Zoe Harris, Trinity Mirror on Embracing Disruption in the #alpsp16 Keynote

Zoe Harris, Group Marketing Director at Trinity Mirror Plc kicked off the ALPSP Conference with the keynote. She has worked in TV, magazines and advertising: who better to hear from about how other industries have dealt with and embraced disruption?

Trinity Mirror have learned that the local, regional and national press can no longer be suspicious of each other. Tabloid newspapers have a bad reputation, but The Mirror is passionate about being different. Yes, they want to entertain, but they also want to inform, investigate and campaign.

In such a challenged market revenues with 10% year on year readership decline 20% year on year advertising decline, with digital revenues slow to make up shortfall, how do they adapt?

They have looked outside and inside for inspiration. They have learnt to have a thick skin and be resilient. Disruption is everywhere. Netflix is disrupting pay TV. Airbnb has in five years become the main hotel chain rival selling more rooms than the whole Hilton group worldwide. Uber has totally changed the taxi business forever. You no longer give an address, you give a postcode: a fundamental change in behaviour. Online estate agents like Rightmove hit Trinity Mirror hard. Five years ago they had £150m revenue in this area. It dropped to around £30m in 2015. There has been an explosion of disruptive news brands including: HuffPost Buzzed and Facebook.

For Trinity Mirror, they have skilled journalists, trusted brands, scale and reach, experienced commercial teams as well as strong branding nationwide. It's easy to get stuck in a rut becoming afraid to change anything from the past.

Audi asked their engineers how could they win a race if our car could go no faster than anyone else? By phrasing it that way, they looked at other areas of development. The answer was fuel efficiency. They won the next three years.

Newspapers often look at problems the wrong way. The decline in The Mirror readership isn't a recent trend. It's been happening over decades driven by digital, behavioural trends and competitor activity. Crucially, the demographics of the UK have changed. it has gone from a pyramid upper class, middle class, working class to a diamond shaped elite, bulging middle classes and breadline existence.

The three forces of change they face are the recession as a social leveller, connectedness available to all, and a post-industrial workforce. Today, their readership have inherited values, achievable aspirations, and a tighter network. In addition, traditional news is less valuable than before. The main issues lapsed readers have with current offerings have:

• not enough breadth in content
• people don't define themselves as working class anymore
• in a time when we are less defined by political bias we switch political allegiances
• newspapers that are perceived to be written for and by men means a disconnect with readers can happen
• newspapers haven't changed approach in many years
• also an issue of journalists as part of the establishment, chummy with politicians and big business alike. 

There are a number of initiatives they have tried. You need to have a thick skin, fail fast, and work fast to adapt to disruption and change. One part of their response was to launch a national newspaper - New Day - which shut two months after launch. They always had a plan to have a go and if they were going to fail, to fail fast. 

With data journalism they have built a specialist team that monitor, scrape, analyse and use Freedom of Information laws to research and find new stories. Looking through data to create news stories for their titles. They also create engaging and interactive gadgets to make the news personal to the audience. By making data personally relevant to them they can make them care about issues that should matter to them all as well as hold councils and governments to account.

They have also used content curation. Clipboard, News 360 and other services have built big markets quickly. New and different opinions rarely get seen where we have our filter bubbles of online services that use algorithms to find content you will like. Trinity Mirror launched a new app - Perspecs - a curated news application. It offers three different perspectives on each news story from other sources. It adds diverse opinion and transparency. It also facilitates the discovery of new sources.

The fast reproduction of content is a real challenge and the speed and breadth of local coverage. For their regional titles, being part of that local life is what they've always done. Now they're doing it differently, because that's what readers want. They work with police forces, local courts and sport clubs reporting on their own matches. They have seen huge increases in local traffic. They have set about doing this by focusing on local knowledge and building a connect with local readers who want to reach out to them. This also builds a strong local advertising platform for sustainability.

