimization, email promotions, demo disks…. anything that makes sense, because you’re never really sure what might work.”

BLR’s formula does work and has been for many years. That’s one reason why this leading compliance information company is profiled in SIPA’s latest management report, Building Subscription Websites That Sell: A Marketing Perspective. The profiles in this report give you very workable examples of many kinds of successful subscription websites.

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In This World, Engagement and Relationships
Build Online Communities Not Marriages

Creating conversations relationships in online communities.

The above line—crossout and all—was imprinted on a slide from the presentation of Sift CEO Ben Heald at a SIPA 2010 session on Building Online Communities. Conversations aren’t quite enough anymore. You need to engage people, Heald said.

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Tom Lynch, CMO, Astek Consulting

SIPA: What was your first job out of college and how did you get into this business?
LYNCH: First job out of college: Selling "plain paper" copiers in Chicago for a large company out of Minnesota—lots of cold calling. Did it for about a year and a half. The earliest heat fusion models would set the paper on fire if they ran too long. Short demos sold more copiers... Found out on the street a large company out of Japan manufactured their copiers and sold the identical box in my territory for about a grand less. It was a tough job..

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Everybody’s Doing Them (Webinars),
So Why Not Take Some Good Advice?

Webinars have quickly become a standard part of the specialized information industry. A quick tour of some SIPA member sites shows Best Practices in Sales coming up for Modern Distribution Management, HR Under Attack: How to Survive Washington’s Aggressive New Compliance Crackdown playing next week for Business Management Daily and Everything You Always Wanted To Know About DLOM But Were Too Afraid to Ask being shown by Business Valuation Resources. (I just found out that DLOM stands for discounts for lack of marketability.)

Obviously, in this space, we can’t give you everything you always wanted to know about Webinars, but we can give you some good tips and

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Not-So-Great Ideas Lead to
Some Pretty Great Solutions

Setting up too many promo codes, over-complicating audio conferences and still printing things you shouldn’t. 50 Dumb Things Publishers Stopped Doing and So Should You proved to be one of SIPA 2010’s most popular sessions. We don’t want to give everything away in this space—and we have our own catchy title to adhere to—so let’s shoot for 10.

Denise Elliott and Greg Krehbiel, both from The Kiplinger Washington Editors, led this session and will also be speaking at the Marketing Conference in Miami, Nov. 10-12—Elliott leading the Marketing Directors Roundtable on the first afternoon and Krehbiel leading a session called Top 10 Things Marketers Need to Know About IT. (That’s pronounced “Eye” “Tee”—though “it” in all caps works as well to build excitement.)

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Price Points, Loyalists and Renewals:
SIPA Online Forum Leads by Examples

“How are publishers REALLY helping long-time subscribers who genuinely have no budget?”

This was a question posted a couple months ago to the SIPA Online Marketing Forum, one of seven forums that SIPA members can access through the Website. The others are Editorial, Information Technology (IT),Conferences,Fulfillment/Operations, Electronic Publishing and Large Publishers.

These forums provide incredible benefits for SIPA members

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Lucretia Lyons, President, Business Valuation Resources, LLC (Portland, Ore.)

SIPA: What was your first job out of college and how did you get into this business?
Lyons: By some stroke of good fortune, I landed in publishing and marketing early on in my career. My first job was as marketing coordinator for University Press of America (UPA), a small academic publisher outside of Washington, D.C. Before I even knew what direct marketing really was, I was writing one-page flyers and renting lists for monographs on pretty obscure topics written mainly by professors needing to fulfill publication requirements. I clearly remember the courier typeface, the paper jams in the copier and the

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Build It Well and They Will Come
Says Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos

The Internet is a word-of-mouth accelerator. If you build a great product or service, people will talk about it.
—Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com

In a week when PBS’s Charlie Rose Show had such entertaining guests as actors Steve Carell and Paul Rudd and baseball writer Roger Angell, a little serious banter sounded good last night in the form of Jeff Bezos.

