Media Library (20)

SIIA Statement on President Biden’s State of the Union

by Policy

The following statement can be attributed to the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA).

SIIA commends President Biden on a State of the Union address that highlighted the importance of “investing in American innovation, in industries that will define the future” and signaled a redirection of the Administration’s efforts around technology and information policy. Innovation and government investment in the technology and information industries is critical to support consumer needs, strengthen the U.S. economy, and protect U.S. national security. SIIA supports policy to further a healthy environment for the creation, dissemination and productive use of information.

We appreciate the President addressing the critical issues of protecting online privacy and safety.

Protect kids online. SIIA commends President Biden’s commitment to protect kids online. We are encouraged by the ongoing bipartisan negotiations in Congress to do just that and look forward to working with all stakeholders throughout the process.

Social media. SIIA urges the Administration and Congress to take a nuanced approach towards social media. The Administration and Congress should take care to advance policy measures in a targeted and researched-based manner rather than with a broad brush.

Federal data privacy. Notably, President Biden hinted at but did not call directly for comprehensive federal privacy legislation. We encourage the White House to be proactive in supporting comprehensive federal privacy legislation that is appropriately tailored to the needs of consumers and businesses.

Competition. SIIA commends the President for focusing competition policy on issues that matter to consumers and are driven by concern for their welfare – hidden “surcharges” and fees for travel arrangements, concerts and sporting events, and the like. We urge the Administration to avoid regulation sounding in unproven theories of antitrust regulation such as a number of technology-related proposals that failed in the last Congress.

Woman entrepreneur busy with her work in office. Young woman talking over telephone while working on computer at her desk. (Woman entrepreneur busy with her work in office. Young woman talking over telephone while working on computer at her desk., ASC

‘The Hybrid Model Will Continue’; BIMS 2023 Future of Work Panel to Offer Updated Blueprint

by Media

We see many strategies for in-person office requirements vs. working remotely these days. And you’ll read a couple more below. But Terri Travis, VP of human resources at Industry Dive, who will speak to the future of work at BIMS 2023, seems to make the most sense when she told us: “We routinely ask our team what’s important to them to get a sense of where things stand. We ask how do we meet them where they want to be.”

On the episode of Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me Saturday, the weekly quiz show on NPR, the question was asked: “The company Shopify says they have increased productivity by the equivalent of roughly 95,000 hours of work this year by simply doing what?”

“Getting a cattle prod and zapping the workers?” was incorrect.

“All of this could have just been discussed over an email after all” was the hint.

“No more meetings” was the answer. “Deleted 12,000 recurring meetings from their calendars.” “We actually tried this idea of cancelling meetings this week,” said guest host Peter Gross. “We cancelled one—completely eliminated our regular Thursday punchline meeting. And you know what happened?” Long pause.

An article in The Washington Post last week suggested that “the beginning of the year is a good time to audit your meetings, work experts say. Review all recurring meetings on your calendar. Consider which are necessary and effective, and make changes as needed,” said Steven Rogelberg, who teaches organizational science, management and psychology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

BIMS 2023, Feb. 23-24 in Orlando, will have this covered. One of the most anticipated sessions is The Future of Work in B2B Media—so valued by us that it will be the Closing Keynote. The speakers are: Nick Schacht, chief global development officer, SHRM; Kevin Turpin, president, National Journal; and Terri Travis, VP of human resources, Industry Dive. While they may not be in favor of cancelling all meetings, they will offer pivotal perspectives on where the industry is headed.

Here are 5 previous assessments from this esteemed panel:

Move forward. It’s not going back to the way it was. “The 40-hour work week will evolve and won’t look the same in the years to come,” Travis told us by email. “Workplaces will need to remain flexible to recruit and retain team members. I don’t envision workplaces returning to a pre-2020 model. The ‘hybrid’ model—meaning in-office some days and working remotely on others—will continue.”

The lead story in The Washington Post today was headlined, “Offices half-full, likely to stay there.” While 50% of people are back at their desks, the article reported, “overall growth in office occupancy has begun to level off in recent months.”

Spend more time “outside” your own organization. Previously, Turpin (pictured) had spoken more broadly about transformation. “When businesses are trying to recreate themselves and change, they spend too much time inside, in strategy meetings, batting around ideas that they think will work. We don’t spend enough time going around. How are [our customers’] jobs changing? What are they thinking about? What are they investing in this year? This will give you solutions.” Even more so now, with all our work parameters changing.