How? They've focused on audience data. While page views are their primary metric, they listen to others such as time spent on page, bounce rate and percentage of readers who are local. While journalists have strong gut instinct about the local audience wants, but it's important to get out to meet people combined with understanding the audience.

They have also doubled down on audience analytics, finding out what they know works and ask themselves what else might. It is passion and belief that will give you determination to meet changing needs of your communities. But it is the ability to expect the unexpected and adapt that will see you through.

Zoe Harris is Group Marketing Director at Trinity Mirror Plc. She provided the opening keynote address at the 2016 ALPSP Conference. 

Spotlight on Cartoon Abstracts - shortlisted for the 2016 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing

Ben Hudson, at work, visualising research

In this, the second in a series of interviews with the 2016 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing shortlist, we talk to Ben Hudson from Taylor & Francis about Cartoon Abstracts.

Tell us a bit about your company

I work as a marketer in the journals division of Taylor & Francis. We’ve been cultivating knowledge since 1798.

What is the project you submitted for the Awards?

Cartoon Abstracts, which are a fun new way of visualising academic research. These act primarily as a marketing tool, and are making a big impact on social media as well as having other applications.

See the cartoons for yourself at www.cartoonabstracts.com.

Tell us more about how it works and the team behind it.

Marketers are already using many different ways to promote individual research articles, and attracting the attention of an audience is an ever-evolving challenge.

I wanted to create something that stands out from the crowd, so I worked with a number of illustrators to combine the storytelling of a good press release with the highly visual nature of infographics. The end result is both concise and engaging – perfect for today’s marketing environment.

Once created, individual cartoon abstracts are promoted by T&F through social media, online, and via email. In addition, printed comics are proving very popular as a conference giveaway.

The original authors are provided with printed posters of their cartoon. These can be used at the authors’ place of work, at conferences, or even in poster sessions. Authors are also encouraged to self-promote their cartoon abstract through blogs and social media.

This combined promotion generates significant downloads and fantastic PR for the original research articles. This also increases the potential for citations.

Why do you think it demonstrates publishing innovation?

Each individual cartoon abstract summarises the original authors’ work through illustration, harnessing the overwhelming power of images over text.

Illustrations can aid the understanding of difficult concepts, broaden the appeal of niche topics, and transcend language barriers.

Authors enjoy being included as characters, which encourages them to share their cartoon via their own networks, thus increasing our communications reach. The author characters also resonate with the audience.

Elements of humour, intrigue, and parody can be found throughout many of the cartoons, which further increases audience engagement.

Cartoon Abstracts truly has gone viral, winning resounding organic praise from the academic community and beyond.

What are your plans for the future?

Cartoon Abstracts continues to gain exposure and awareness in the wider community, bringing written research to new audiences. I would like the concept to inspire not only current academics, but also the academics of tomorrow. As stated in the cartoon abstract Are Comics a Good Medium for Science Communication?, “Science comics have the potential to develop lay people’s ongoing interest and enjoyment for science”.

Ben Hudson is Associate Marketing Manager at Taylor & Francis and Founding Editor of Cartoon Abstracts. Watch him present during the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing lightning sessions at the Conference in September, where the winners will be announced. Further information and booking available online.

The ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing 2016 are sponsored by MPS Ltd. 

10 ways to do database marketing badly (and how to avoid them)

There's nothing quite like a summer birthday, is there? ALPSP member DataSalon are celebrating 10 years of helping publishers with the challenges of data quality and customer insight.

We spoke to their Managing Director, Nick Andrews, who shared a little bit of wisdom gleaned from all those years' experience.

"We've learnt a lot over the years about the wonderful world of database marketing, and how things can sometimes go a little wrong if the right tools and processes aren't in place. You'd be amazed at what gets through internal quality checks: some of it embarrassing, some of it downright cringeworthy.

As we reflect on ten years helping publishers avoid making mistakes, here are 10 ways to do database marketing badly (and how to avoid them)...