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A Summer of Content: Bailey Counts
The Ways to Create New Web Posts

Leave it to Matt Bailey to tell us about an online “tax rap” competition hosted by Vanilla Ice on Intuit (TurboTax)—where they drew about 700 entries to post online. Because when it comes to talking about marketing, analytics, and in this case, building content, Bailey has always drawn very high marks from SIPA Conference-goers.

“Intuit has been very inventive to give people tools to create content,” Bailey, president of SiteLogic, said at a session at last month’s SIPA 2010 Conference. “Now they have hundreds of videos of people talking about how great TurboTax is. Last year they did another successful competition around comedy routines.”

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The Search Is ‘On’ for
SIPAlert Daily Articles

Good news: SIPAlert Daily articles are now searchable on the SIPA Website. To commemorate the occasion, here are some popular clips of information from the past three months.

From the very first Road Taken member profile, the two most important concepts for Melcrum’s Robin Crumby:
First, keep it simple: Information businesses get complicated very quickly, so stick to the formats that work best. Second, squeeze the lemon: It is always tempting to diversify into other topic areas, but focusing on your core market yields the best returns.

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Dave Garrett, president and CEO, gantthead.com

SIPA: What was your first job out of college and how did you get into this business?
GARRETT: I was an Allstate Agent for about a year but didn't really have the hands for it. Then I managed debt collectors for the next year but didn't have enough tattoos or body piercings for that. Neither of them was really a career for me, but I learneda lot in each about what motivates people—both positively and negatively. Obviously, sales is critical in publishing. Unfortunately, sometimes debt collection is as well.
I got into this business before I realized what it was...

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A Handout by Any Other Name
Might Just Be a Little Sweeter

Perhaps conference handouts have an image problem; they should be in incredible demand.

It probably has to do with that first definition of handout in the dictionary: “Food, clothing or money donated to a beggar or destitute person.” No thanks. But the handouts from last month’s SIPA 2010 Conference—available on the member part of the SIPA Website or by ordering the Conference sessions—contain an amazing amount of information (that I sample for you below).

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Content Is King, lynda.com Queen,
And Marketing Lessons Abound

Jose Mallabo, director, international corporate communications for LinkedIn, began a recent interview with the now-common phrase, “Content is everything.” He went on to say that LinkedIn provides “the best platform for professional networking and career advancement.”

In SIPA’s latest management report, Building Subscription Websites That Sell: A Marketing Perspective, - funded by the Specialized Information Publishers Foundation - there’s this quote: “…the more successful subscription websites have carved out a very narrow niche for themselves and present exclusive, quality content that their customers can’t find elsewhere.”

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No Dancing Around This One:
Apps and Taps Are Here to Stay

The word “tap” has a lot of meanings, some happy—tap dancing, tap syrup from a tree, a beer tap—some very serious—the song Taps, wiretap—and some quite funny as in the film This Is Spinal Tap.

All that might pale in comaprison with its latest primary usage. Check out this description from the new Popular Science app for the iPad from Apple:

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David R. Yale, Direct Marketer

SIPA: What was your first job out of college and how did you get into this business?
YALE: I taught freshman communication at the University of Minnesota while I was a grad student. But my first real job was as a Recreation Director for the Minneapolis Parks & Recreation Department, with full programming and bottom-line responsibility for a neighborhood recreation center. That's where I learned to plan and get news coverage for unusual special events, like an annual ragweed pull, a greased watermelon contest and a tug-of-war across the creek, which got front-page and prime-time coverage.
From there, I moved on to the Oakland (Calif.) Parks & Recreation Department as an in-house programming consultant. When one of the PR staff took a medical leave, my boss offered the slot to me, complete with training by a seasoned PR man. After my stint there, I got a contract from Bantam Books to write The Publicity Handbook, the first PR how-to for non-experts, a Fortune Book Club Selection, and a classic in the field that's still in print.
I moved back home to New York, got a job as a senior copywriter at Publishers Clearing House, moved on to become VP/director of marketing at Marketing & Publishing Associates, and learned the newsletter business there.

Has there been a defining moment in your career?  Perhaps when you knew you were on the right road.

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