Newstex President Larry Schwartz has been re-elected to the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) Content Division Board of Directors after a two-year hiatus.

Having spent six years on the SIIA Content Division Board of Directors previously, Larry had reached the maximum of three consecutive terms. Now, he’s back on the Board for the 2012-2013 term where he’ll help the SIIA develop and prioritize the Division’s initiatives and determine the projects, activities and events to be undertaken in the near future.

The newly elected (and re-elected) board members include:

• Nancy Aldrich-Ruenzel – Vice President and Publisher – Pearson Education
• Simon Beale – SVP, Global Sales & Training – ProQuest
• Chris Broekhoff – COO, VP Business Development – MEI
• Dan Duncan – Sr. Director, Government Affairs – The McGraw-Hill Companies
• Barry Graubart – Vice President, Marketing – ReisReports.com
• Kevin Novak – Vice President, Integrated Web Strategy and Technology – The American Institute of Architects
• Larry Schwartz – President – Newstex, LLC

These board members will join the following mid-term board members:

• Robert Barber – CEO – Environmental Data Resources
• John Blossom – President – Shore Communications Inc.
• Anthony Capon – Vice President, Content, Corporate Markets – Dow Jones & Company
• Edward Colleran – Senior Director, International Relations – Copyright Clearance Center
• Adam Gross – CMO – The Jordan, Edmiston Group, Inc.
• Edward Keating – Chief Content Officer – BLR
• Daniel Kortick – Partner – The Wicks Group of Companies, L.L.C.
• Scott Livingston – Vice President – LexisNexis Group
• Peter Marney – Senior Vice President, Global Head of Content Marketplace – Thomson Reuters
• Guillaume Mazieres – Executive VP, North America – TEMIS
• Ann Michael – President & Principal Consultant – Delta Think, LLC
• Jeffrey Massa – President & CEO – YellowBrix, Inc.
• Robin Neidorf – Director of Research – Free Pint Limited
• Claudio Pinto – Director Business Development – Thomas Industrial Network
• Frank Rubino – Director – MarkLogic
• Daniel Schaible – SVP Content – BurrellesLuce
• Mary Jo Zandy – Managing Director – Berkery, Noyes & Co

The goal of the SIIA Content Division Board is to advance business priorities for the content industry by bringing industry perspectives and acting as the voice of SIIA member companies. Please join us in congratulating Larry on his appointment!

This week, Social Media Examiner launched its fourth annual Social Media Marketing Industry Report, and there are some interesting discoveries found in the report. The study surveyed 3,800 marketers to learn how they’re using social media for business promotion. Some of the results will surprise you.

First, let’s take a look at the top 10 things about social media marketing that marketers who responded to the survey have questions about and want to understand.

1. How to measure the effect of social media marketing on their businesses
2. How to find their target audiences with social media
3. How to engage their audiences
4. How to sell with social media
5. How to best use their time to maximize social media results
6. How to create a social media strategy
7. Which social media tactics are most effective
8. What are the best social media management tools
9. How to use the different social media platforms
10. How to select the right social platforms for my business

Some of these truly worry me. Who is handling social media for these businesses if they’re asking these questions? While measurement continues to be a challenge for social media marketers in general, a professional marketer with social media experience shouldn’t be asking the rest of these questions. I suppose this could be attributed directly to the #3 finding from the study discussed below.

83% of respondents to this survey believe that social media is important to their businesses, but they’re still using a silo marketing approach in implementing social media in their marketing plans and missing the full opportunity that social media offers. Following are five key areas of the study with particularly interesting findings:

1. Time

The vast majority of marketers who responded to the survey are spending less than 10 hours per week on social media marketing activities (67.4%) with 41.7% spending less than 5 hours per week on social media marketing activities.

2. Sites

Marketers are focusing the vast majority of their efforts on just a handful of sites for social media marketing: Facebook (92%), Twitter (82%), LinkedIn (73%), blogs (61%), and YouTube or other videos (57%).