1. Call your customer "Ms Ass"

Or "Ms Ass Librarian" to be precise. Yes, this really happened. Somehow the job title of "Ass Librarian" ended up in a customer's first/last name fields, leading to a very unfortunate address label. Some basic checking and clean-up could have avoided this particular mistake.

Yes. Really.

2. Get their name (and gender) wrong

Unfortunately, overly vigorous data cleansing can also be a problem in its own right. Our Communications Director Jillian (female) regularly receives post addressed to "Julian" (male), presumably due to a software rule deciding that her real name must be a typo, and unhelpfully "correcting" it. Moral of the story: do clean your data, but try not to make it worse.

3. Try to sell something they've already bought 

With the complex world of package and consortia deals, this probably happens to unfortunate sales staff way more that it should. You send prospects a tempting deal... only to discover they've already bought the product in question. Properly getting to grips with your sales data isn't always easy, but it is the only sure way to avoid this type of embarrassment.

4. Try to sell something they've absolutely no interest in

Another awkward sales scenario: alienating your (potential) customers by trying to sell them products which don't match their interests. The "hey, let's just include everyone!" mailshot is a great way to do this. And the "hey, let's get our data together and do some proper segmentation!" project is a great way to avoid it.

5. Don't respect opt-outs

Ah yes. There is perhaps no greater way to turn a potential customer into an angry ball of rage, than to keep marketing to them after they've opted out. Companies don't do this intentionally of course, but plenty do it by mistake - often when opt-out requests aren't properly consolidated across different customer databases behind the scenes.

6. Don't communicate with opt-INs

Not respecting opt-outs definitely annoys customers, but so does neglecting to communicate with customers who are interested. If John Smith has taken the trouble to tick the box and opt in to your news and offers, you’d better send him some. Asking customers to opt in sets the expectation you'll have something useful and interesting to send their way.

7. Send far too much email

Many people are perfectly happy to receive relevant promotional messages from time to time, but nobody wants to feel bombarded on a daily basis. This can often happen if different departments or divisions are all marketing to the same pool of contacts, without coordinating their efforts to keep it to a reasonable level. A company-wide comms strategy should help solve that.

8. Get your facts wrong

It can make for a really compelling message to merge customer-specific details into your marketing emails, for example: "Your recent high/low usage of product X suggests you're really loving/hating it!!" But of course that's only impressive if the key facts are correct (and it makes a bad impression if they're not). Be sure of the quality and accuracy of your underlying data before trying this type of campaign.

9. Send marketing to the deceased

At its worst this mistake can be very upsetting for relatives of the deceased. There are services like Mortascreen out there to help remove deceased contacts up-front. But even without that level of checking in place, the most important thing is to make absolutely sure that any notice that a contact has died (often sent via email to customer services by a relative) is acted on promptly to ensure no further marketing is sent ever again.

10. Assume everybody has one unique email address

It's easier for databases to assume that one email address equals one person, but in reality many of us will have multiple emails (for home, work, etc.) and some share a single email address ('family_robinson...' etc.) It can be annoying for customers to receive the same message more than once, so it's good practice to get to grips with multiple emails and organize your comms accordingly.


But let's not feel too disheartened - it's true that database marketing can go wrong, but getting it right isn't rocket science. It's just a question of giving proper attention to data quality, establishing some form of single customer view, and ensuring you have a clear company-wide comms strategy. With those pieces in place, database marketing can be hugely effective.

Now, you'll have to excuse me. I have some cake to eat. Happy birthday DataSalon!"

Nick Andrews is MD of DataSalon who celebrate their 10th birthday this summer. Watch this video to find out more about them.

The Marketer's Tool Kit: Leveraging social media - three steps to move beyond broadcasting

We spoke to Emma Watkins, Marketing Manager at IOP Publishing and co-tutor on our Effective Journals Marketing training course about how to get the most out of social media. Here's what she said.


