No Solid Answer to 'What’s Next for B2B?'

On April 21, the Cleveland chapter of ASBPE held its first event in several years called "What's next for B2B?" The meeting was held downtown and over 20 people attended. We had four panelists with four different perspectives. Richard Jones is Group Editor for Meister Media Worldwide's Ornamental publications, Nathan Kievman is a Social Media strategist and trainer, and co-founder of Woovertise, Inc., Joe Pulizzi is a thought leader, speaker, writer and evangelist for content marketing, is founder and chief content officer for Junta42, and Mike Malley is director of advertising sales for Crain's Cleveland Business.

Everyone who attended felt the meeting was very worthwhile and wanted the discussion to go on all day.

If you couldn't make it to this event, stay tuned for more through the rest of the year.

And be sure to read vice president Marisa Palmieri's recap of the event.

Benchmarking your web presence

Surfing around on social bookmarking site Delicious is an interesting educational exercise for editors -- exploring the tags that you habitually use can bring new sources into your research universe. I was on the site yesterday, organizing a social bookmarking pilot for a project, and came across Compete.com, an analytics site that offers a quick, free benchmarking snapshot of your site versus your main competition.

The free tools let you sort by unique visitors, monthly rank and average stay, as well as velocity, which is used to determine the relative growth of a domain over a particular time frame or compared to other sites. Velocity can be useful in measuring the impact of things like events, trade shows, and/or ad campaigns on your site's competitive landscape.

Depending on the results of your benchmarking exercise, it could also potentially be useful to pry a little more web budget out of reluctant publishers and business managers!javascript:void(0)

A Couple Corrections for Christmas

In the Christmas spirit, a little gift of laughter, courtesy of the factchecking fanatics at the Regret The Error blog.

From Dave Barry in the Miami Herald:

In yesterday’s column about badminton, I misspelled the name of Guatemalan player Kevin Cordon. I apologize. In my defense, I want to note that in the same column I correctly spelled Prapawadee Jaroenrattanatarak, Poompat Sapkulchananart and Porntip Buranapraseatsuk. So by the time I got to Kevin Cordon, my fingers were exhausted.

Here's one from Slate:

In the June 20 “Culturebox,” Jonah Weiner stated that Lil Wayne was the first hip-hop artist to fantasize about eating his competition. Other rappers have contemplated consuming their rivals.

And from the UK's Press and Journal:

We have been asked to point out that Stuart Kennedy, of Flat E, 38 Don Street, Aberdeen, who appeared at Peterhead Sheriff Court on Monday, had 316 pink, frilly garters confiscated not 316 pink, frilly knickers.

Did the editors really need to correct that? (Did we really need to know in the first place?)

This post is apropos of absolutely nothing, except to suggest that you take advantage of every opportunity to introduce a little fun into your publication.

Plus, if you laugh at yourself, then everyone else has to laugh with you (instead of at you) right?

Happy holidays and safe passage into the New Year.

Brad

Giving thanks for innovation

At the rate things are going, someone will figure out a software algorithm that will write our stories for us. Until then, there are tools cropping up to take some of the pain out of an editor's pain-dense life.

Textflow is the latest example. Lifehacker's Adam Pash describes this new tool as a "word processor with a new and innovative take on document collaboration. Rather than offer real-time updates when multiple users are working on a document like Google Docs, Zoho Writer, or previously mentioned Gobby, TextFlow imports multiple Microsoft Word documents, analyzes all of the differences, and provides robust tools for merging, accepting, or rejecting any of the changes therein by a master editor."

As far as I can tell, it's just a modified version of a tool that software coders have been using for years for version control/error reduction.

Best of all, it's free for download at the Textflow site.

Check out the video for a better sense of it:



Happy Thanksgiving!

More competition?

As if the blogosphere hadn't democratized content production enough, now comes word of a new tool from HP Labs that the company says will allow anyone who can create a PDF to publish a magazine.

From the HP Labs site:

"Called MagCloud, the service makes it possible to create digitized magazines and economically print, promote, sell and deliver them on demand.

It costs nothing to publish a magazine on MagCloud.com. You simply upload a high-resolution PDF file, and the system takes care of the rest: printing, mailing, subscription management and more."

I guess our only solace lies in the fact that while anyone can now create a magazine, very few can create a good one.