3. Manpower

It’s clear from these results that time, experience, and expertise is an issue for marketers, yet only 30% are outsourcing at least a portion of their social media activities to third parties.

4. Metrics

Marketers don’t know how to track their social media efforts and truly determine if they’re driving real results. 40% of survey respondents say they want to know how to measure the return on investment of social media and how to find customers and prospects.

5. Benefits

Marketers who responded to this study believe that the biggest benefits of social media marketing are: Generating more business and exposure (85%), increasing traffic (69%), and providing marketplace insight (65%). This leads us back to the inability to measure results. Without measurement, building brand awareness and increasing blog traffic are the only things marketers are comfortable saying they’re impacting through social media marketing.

Social media marketing represents a significant opportunity for businesses to build their brands and ultimately, boost sales. As the results of this study show, there is still a lot to be learned and plenty of room for aggressive and innovative businesses to thrive on the social web. The marketers who responded to this survey indicated that their future plans will focus on online video and YouTube (76%). Beyond that, the top areas marketers plan to increase investments in during 2012 are Facebook (72%), Twitter (69%), blogs (68%), Google+ (67%), and LinkedIn (66%).

Notice a pattern here? Again, marketers are focusing primarily on the top social destinations rather than surrounding consumers with branded content so they can self-select how they want to experience and interact with the brand. The biggest destinations are the easy path. Think beyond “easy” in 2012.

 Image: Social Media Examiner

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to LinkedIn by Susan Gunelius (Newstex marketing consultant) is now available as both a paperback and an ebook through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all online and offline booksellers.

This book goes beyond the basics of setting up a profile. It also teaches readers how to get the most out of the site based on their individual goals. In other words, rather than simply focusing on the “tactics” of using LinkedIn, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to LinkedIn also covers the “strategies” of using LinkedIn.

Whether you want promote your business, find a job, recruit new employees, or simply network with like-minded professionals, this book shows you how to do it. Some of the topics covered in the book include:

• Customizing your LinkedIn profile to meet your specific goals
• Strategic analysis of the various LinkedIn account options and features
• The do’s and don’ts of LinkedIn
• Finding the right people and making sure they can find you, too
• Finding and communicating with LinkedIn Groups to reach your objectives
• Specific suggestions for using LinkedIn to find a job, promote a business or brand, raise capital, and increase sales

Books in the popular “Complete Idiot’s Guide” series are typically intended for a beginner audience. While The Complete Idiot’s Guide to LinkedIn covers all the basics, it goes into far more strategic detail related to setting and achieving professional goals using LinkedIn than similar beginner books. Most LinkedIn users don’t realize the full potential that the site has to help them build their careers, brands, and businesses. With that in mind, there is likely to be something that any LinkedIn user — novice to guru — can learn in The Complete Idiot’s Guide to LinkedIn.

The Complete Idiot’s Guide has a great price in paperback from both Amazon and Barnes & Noble right now of $13.43 (a 33% discount).

The 2012 In-House Counsel New Media Engagement Survey from Greentarget, InsideCounsel Magazine, and Zeughauser Group sheds light on the social media trends within the legal field. When the study was first conducted in 2010, blogging and social media usage among lawyers wasn’t mainstream. While younger counsel were diving into the world of social media, older counsel still primarily ignored it. That generational divide has narrowed significantly in the 2012 study.

According to the 2012 In-House Counsel New Media Engagement Survey, which surveyed corporate counsel from across the United States, some trends have emerged that are having a big impact on hiring, marketing, research, and more. Following are some of the highlights from the study results:

Quality Blogs Influence Outside Counsel Hiring Decisions

3 out of 4 of survey respondents believe that a lawyer’s blog is an important factor when they’re deciding which firms to retain.

Client-Side Counsel Prefer to Read Blogs by Firms

84% of in-house counsel believe that blogs are credible, and most prefer to read firm-branded blogs rather than blogs written by journalists.