It’s ten years since Facebook became available to the general public and Twitter was launched (and even longer since long forgotten and yet somehow still in existence MySpace began). In that time we’ve seen numerous new networks rise (and fall) and yet for many marketers the social web is still a daunting place to be.

For those companies who aren’t afraid to try, there is an awful lot of value to be found in engaging researchers in the social sphere – here’s how to start.

1. Start listening

Social networks are a great place to find out exactly what the community wants, needs, and thinks of you. Make sure you’re set up to find those conversations – there are tonnes of social media listening services out there which will aggregate content by keyword or product name. Take the time to skim through these regularly, as there can be valuable insight nestled amongst the pictures of people’s breakfasts.

Helpful link: Brandwatch Blog's Top 10 Social Media Monitoring Tools

Top tip: Conference hashtags are the perfect place to start – search for relevant events and keep an eye on your timeline when they are on (for example #alpsp16)

2. Conversations are a two-way thing – but make sure you’re speaking the same language

So you’ve done some great listening, perhaps even followed a conference hashtag or two – what next?

Time to start having some conversations! If you can add value to a blossoming conversation, perhaps with a link to some free (and highly relevant) content, or some advice on a publishing problem, then do it! But make sure you enter the conversation as a human being, not as a brand automaton. Where possible include your name – ASOS do this really well on Facebook.

Helpful link: Harvard Business Review - 50 Companies that get Twitter - and 50 that don't

Top tip: Once you’ve joined a conversation remember to stay with it – don’t just log off as people may respond to you.

3. Embrace different forms of content

It’s easy to get stuck on just sharing text content and links, but if you really want to make a splash then you should vary the content you share. Vlogs, infographics, images, podcasts – all of these offer unique ways to get your message across, so make sure you don’t just choose the right channel but also the right content.

Helpful link: Hubspot - 37 Visual content marketing statistics you should know in 2016

Top tip: Audit your current content store (leaflets, blog posts etc…) to look for new ways to repackage this information for social sharing. You could turn an FAQ page into an infographic, or make a video out of a press release on a product launch.


Emma is a Marketing Manager for IOP Publishing (IOPP), where she oversees the academic marketing strategy for the entire journals portfolio, as well as community websites, B2B products, and ebooks programme.

The next Effective Journals Marketing course runs on Wednesday 21 June 2017 in London. Further information and booking available on the ALPSP website.

SciHub, sharing and predatory journals: how can publishers justify their existence? Rachel Maund reflects...

Rachel Maund, Owner of Marketability and tutor on ALPSP's Introduction to Journals Marketing course, reflects on the increasing importance of the relationship with your editorial board.

"At last year’s meeting of the Asian Council of Science Editors the talk was all of ‘predatory journals’, and how they damaged the reputation of the rest of us by charging author processing fees but not then adding editorial value in return.

Their actions fanned the flames of the argument that publishers exploit academics and are increasingly redundant in an age when sharing, self-archiving and self-publishing is so easy. 

Witness a spate of wonderful retaliatory articles about ‘xx things publishers do’ (various numbers as different authors came up with more) on sources such as The Scholarly Kitchen. Do look up a few of these if you need a bit of reassurance that all is not lost (and inspiration for future copy).

This year it’s the actions of SciHub that are getting journals publishers hot under the collar. And that genie is well and truly out of the bottle. SciHub’s founder, Alexandra Elbakyan, is convinced she has right on her side by making your research content available free to all, and let’s face it, those of us with an inside knowledge of what goes into publishing quality journals are in a very small minority. How much of your content is already being accessed via SciHub? 

But despite the scary headlines, all is not lost. We can distance ourselves from predatory publishers by constantly making clear how much value and credibility is added through the publishing process, and a majority of the research community does accept this in principle.

SciHub is a tougher proposition, because it’s your content they’re making available. 

