SIIA Summit: Users Taking Control.

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Author: Brynko, Barbara

REPORT FROM THE FIELD

The fifth annual SIIA Information Industry Summit rolled out the red carpet for industry executives and market notables from Jan. 3 to Feb. 1 in New York, just steps away from Grand Central Station in the Cipriani on 42nd Street.

The summit turned the spotlight back on the audience this year. Under the umbrella of Users Taking Control, the SIIA hilled the conference as "insights on the market and the emerging issues that are affecting how users purchase, use, share, and store content." More than 400 attendees wanted to find out about the changing world.

BuzzMachine blogger Jeff Jarvis summed up a growing trend in the session on My Media: The Explosion of User Generated Journalism: "If |we| give people control, they will use it. If we don't give them control, we will lose them."

The 24-member Industry Information Summit Steering Committee took months to plan and set up the 2-day conference with panelists, keynoters, and moderators who offered a closer look at industry trends. Input from SIIA members helped create a buzzworthy program that kept attendees in their seats until the end of the last session.

Good speakers are likely to attract a bigger audience. "You can't fill the back of the room until you fill the front of the room." said Ed Keating, SIIA vice president of the content division, He explained that the first day of the event focused on major industry players: the second day concentrated on "My Media" and leveraging new technologies.

Hot topics ranging from RSS feeds and blogging to podcasting and pay-for-view sparked plenty of dialogue from panelists who described "secret sauces" and "different flavors" from their respective small and big businesses, government agencies, and entrepreneurial posts, Major industry players, including Harold McGraw III, chairman, president, and CEO of The McGraw Hill Companies; Richard Harrington, president and CEO of The Thomson Carp.: Neil Budde, general manager for news at Yahoo!; and Tim Armstrong, vice president of advertising sales at Google, took the podium for the keynotes and discussed their companies and business challenges. Collectively, they are all paying closer attention to users than ever before.

Who are the users? "We have met the future, and he wears blue jeans and longish hair and cares a whole lot more about his users than he does the content industry," according to John Blossom, president of Shore Communications, in his blog. "What's more, this barbarian that slouched in past the gate makes a ton of money."

One of the conference's biggest hits was an interview with Jim Buckmaster, CEO of craigslist, Inc. In a one-to-one chat, senior technology and Internet editor David Kirkpatrick posed a few questions to the entrepreneur who was the driving force in making craigslist the world's most-used classifieds in any medium as well as one of the world's most popular Web sites. With a staff of 18, Buckmaster has been head of the company that has single-handedly generated $50 million in annual revenues, a figure that he estimated could easily grow to 10 times that amount if he wanted to push. Even without pushing, traffic to the site grew by 200 percent last year alone.

One of the keys to craigslist's success was something Buckmaster was very willing to share: "Focus on your users and blot out everything else." craigslist now probably has more traffic than Monster.com and Careerbuilder.com combined, according to Buckmaster, who prefers to keep the business a manageable size rather than go public. He works with advertisers who offer premium services and users who provide feedback about inaccuracies via an automated response system, eBay now owns 25 percent of craigslist, but the low-key Buckmaster said there's enough business to go around for everyone. While eBay may Focus on long-distance with added service including PayPal, craigslist chooses to keep it simple by dealing with the person on the other side of the listing.

According to industry consultant and editor of The Local Onliner Peter Krasilosky's Feb. 8, 2006 blog entry, "Let the conspiracy theorists have their day. Craigslist is going to continue to do things in its own merry way. It doesn't expect to step up its activity with minority owner eBay, it isn't worried about competition, and it isn't especially embarrassed about its hard-to-search, think-featured, plain-vanilla technology." Right now, Buckmaster is intent on hitting as many markets as quickly as possible, but still wants the company to remain "a family-sized business."

Industry analyst Blossom viewed craigslist as a breath of fresh air. "What we have in Craigslist is a company that is content to move slowly and carefully as a small business to satisfy a growing marketplace," Blossom wrote in his Shore Communications, Inc. blog on Feb. 7, 2006. "Imagine that--an online publisher that is willing to stick to its knitting and put out trusted content and services." In an era where smaller companies have been overshadowed by the industry's big giants, the little guys are staking claim to their slice of the revenue pie.

Leave it to users to want the best of both worlds. They haw, different needs for different situations. For example, users want portable technology with small screens to take on the road with them, but they want the "bigger and better" television screens at home, And they know what else they want.

Users also want free sources, but they'll pay for something they can't find anywhere else. Companies such as HighBeam Research now offer a world of free content to nonsubscribers, a Free service that translates into access to 1.5 million full-text articles, according to CEO Patrick Spain. Current subscribers now also have more content to choose from in the premium archives.

Users want technology they can navigate easily. Managing content is essential to good business practice, and SpringCM is one company that has an innovative on demand content management solution that streamlines existing technology. According to CEO Christine Mason, SpringCM builds on software-as-a-service (SaaS) technologies for an alternative to client-installed server solutions. What users get is a way to share information securely without relying on e-mails, attachments, and multiple versions of the same document.

Users want to take charge. Outsell, Inc.'s Hot Topics on "Information Industry Market Size and Share Ranking; Preliminary 2005 Results" looks to a growing trend this year of mixing Web 2.0 and content/ technology, Users can build on open technology, social publishing, and other people's content to customize what they need, how they get it, and when they need it.

Tim Armstrong, vice president of advertising sales at Google, started his keynote with an image of a black-and-white cow projected on the theater-size screen behind him. He spoke about The Wisdom of Crowds. Picture a cow. Ask how much it weighs. Then poll individuals in a crowd, take an average of the total responses, and the answer will be relatively accurate. What does that tell you? Perhaps people are collectively pretty smart, after all.

Google is concentrating its focus on capturing the local ad market, which has been "a change until recently," according to Armstrong. "But it's probably one of the areas that is going to grow the fastest." Only 5 million terabytes of the possible 170 terabytes have actually been cataloged to date, leaving plenty of new territory to unearth.

Users are used to having more information at their fingertips. Armstrong cited his own recent experiences with major and minor purchases. In his search for an SUV, Armstrong asked a young salesman at a local dealership about possible vehicle options. Armstrong's queries quickly turned full circle, when the salesman piped up saying, "Hey dude, look on the Web."

How and when to best use information is also essential; this can ultimately benefit users too. Take Peeped, the online order and-it'll-deliver-to-your-door grocery service, for example. Getting to know a user's buying habits and preferences can yield a new client base by offering product samples that a customer might like to try Knowledge about product preferences + information about clients = additional potential targeted customers. A company that can identify and understand its assets is more likely to find a way to reach relevant users who need those assets. And with this winning formula, can success be far behind?

The concept of users taking control wasn't a topic for debate--the time is here and now. And how fast the information technology industry can adjust to this new era remains to he seen. With the popularity of blogging at an all-time high, the notion of user responsibility was woven into many of the sessions. In My Media: The Explosion of User Generated Journalism, Jim Debth, Internet general manager at the Austin American Statesman, sees a growing trend of a more educated community of users: "Give users control: they are more responsible than we think they are."

PHOTO (COLOR): Neil Budde

PHOTO (COLOR): Patrick Spain

PHOTO (COLOR): Tim Armstrong

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photos by Barbara Brynko