LinkedIn is Viewed as the Serious Social Network for Attorneys

88% of in-house counsel surveyed believe LinkedIn is credible and use it for professional and personal reasons.

New Media Usage is Mainstream

Blogs are read more often by this audience than any of the most popular social networking platforms (i.e., Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn). Older counsel are consuming far more content, particularly blog content, then they did a year ago.

In-House Counsel Are More Likely to Consume Content than Create Content

In-house counsel are often “invisible users” of social media who consume a lot of content but rarely create content or participate in online conversations.

Social Media is Becoming a More Popular Tool for Client Services

The legal industry is using social media more frequently for client services and communications with an 8% increase year-over-year.

As the research report says, “The primary utility of social media — at least for this survey’s audience — is an intelligent filter of useful information.” However, the trends cited above show that the current primary utility of social media for in-house lawyers is evolving. Content consumption and content creation are both growing in 2012.

Clearly, there is demand for high quality legal blogs like those content publishers that syndicate their legal blogs through Newstex Authoritative Content such as Lawyers, Guns, and Money. That demand will only increase in the future.

In a great review of Newstex vice president of technology Chris Moyer’s book, Building Applications in the Cloud: Concepts, Patterns, and Projects, Jack Vaughan of SearchSOA discusses the misconception that you can throw a bunch of servers on the cloud and then sit back and see what happens. The result is likely to be multiple problems like decreased speeds or a crash.

That’s just one of the “gotcha” moments that Vaughan highlights from Moyer’s Building Applications in the Cloud: Concepts, Patterns, and Projects. Vaughan writes:

“Cloud providers lead you to believe you can take your existing applications and put them on the cloud with no fuss or muss. It is true, the applications can run; but you may find the performance is not what you expected. The fact is that application integration is one of the more complicated aspects of cloud computing.”

In his book, Chris Moyer discusses the principles of successful cloud solutions. He explains that your best strategy is always to design around your possible points of failure wherein failure is viewed as a feature that you plan for just as you plan for and design around any other feature. For example, it’s essential to scale out rather than scale up and make sure things run in parallel rather than just using bigger and better servers to band-aid problems related to scaling as they arise. Chris writes, “You must figure out how you can abstract critical computations and transactions so they can run in parallel.”

Check out the complete article on SearchSOA for all the details, and to learn more about building cloud applications (while avoiding potential problems), follow the link to read about Building Applications in the Cloud: Concepts, Patterns, and Projects on the Newstex blog.

Image: Will Merydith

In its ninth annual study, Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has released the 2012 State of the News Media report, and while the future of print newspapers is unsurprisingly bleak, the future for mobile is bright. With 1 in 4 Americans getting news from mobile devices in addition to desktops, this is an audience of news consumers that the media needs to pay close attention to.

The 2012 study also found that news consumers who access news content via mobile devices are less likely to rely on a search to find news content that interests them than they are likely to go directly to a news site or access news content via a mobile app. Furthermore, social media sites like Facebook and Twitter grew by huge amounts in 2011, but those sites played a limited role in daily news consumption, according to the 2012 State of the News Media report. Pew Research found that, “only about a third as many news consumers follow stories via Facebook as do so by going directly to news websites or apps or by using search. For Twitter, the proportion drops to less than a sixth as many.”

Interestingly, the study found that Facebook users are more likely to follow news links provided by friends and family while Twitter users follow links from a wide variety of sources and connections. This is useful information for news organizations. Social media represents a significant opportunity for news organizations to connect with and engage with news consumers. Those consumers are on sites like Facebook and Twitter, but news organizations haven’t found the right way to connect with them on those sites yet.

Given that Pew Research predicts as many as 100 newspapers will move to a digital subscription model in the coming months in order to survive financially (as 150 dailies already have), we can expect to see some big changes coming for online news in 2012. Pew Research also predicts the proliferation of local news sites will contract even more in 2012 as AOL’s Patch.com has already demonstrated.

