Report from the Semantico Online Publishing Symposium on Mobile and Cross-platform Delivery – Part Three

Publishers know they have to innovate to survive in the jungle of online publishing, with the big beasts of technology such as Amazon, Google and Apple all too willing and able, it seems, to disintermediate traditional publishers out of existence.

But two conflicting models of innovation seem to present themselves. One is open, data-driven and responsive, the other more ‘walled garden’ and perhaps even hieratic in character. How should publishers decide which to follow?

This was one of the key points discussed at the inaugural Semantico Symposium, held recently in London to discuss implications of the shift to mobile for publishers and information providers. An invited audience of publishing industry leaders debated the issues under Chatham House rules, covering the following three themes:

• Devices and technology
• Business models
• Future strategy options

It was a stimulating event with a high calibre guest list, delegates attending from organisations including Oxford University Press, Nature Publishing Group, Macmillan Education, Wiley-Blackwell, CrossRef, CABI, BSI Group and the Institute of Engineering and Technology. To do justice to the discussion, we’ve reported it over three blog posts. This final post is on the theme of future strategy options.

Listen to your users

Publishers from a traditional print background have one notable advantage over the tech companies that dominate the online information environment, which is that having been around a lot longer, they know their market very well. As a result, they know a lot about the needs of their readers and their institutional users.

Added to this hoard of existing knowledge about their specific niche in publishing is the wealth of data now available to publishers through web analytics. Sales and attitudinal research garnered through focus groups and the like are no longer the only source of market information. Customer behaviour online can be studied in minute detail, across large data sets.

Amazon, the online retail behemoth, which from its inception has had the stated aim of being the world’s most customer-focused company, has made a business out of data mining at large scale. However, Amazon is a generalist. Publishers benefit from highly specific knowledge of their individual niches, a knowledge whose specificity is growing all the time. Surely it makes sense for publishers to play to their strengths by setting their sites on the customer interface, pressing home their advantage of greater focus and beating the behemoths of the tech industry at their own game?

Several around the table at our symposium were clearly of this mind, believing that the roots of true innovation lie in researching customer behaviour and attitudes ever more effectively.

The online culture of openness and its threats

If companies can expect more transparency from their customers online, the reverse also holds true. Publishers must operate with a greater deal of openness on the internet than they might previously have been used to.

This is not an ideological point but a practical one. Unpacking extra value from content may well necessitate making it more freely available, at a lower level of granularity and in an unredacted form – particularly where those information resources have the character of data rather than text. In order that a company can benefit from the highly connected nature of the web it might have to be prepared to let the user use that data in any way they want to; e.g. third-party use of data for mash-ups, open APIs, semantic web etc.

Guardian News & Media was cited as a company trying to build a whole new business online from the data they gather in the course of their normal activities, making it openly available in many different ways for third party use. Clearly, this is a very different view of the online world from that taken by The Times Online, whose experimental retreat behind the paywall is being watched with some interest by The Guardian as well as its many other competitors.

What’s the big deal?

In the academic world too there has been a call for more openness – openness in the way publishers deal with their institutional users. Librarians facing the prospect of further, deeper funding cuts are rebelling against the ‘big deal’, with confidentiality clauses in big-deal contracts often leading to big differences in what universities are paying for their information resources. This tends to make subscriptions prices dependant, to a large extent, on the individual library’s negotiating skills.  At least one of our delegates felt that this was unfair, as in his view, librarians do not have these skills.

This type of practice is not uncommon in the offline world, and no doubt many would see some of Amazon’s online exploitation of its virtual monopoly position as equally invidious. Both seem light years away from the more idealistic tenor of Jeff Bezos’s formula for customer-centric innovation:

‘There are two ways to extend a business. Take inventory of what you’re good at and extend out from your skills. Or determine what your customers need and work backward, even if it requires learning new skills. Kindle is an example of working backward.’

Apple not in the buggy whip business

Not everybody agrees with working backwards. A counter to the call to watch the user in this way is the reflection that best practice keeps you alive, but doesn’t push you forward.

Apple, for instance, has innovated not by giving its customers what they want but by inventing new, cool things for consumers that they didn’t know they needed until they saw them. When this works, so cool are the things they produce; so pleasingly are they designed and packaged, that once consumers actually do set eyes on them, they quickly find them essential, must-have items. Soon they’re wondering what they ever did without their iPod/iPhone/iPad.

Apple has achieved its success in innovation not by watching and following customers, but by being one step ahead of them.  ‘You can’t go out and ask people,’ says Steve Jobs famously, ‘what’s the next big [thing.] There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, “If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘A faster horse.’’’

Apple, allegedly, does not do market research. ‘We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do.’

So who’s right?

Opinion was split around the table, with the term ‘Apple Fanboy’ (apologies to all female fans of the company) surfacing as the pejorative of choice – as in ‘I don’t want to sound like an Apple Fanboy, but …’

Others felt there was no inherent contradiction between the two approaches, and that they were both perfectly valid depending on exactly what you were trying to invent and what sort of company you were. A consensus view seemed to be that there has to be a balance between inspiration and observation.

Conclusion

One thing this part of discussion highlighted was how big a culture change publishing faces in coping with the raft of new competitive pressures brought about by the move online. Many around our table were among the vanguard of those bringing innovation to the business of delivering content online – but the picture over all is of an industry still struggling slightly to get off its back foot.

New understandings, new ways of working – and, to a degree, a whole new language – have to be taken on board. We hope that in some way this symposium has contributed to that effort.