And even if they were closed down, free sharing of information (as articulated as Google’s mission many moons ago now), is the future. We have to find ways of promoting why working in partnership with a publisher, whether as an author, researcher or librarian, gives an extra quality of service that’s worth paying for. In other ways, we have to find ways to co-exist, as book publishers have had to do with Amazon.

The key may lie with our editorial boards. 

It’s never been more important to work in partnership with them to bring positive messages to the wider research community. A percentage of our audience may be sceptical about what we have to say, but editorial board members are fellow academics, and their views have credibility with their peers. Simple tactics like having campaigns fronted by the Editor-in-Chief (written by you, naturally) can really help.

It’s always been important to work in partnership with editorial boards to deliver marketing to our audiences. But today that’s true more than ever before.

We’re in this together, regardless of what you might read in some of the headlines.

None of us has definitive answers as to how to tackle these challenges, but our Introduction to Journals Marketing workshop is both a reality check for some of the simple tactics that will still work for you, and a great chance to hear what other publishers are doing to mitigate the effects of initiatives such as SciHub.”

Rachel Maund is an international publishing consultant specialising in marketing training, with over 30 years’ practical experience, and is the founder of Marketability.

Introduction to Journals Publishing will run on Wednesday 20 April in London. Book online or further details are available from melissa.marshall@alpsp.org.

The truth about content marketing: in conversation with IOP Publishing's Jo Allen and Karen Watts

H92: the place to be

Picture the scene. We're at the ALPSP stand in Hall 4.2 at Frankfurt Book Fair. Plans are being discussed for the forthcoming ALPSP Content Marketing seminar and the ALPSP team have got together with two communications specialists who are getting animated about what content marketing *actually* involves.

We joined in the discussion with Jo Allen (JA) who is Head of Marketing & B2B at IOP Publishing and Karen Watts (KW) IOP’s PR and Communications Manager, and captured some of the highlights of the conversation below:

ALPSP: What does content marketing mean to you?

JA: Using your content to do the work for you. All publishers are sitting on deep seams of great content. Effective content marketing makes use of these gems and does hard work for you.

KW: I think it's about utilising your best assets rather than looking for gimmicks.

JA: We're lucky we've got Physics World, it lends itself beautifully to this arena. To be honest we've been doing content marketing for a while unconsciously, but now it's more deliberate and far more strategic.

KW: Do you mean rolling out into different channels like social media and on the website?

JA: Yes. We now have a much more holistic approach. We focus on the content first and the channel second. Content comes first. It's a similar approach to the one we have with IOP’s design studio. Instead of simply designing a printed piece or an email communication, we consider the content first and make it adaptable to all formats right from the start.

Jo Allen: content marketer extraordinaire

KW: Let's face it, content marketing drives and informs every decision we make in communications now.

JA: True, we'd struggle to make a decision that doesn't relate to it in some way!

ALPSP: What do you think is the most effective piece of content marketing IOP has ever done?

JA: The Physics World 25th anniversary issue back in 2013 was incredibly effective. We produced a special issue with lots of special features. Do you remember the 25 top list? It had five top people to watch, five best discoveries, five puzzles GCHQ created…..  that really helped the comms team with newsworthy content. It made a big splash then, and we're still using it nearly a year later.

KW: It was hugely successful.  Because a key strength of Physics World is high quality reviews of physics news, it is not always easy to pitch the content as newsworthy on its own. It was a great opportunity to showcase the editorial quality of the magazine in a different format.

JA: And we've got good mileage from it. The new digital magazine app has just launched using the 25th issue as a free download to showcase the fantastic design and functionality. We're still using it as a recruitment tool for membership for the digital only member category.

KW: On the journals side, I think the video abstracts are one of our most effective pieces of content: the stats speak for themselves. Papers with a video abstract are downloaded three times more than those without. Press releasing articles is enormously important too. A press released article will see downloads for it jump from an average of 40 to around 7,000. That's a fairly impressive rise.

