BSeC ’09 co-chair is interviewed today by Firece Content Management about content trends.  At BSeC she’ll be conducting”virtual interviews” with the industry experts who judged our EContent 100 Awards competition.

The tables turned, in her own interview she describes a key trend as being the integration of free and fee content.

Her post below describes the conversation group at BSeC that will open the discussion to meeting attendees.  Or, please, feel free to comment here.

I had a good talk with BSeC speaker, Alacra CEO Steve Goldstein, for an EContent news feature I did on the company’s latest content offering: The Alacra Pulse Platform. With this launch, Alacra will be trying out the freemium model (a term one of its own employees coined) for the first time. The product is interesting on its own merits, but I always find it fascinating to see what Alacra is up to in terms of its content strategy and willingness to experiment with new delivery mechanisms (and, in this case, content sources and content models). With Pulse, Alacra has invested time in hand-selecting freely available web content, which it aggregates and slices and dices for users. Steve said, “We had to add blogs to the mix for a number of reasons: First, there’s a lot of good stuff there. Second, these days there are a lot less analyst reports available, a gap that hasn’t been filled by independent researchers, so blogs are filling part of that gap.” Thus, he recognizes the value of freely available content and believes that through vetting and presentation, he can add value (even more in the premium edition). Good.

Steve Goldstein, CEO of Alacra

However the value of web content goes much further than the information it contains. Steve points to the “Dave Winer line about the internet, the more you send people away the more they come back.” According to Winer, “Now the fundamental law of the Internet seems to be the more you send them away the more they come back. It’s why link-filled blogs do better than introverts. It may seem counter-intuitive–it’s the new intuition, the new way of thinking. The Internet kicks your ass until you get it. It’s called linking and it works.” Right. No surprise: Alacra wants people to come back (and spend money). They believe that freemium approach will reveal potential new customers—which can be difficult and costly to pin down—and should help with incremental sales through the Alacra store. Freemium is more than finding the right balance of free and fee, it leverages the interconnectedness of ideas online to help lead customers to your door.

Robin Neidorf, General Manager, FreePint Ltd.

One thing that is particularly special about the BSeC event is the quality of attendees and the kind of networking that goes on. A favorite part of the program for me are the conversation groups, in which a small group gathers together to discuss a topic of interest to the industry. Unlike listening to event the best presentation, these groups really generate discussion and since the attendees are all industry leaders, real meaningful ideas based on actual experience are exchanged. This year, Robin Neidorf of FreePint Ltd. is leading one that looks like my choice: Flexible Content & Facilitating Reuse. It has never been more important to find incremental revenue and enabling content reuse is a key aspect of this.

Michael O’Donnell, CEO, iCopyright, Inc.

I had an interesting chat with Michael O’Donnell, Founder & CEO of  iCopyright, Inc. this week. He said the company is in the process of concluding a $100K study on how commercial users interact with digital content. They tested “home grown article tools” as well as iCopyright, Rightslink, Clickability and more, essentially “any way that publishers are currently allowing readers to do something with content, besides read it.” He said one of the things he found most interesting was an editorial notion that, once an article is published, it is over with;” that content makes money on primary publication and that is that.

To the contrary, O’Donnell says iCopyright is “seeing a tremendous opportunity to make money downstream.” He suggests that there are a couple of relatively small things a publisher can do to help navigate these waters: For example, make it easier (and clearer) for users to do the right thing. iCopyright found one prominent newspaper with a wildly popular website that was granting an implied license to do whatever users wanted with its content. How? By providing free “email this” or “print this” features. No, O’Donnell wouldn’t suggest taking away the ability to readily share content, or to print out a copy. He wouldn’t even suggest putting up a wall. Instead, he says: when users click one of these handy features: make copyright clear. “you can still use the honor system, but simply by communicating the limitation that you can, say, print one copy for personal use, many readers will think twice before printing out a couple of hundred copies.” Better, provide an easy way for them to readily order legal reprints which can help “recapture millions of dollars in lost revenue.” I like the sound of that. Join us at BSeC and to hear O’Donnell discuss the complete study results, and how to apply them to the bottom line.

It’s no surprise that newspapers are in for a rough year—like the rest of us–and then some. It has been a difficult decade for newspapers, from the shift from trusted classified revenue to web-based community style solutions like Craigslist to the steady attrition of local print advertising. Sign of the times: Today, I read that the Seattle P-I will stop publishing if it isn’t sold in the next 60 days.

My long ago college professor, Tom Johnson—who is one of the co-founders of the Institute for Analytic Journalism–sent me a great link last

The article traces the context of the current newspaper media crisis, not the least of which is the need for a revolutionary business model: According to a number of Wharton faculty who have followed the subject, someone will have to come up with a new business model that pays for the sometimes costly work of gathering news while also squeezing a profit out of a readership whose options include the entire world wide web.” The Wharton team suggests some very interesting models that may bring the bucks back.

Undoubtedly, we are all troubled by, as the authors put it: “The problem, from a business point of view, is that few of today’s eager, fickle readers are willing to pay for their online news.” Certainly, in the eContent business, we provide valuable stuff that people pay for, but keeping our eyes focused on the most effective models is what will keep us in business for decades to come—come what may in the way of technology. This Speaker Roster  at this year’s Buying & Selling eContent conference includes some of the leaders in making money from digital content, not the least of whom is my friend, Rafat Ali founder of ContentNext, which was recently acquired by the forward-thinking Guardian Media Group. Join us at the event in which attendee voices bring as much to the conversation as the stellar speakers.

Times like these, content publishers need to be looking for ways to cut costs to whether the storm. I’ll be keeping a lookout for interesting ideas that can help in this regard, like this Q&A over at Publishing Executive, in which United Business Media’s SVP of Manufacturing discusses Her Company’s Cost-Reduction Strategies. Yet we can’t be an industry that solely relies on fat trimming to get by. Frankly, from what I see, this industry wasn’t exactly portly to begin with. In large part, that is because of the ongoing struggle to monetize web-based content in a way that actually supports its creation. Sure user-generated reviews are free, but there are a whole lot of professionals out there who still need vetted, quality content. That said, we have worked incredibly hard to bring you strategies for fresh thinking about digital content, to help your company do more than cut, but to (perhaps cautiously) build upon your strengths and fully leverage the opportunities that “eContent” as to offer. Take a look at this year’s BSeC Program and get a glimpse of the possibilities. Yes, it will be a difficult year, but at the end we want our companies to be more than skeletal remains; we them to be lean, (earning) green, fighting machines.