Skip to main content

ACCESSE17 Conference Takeaways: Publications a recurring theme

The annual CESSE conference (Council of Engineering and Scientific Society Executives) has historically been focused on high-level strategy, so when we headed up to Quebec City for this year’s I wasn’t sure I’d be hearing a lot about publications.

But I was surprised at how many discussions—both in the sessions, and in the hallways—revolved around issues that publications really are central to.  The issues themselves are nothing new…
  • Recruiting, engaging and retaining members
  • Building organizational branding and identity
  • Finding effective value propositions for members and prospects at all points in their careers
  • And of course, adding revenue streams
What’s new is that we’re seeing more and better ways of using publication content to address them.  

For example, associations can recruit, engage and retain members by meeting readers where they are, making it easier to find publication content in Google and social media, and reducing the barriers to sampling, with metered paywalls, rather than strict access denieds.  

If you do it right, some of that traffic converts to publication sales and new memberships.  And more of it converts to awareness that your organization is the place to go for information that is both relevant AND credible.  

Another example: repurposing your publication content in continuing education, courses, leveraging existing materials to create offerings that deliver educational outcomes, and can be adapted to each waypoint in the member’s career journey.

A conversation I had on the flight up neatly captured the challenge.  The woman sitting next to me told me she’d recently started her career as an occupational therapist.  She’d had a student membership in her organization—the AOTA—while in school, but hadn’t renewed when that lapsed.  She clearly felt bad about it, and was aware of the research and other valuable contributions the organization made to her profession, but felt she could get the information she needed to do her job from colleagues, and yes, Google.  

Fortunately, AOTA recently started working with Tizra, and hopefully next time I happen to sit next to an occupational therapist, she’ll be reading one of their digital publications.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Stanford's HighWire Press Picks Tizra

We're thrilled to announce a new partnership with Stanford University's HighWire Press.  It's exciting not only as an opportunity to work side-by-side with a longtime leader in online publishing, but also as validation of the robustness and flexibility we have worked so hard to build into Tizra.  HighWire has been serving up some of the most prestigious online journals in the world since 1995, and they are extremely selective about the technology they offer their customers. But the real proof of the collaboration's value is the response from the marketplace, with organizations including Project MUSE (Johns Hopkins University Press), Duke University Press , and GeoScienceWorld already signed on in advance of the product's launch.  Clearly, the increased discoverability, ease of use and agility resulting from the collaboration are what publishers—and readers—are looking for. Further details on the partnership are in the news release below.  A PDF version is ...

Leave Web Enough Alone!

Jeremy Zawodny is rightly torqued about the needless complication of tools that purport to help with information sharing. The web's always had that pretty well covered, thanks to the simple magic of the URL. Anything you find, you can bookmark, email, or with a tinyurl , disseminate on a cocktail napkin. If my dear grandfather had been born later, he probably would never have picked up the habit of mailing articles lovingly clipped with a pen knife, and instead would have referred me to his del.icio.us feed. Zawodny points to a bizarre assortment of pop-ups, forms, and other unwelcome surprises that result from the "helpful" new sharing features, and notes... they seem to be placed on the sites under the assumption that I'm too stupid to send email (to the people I presumably email frequently already) with a URL in it... Thanks for the confidence boost. At Tizra, we're more inclined to say thanks to for the opportunity to do better. Our AgilePDF™ , for exampl...

Context is King!

John Blossom's post on traditional portal strategies resonated with my recent thinking about aggregation sites ( Shorelines: portals Passe ). I made his post into a silly slogan for my subject line, but he is making a good case that even in the "piling things up" business, there are potential problems with actually piling them up. Reading it, for a minute, I had a pang about Tizra. You might be able to read it as saying that it's not worth building your own content collection at all, but I don't think that is the practical point for publishers. I think that the notion of stressing context and tuning product offerings to user groups is exactly what we enable with our product and content management tools. You need to have a branded presentation of your content to all your different audiences, and make every audience an offer that they want to buy. That takes a lot of flexibility, which is what we've concentrated on. That flexibility should be on tap, not the en...