Karen Watts: an Oscars-free zone

JA: Agreed.  Mind you, content marketing can go badly wrong.

KW: Oh yes, I cringe when I see people using gimmicks instead of thinking about the actual content and audience. The worst is when you see someone try to put across a personality that just isn't them. Tone of voice is crucial!

JA: Talking of personality, something we have to remember is that while our authors are physics experts, they are also human beings!

KW: Exactly, our authors and readers aren’t just an audience segment or a specialist field. They have the desire to share and connect with other people just like everyone else. When you try and be something you're not, you're doomed. It's about authenticity and relevance.

JA: True. But when you think about tweaking tone of voice and changing marketing approaches, it’s crucial to bring along colleagues. Changes in marketing strategy can be scary so we need to support them along the way...

KW: You know my pet hate? Trying to be 'current' and shoehorning celebrity news into your channels. Don't comment on the Oscars unless it's related to your topic!

And with that, the discussion concluded and normal Frankfurt Buchmesse business resumed.

Karen Watts will be presenting a case study at the forthcoming ALPSP seminar Content Marketing - using your publishing assets? on how IOP’s content marketing strategy is changing lives, one Ferrari at a time!

Register for Content Marketing - using your publishing assets?  on Wednesday 12 November 2015 in London.

Data, the universe and everything. How data can drive your business

Melinda Kenneway: loves data

Melinda Kenneway, Chair of Data, the universe and everything: How data can drive your business seminar, opened the day by emphasizing how data underpins modern business. She summed up the premise for the day by quoting Jeff Weiner from LinkedIn:

‘Data really powers everything that we do.’ 

If we’re not selling content, what are we selling? Data is also becoming a product or service itself now. An era of big data can help us understand and deliver a much better experience for customers In 2012, 90% of all the data that existed in our entire history has been created in the previous 2 years. We need to get the basics of data right, but also have a strategy.

It’s knowing what you need to know rather than trying to find out about everything. Have clear objectives and stick to them. Don’t forget to consider privacy and legal issues about data. Deliver useful services that build on what the market thinks is acceptable. And if you don’t like data now? You should get out of marketing.

Colin Meddings from DataSalon focused on why you should care about cleaning up your data. To start with it can embarrass or annoy your customers when it is wrong and it’s open to error when users don’t put in info correctly.

Colin Meddings: not vague about data

Continuing with quotes from the great and the good, he cited an observation from 2013’s UKSG conference by Liam Earney from JISC:

‘Publishers can’t even tell a library what they subscribe to.’ 

We’re too vague about absolute fundamental data. The basic process of publishing involves: submit, review, copy edit, publish, purchase, read, cite, licence. All of these aspects generate data. The volume of data is huge and all these areas are where errors or mistakes can happen and where data can conflict.

Reflect on your efficiency with dealing in data. Do you struggle with data wrangling where you have to continually review and refresh datasets? See data as an asset in your business. It is worth investing in. You will get a return. Don’t forget that there’s a legal requirement around data to ensure it is accurate and fit for purpose. He recommended the DQM Data Governance Maturity Model. Be aware. Become reactive. Turn this into proactive. Then make it a managed process. And finally, it becomes optimal. 

Meddings outlined the seven deadly sins of data quality:

1. Missing data 
2. ‘Siloed’ data 
3. Invalid data 
4. Out of date info (people move around) 
5. Inconsistencies 
6. Right information, wrong field 
7. Duplicate and conflicting data. 

Put some effort and resource into sorting data. Task to someone specifically, create champions, set targets. It’s great if you can employ a team, but if you can’t, get senior management buy-in and work with those who have aptitude/passion for data. Start with one problem, don’t try to fix all at once.

Do a data audit. It can be manual. People who work with data everyday will know where the problems are. Sometimes an automated audit is better – good at finding information about your data for identifying empty fields, etc.