Finally, Pew Research reports that one of the biggest things to watch is the intrusion of technology giants into the news media world. With sites like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple attempting to handle everything in consumers’ digital lives, the news is a likely target. Already, deals have been struck between major technology brands and news brands — YouTube and Reuters, Yahoo! and ABC News, and Facebook with The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, and others. Who will own the news in the future? That’s a big unanswered question right now.

All hope is not lost for the news industry. As Pew Research explains, “the news industry is not much closer to a new revenue model than a year earlier and has lost more ground to rivals in the technology industry. But growing evidence also suggests that news is becoming a more important and pervasive part of people’s lives. That, in the end, could prove a saving factor for the future of journalism.”

Image: Kay Pat

The Encyclopedia Britannica print edition lived a long life — 244 years — but that life is officially over. According to The New York Times, “the last print version is the 32-volume 20120 edition, which weighs 129 pounds and includes new entries on global warming and the Human Genome Project.”

The death of the Encyclopedia Britannica print edition is simply a sign of the times. The printed books have become instantly outdated in a world where anyone can access current information about any topic online in a matter of seconds.

While it’s true that user-generated online encyclopedias and information sites like Wikipedia are far from perfect, they have become the go-to source for anyone who is not writing a research paper. In other words, Wikipedia is “good enough” for most people. Serious research takes a bit longer online, but plenty of trustworthy and authoritative content is available for free for patient and determined fact-checkers. The fact that the Encyclopedia Britannica print edition just added entries about global warming in the 2010 edition is a perfect example of just how outdated the books can be.

Furthermore, The New York Times cites a 2005 study published in Nature that showed Encyclopedia Britannica is only slightly more accurate than Wikipedia. With a $1,395 price tag, it’s not surprising that only 4,000 of 8,000 sets of the final printed 2010 edition have been sold. For $70 per year, you could get an online subscription to Encyclopedia Britannica, so it’s also not surprising that printed sets are primarily purchased by libraries, research institutions, and similar organizations.

For those of us who remember trips to the library with a pocketful of change to copy pages out of the Encylopedia Britannica for a school paper only to get there and see someone else using the volume you need or the line at the copier is five people deep, the death of the print version marks the end of an era. To those of you reading this who have never had to experience the scenario I just described, consider yourself very fortunate.

Will you mourn the death of the Encyclopedia Britannica print version? Did you know it was still being printed? If this news makes you sad or nostalgic, don’t worry. The World Book Encyclopedia set is still being printed each year.

Image: David McLeish

From May 9-10, 2012, Content VIA Platforms, a new conference that’s being called the “essential event for content creators,” will be held at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, California. This new event from the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) will address the new demands of publishing across multiple platforms.

The goal of the conference is to provide publishing, media, and information companies with the resources they need to overcome the challenges of getting content published and distributed in real-time across varied channels. These channels are both traditional and emerging, such as mobile, social, and aggregation platforms, and more.

Attendees will hear panels and presentations focused on delivering both tools and insights that will enable them use a variety of platforms, develop monetization strategies, and evaluate devices and app distribution models.

The Content VIA Platforms conference will feature a variety of mobile, publishing, and technology experts as well as key individuals from the information industry, including keynote addresses and case studies from:

• Burt Herman, Co-founder, Storify – Audience Engagement 3.0
• Charlene Li, Founder, Altimeter Group – Platforms from the Customers Perspective
• Chris Silva, Mobile Industry Analyst, Altimeter Group – Beyond The Page: The Sentient World and a New Layer of Content
• Kara Swisher, Co-Producer, D: All Things Digital, Co-Executive Editor, AllThingsD.com, The Wall Street Journal
• Dan Bennett, VP of Technology, Thomson Reuters – Going Native: When and Why Should You Use Native Apps vs HTML5?
• Brian Alvey, CEO, Crowd Fusion – A Seat at the Table: Crowd Fusion

Attendees will also have opportunities to make key connections during scheduled speed networking sessions and have some fun during a unique “Social VIA” event where presenters share their personal or professional passions in five minute entertaining show and tells. After the presentations, the audience will vote for their favorite, and the winner will win the Social VIA crown!