Four steps for effective journals marketing integration

Do you integrate your journals marketing strategies or are you concentrating on one or two channels?

Alexa Dugan, Associate Marketing Director for Life Science Journals at Wiley-Blackwell, holds responsibility for the global marketing strategy for over 100 journals. Here, she reflects on successful marketing integration.

"Institutional marketing, author marketing, end-user marketing, marketing to funders and developing relationships with Subscription Agents and Aggregators. These are some of the elements today's journal marketer has to integrate into their global strategy.

Journals marketing is becoming increasingly complex, as research continues to evolve and develop in an ever changing environment. This could result in a tendency to concentrate on individual channels rather than implement an integrated approach. However, as the market becomes even more complex, the need for greater - not less - integration becomes apparent.

There are four stages to ensuring successful integration of your journals marketing strategy. You need to:

1. Set measurable and achievable objectives
2. Identify each of the channels to market
3. Identify the most effective and efficient marketing tactics for each channel
4. Measure results, and crucially, do not be afraid of refining your approach."

Alexa is co-tutor on two ALPSP training courses. Effective Journals Marketing (9 July, London) and Getting the Most from Journals Publicity (20 November, London)

Outsourcing: the good, the bad and the ugly. Selecting suppliers, sales and marketing.

Helen Whitehorn

Helen Whitehorn is Director of Path Projects Ltd and advises organizations on resolving a variety of operational and strategic challenges. She outlined the following five stage framework for selecting suppliers:

1. initiation
2. discovery
3. design
4. deliver
5. sustain

Start with a high level proposal and really think about why you are outsourcing. Which processes, departments and people should be involved? Are there key timings, such as product launches to be considered? When you produce the high level stratregic document. You begin to understand whether you know your workflow and what you require.

After developing your high level proposal, you should move on to a detailed specification and preferred suppliers, get an agreement in place and outline suppliers selected, detail the delivery of work underway, and outline monitoring, control and ongoing improvement.

Lorraine Ellery

Lorraine Ellery is a sales and marketing professional with experience in the information industry. She provided an overview of what to consider when outsourcing sales and marketing. Which services do you want to outsource? If it is market research, are you interested in quantitative, qualitative, industry, market or competitor research? Do you want telemarketing, web, PR and media, social media including SEO/SEM or mailings. With sales, are you interested in direct sales representatives, trade fair representation, telesales or sales support? You can also commission consultancy on strategy, outsourcing, mergers and acquisitions or strategic alliances.

Ellery outlined suggestions for best practice. These include managing expectations and ensuring you have a mutual agreement. A service level agreement is essential and it should be a professional agreement. The vendor should include a comprehensive sales and marketing plan so everyone is clear about what you want to achieve and what is to be undertaken.

It is very important from a sales agent's point of view that they have clear market feedback. This can be provided in various forms, from discussion with sales rep on the ground to monthly and pipeline reporting, that all good sales agents should provide you with. A timely response to any publisher enquiries is essential for building confidence in progress and reporting. She also suggests that you ask for references and percentages where they have been successful.

What does a sales agent expect from a publisher? An indication of budget really early on as it makes a big difference to proposal they make so it is appropriate. Marketing collateral and product information needs to be of good quality. If it doesn't meet the niche market needs, that can be part of the service that can be provided.

Share competitor information that you can that will help with the agreement. Pricing guidelines are key and include detail on pricing for different markets. The agent will be able to help with this. One model for one territory does not always translate well to another.

Consider conflicts of interest around allocation of resources, whether it is complementing or competing, and around internal communication - make sure work is agreed across the organization. Consider the compensation model. Some models are based on the value of sales, some on economies of sale,  others on commission-only models. Ellery cautioned that the latter holds more risk to the agent as it cuts off time to deliver and the lengthy sales process is not always conducive to reward (sales can come in direct to the publisher or via another sales agent). She advises a combination of fee based service with some kind of compensation model.