You can follow the link to view the complete schedule and to register for Content VIA Platforms. To take advantage of the best rates, register by April 9, 2012.

Newstex President Larry Schwartz is on the Steering Committee for the Content VIA Platforms event, and Newstex will be in attendance at the event. We hope to see you in San Francisco, too!

A new study called The Paradox of Blogging and Content Marketing by Percussion Software reveals some interesting information about companies, blogging, and missed content marketing opportunities. According to the research report, only 1 in 5 mid-market technology companies surveyed have company blogs. It gets worse. Of those companies that have company blogs, 1 out of 4 don’t blog actively and haven’t published content in any form on their company blogs within the last 30 days.

As Theresa Cramer of EContent explains, it might seem like everyone is blogging, but in reality, that’s far from accurate. She says, “While many companies know blogging is an important marketing tool, they just aren’t on board.”

Content marketing presents a huge opportunity to connect with consumers, tell a brand’s story, and boost search engine traffic to a company website. So why are so few of the over 800 mid-market technology companies surveyed in this study not blogging? According to Percussion Software, the barrier isn’t the size of the company or the depth of the team. Those are certainly contributing factors, but the predominant factor is the company philosophy.

Of the surveyed technology companies, software companies are most likely to be blogging (42.8%), and of all companies that maintain blogs, WordPress is by far the most popular application to do it. It’s important to point out that a disinterest in blogging doesn’t mean that these technology companies aren’t active on the social web at all. Many have dropped blogging down the list of priorities in favor of other social media and mobile activities.

One of the things I talk about extensively in Content Marketing for Dummies is the importance of surrounding consumers with branded content so they can self-select how they want to engage with your brand. Not everyone likes Twitter, and not everyone likes Facebook. Content marketing (including authoritative blog posts) should be a catalyst to social media sharing and conversations. By leaving blogging out of the social media and content marketing plan entirely, a company is missing a huge opportunity to connect with consumers with deeply meaningful, shareable, and value-added content. You can bet that’s a missed opportunity that competitors are more than happy to leverage.

If you’ve been waiting to upload your YouTube channel to the new design launched in December, then you might be surprised to visit your YouTube channel today and see that it’s been upgraded for you. Today is the day that YouTube automatically migrated all YouTube channels to the new design — whether or not channel owners were happy about it.

For people who don’t like change, YouTube is quick to point out that they spent a great deal of time listening to user feedback and analyzing channel performance metrics in order to create this new channel design. In a blog post published last week, the YouTube team explains that the new look and features will ultimately help people find the best and most relevant content and keep visitors on your channel longer. That’s good news for Authoritative Content video publishers!

To reduce complaints from naysayers, YouTube puts the onus back on the users and reminds them that clicking the blue “Send Feedback” button when they see it on YouTube is very important. Here’s what the company said on its blog in response to people who aren’t ready to accept the change:

“We know change is never easy, especially when it’s something you’ve spent lots of time and effort on. Even more, there are human beings at YouTube who look at every piece of feedback, bucket them into categories, and work with product teams to address them each week. So whenever you see a blue “Send Feedback” link, know that that’s not some decorative ornament. It’s for real. So give your feedback because we (humans) need it to keep creating ways for YouTube to showcase your channels.”

So what does the new YouTube channel design offer? Some cool stuff. For example, you can choose from four templates to create the look that best meets your goals and needs — Creator Template, Blogger Template, Network Template, and Everything Template. Each template offers a Featured Tab, so you can continue to feature the content that you really want people to see when they land on your channel.

What do you think of the new YouTube channel layout? Have you upgraded yet? If you haven’t, go check out your channel and make sure it looks the way you want it to look. YouTube offers a handy checklist that you can use to customize your channel using the new layout.

Image: Rego Korosi