Ellery has tended to use formal contracts for services, but it can be as simple as an agreement to accept a proposal. The 3 Cs to bear in mind with a contract are commitment, clarity and communication.

Bill Matthews discusses data analytics on 15 November

HighWire is excited about contributing to the ALPSP webinar this month entitled "Analyzing Customer Data to Create Competitive Advantage".   I have been a 'numbers guy' since early in my career at A.C. Nielsen, so I understand how powerful data can be if transformed into actionable information. There are mountains of data which can be analyzed, but In order to find unique insights, you need to not only access to the information, but also the tools which allow you to manipulate, store, and create custom data sets in real time.  

Analytics touches many aspects of scholarly publishing; content creation, editorial, marketing and sales, product packaging/pricing, and audience development.  Typical business questions can include most read articles, turnaway reports, usage for a specific event such as an annual conference, or simply tracking your content's overall performance. For my section of the webinar, I plan on examining a few of these potential questions and how to extract "valuable nuggets" from data analysis which can provide powerful editorial and marketing insights.

I hope many of you can make it on November 15th!

Bill

For more details on the webinar and to sign up, visit the ALPSP website.  If you can't make the 15th, make sure you sign up to get access to the webinar later.

Bill Matthews
Director of Business Development
HighWire Press | Stanford University

(o) 650-725-9279
(m) 650-208-4643
bmatthews@highwire.stanford.edu

HighWire:  Pathfinders in Scholarly Publishing

Vanja Merrild: Marketing Channels for the World's Largest Open Access Publisher

The second session at our To Measure or Not to Measure seminar was presented by Vanja Merrild, a digital marketing specialist working with BioMed Central. Now part of SpringerOpen, BioMed Central have 243 open access journals across biology, medicine and chemistry. 52 journals are society affiliated. 121 journals with Impact Factors.

Their network of sites and users have:

• 32 million page views a month
• over 5 million registered users
• over 380,000 recipients to fortnightly BioMed Central newsletter
• 14,000 new registrants a month
• Google page rank of 8

Their focus as an open access publisher is on submissions, being author driven, using their own in-house submissions system and focusing on author data.

Vanja focused on providing best practice advice on how to drive traffic and usage to content from their experience. Her suggestions for email best practice are:

• build your lists
• have a good welcome programme - what follows after they've signed up
• make it easy for recipients to add your email to their address book
• make it easy to sign up
• maintain consistency in 'From' lines - builds recognition of a trusted source.

She spoke candidly of the action they took recently to boost results for a newsletter that was dipping:

1. they made it easier to access the interesting relevant content (3 rather than 5 clicks through to website)
2. noted they had lots of forwards so added a recommend button
3. captured the forward emails
4. made it easier to sign up on website and from within the email

Segmentation is hugely important: the same message is not relevant for everyone. Editors, authors, members, librarians, scientific interests: they all need their own message. You should test and measure your hypothesis, check spam filters, look at the mobile device appearance and appearance in different email clients (particularly the ones your audience are using).

Vanja suggested a range of factors to test and measure. Keep track of your reputation with services such as ReturnPath senderscore.org. Understand what works where. Check out your 'sleeping beauties' contacts who need waking up and find out when they leave your email.

She then went on to provide some best practice guidelines for tweeting and Facebook posts:

• share more about others than you do about yourself
• promote others and build relationships
• have a distinct voice
• images are important.

Your social media strategy should focus on increased ROI for your business and your time. Create safe tests to experiment and don't make this only one person's role. Be iterative: plan, execute, measure, adjust, repeat. Understand which metrics matter and which are your goals. Track metrics before, during, and after to show return on investment and consider benchmarks to better understand what they actually mean. Use analytics not only as a reactive tool to see how you did, but as a proactive tool to hone your branding messages. She closed with suggested tools to measure your activity including: Twitter Counter, TweetReach and TweetStats.