Consider different in-office formulas. “The shift to remote work gave employees a lot more power and control,” said Travis. “If companies do not provide flexible workplace environments, they will not be competitive in the market and will suffer from a retention perspective. We have already seen this on the front half with our recruiting efforts. I don’t envision a five-days-a-week, in-office requirement coming back in the short term. However, some team members find it useful to meet with their colleagues and departments in-office and we support that as well.” Ring Central is moving from requiring workers to come in 3 days a week to 30 days a quarter. It gives employees more latitude in how they allocate their time, said COO Mo Katibeh.

Be careful of coding bias. In a podcast with Justin Brady back in April, Nick Shacht spoke about code bias. “If you have a biased approach to evaluating resumes, which you can have in-person too, then you just code that biased approach into the system. You just make those biased decisions that much faster. That’s a problem.” Developers need to be extremely careful on what we tell the AI to do and what bias we code in, for example even requiring degrees or certifications, while overlooking more valuable skills. “We have these legacy requirements for, must have a college degree. Well, ask yourself the question, why?” Shacht explained when speaking about a sales role. “There’s a whole other set of skills that actually can contribute to success in that profession.”

Ask customers and members what has changed for them. “We had a really deep dedication to getting to know our audience as best we could,” Turpin said. “Knowing what their top challenges are, how those challenges are changing? ‘What are the new things that are getting into your budget that wasn’t there five years ago? How are you managing the office differently?’ We spent a year with our customers, asking them a set of questions over and over. The most important one was, ‘What keeps you effective?’”

 

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Have a Plan [Early], Define Your Vision; Thorough Onboarding Is the First Step to Success

by Media

“EMPLOYERS: I’m going to let you in on a secret about employee retention,” Hebba Youssef, chief people officer at Workweek and a prominent speaker at BIMS 2023, tweeted recently. “Most employees know how long they’ll be committing to a job by the end of their first month. Translation: ONBOARDING MATTERS.” The advice Youssef then offers happens to feel pretty sound for customer onboarding as well.

In an accompanying article, Youssef—who will present about Workweek’s content-creator-led strategy at BIMS 2023 in Orlando, Feb. 23-24—offered three tips for improving your employee onboarding: 1) “Define your culture, mission and vision: What exactly are employees doing here and why does it matter?”; 2) “Have a plan for the first 30, 60, 90 days”; and 3) “Survey: the first 30, 60, 90 days should conclude with a survey at each milestone. While that feels like a lot of surveys, this time is the most crucial to get right! If something is not going well at the 30 day mark, you still have the opportunity to make some improvements.”

Interestingly, I wanted to write about member/subscriber onboarding. But when I read Youssef’s advice, it’s not really that different. You should be defining yourselves to the new member in terms of the opportunities available to them to engage. And “have a plan” is pretty obvious. The idea of surveying may, as she writes, feel heavy but better early in a membership or subscription than late, right? And I’ve found that reaching out in a caring, non-intrusive way is never a bad thing.

That also leads to the first of six more tips for onboarding:

Monitor early. “If a subscriber doesn’t have at least 10 page views a month, we run campaigns to engage with them, send them letters from the editor and the CEO, try to understand what they are looking for, and make relevant changes,” said Vaibhav Khanna, senior manager, subscription growth, for The Indian Express and formerly Bloomberg Quint. In a retention study last year from the American Press Institute, the biggest gap between what publishers deem valuable and what they aren’t doing well is in identifying at-risk subscribers—83.5% to 19%. The next two are using metrics to evaluate churn—82.6% to 28%.—and track what subscribers read—75.7% think it’s important but only 30% believe they are good at it.

Come up with clear questions to ask. Youssef suggests these—the brackets are how I would change it for subscribers/members:
I know what is expected of me [programs you offer];
I have the resources I need to successfully do my job [engage with you];
I understand the [your] company culture;
My goals [for our subscription/membership] are clearly defined;
My manager [contact with your organization] has set expectations about my role [our membership].

Perfect your welcome letters. I recall one open-rate survey that had welcome letters far ahead of any other type of communication. We like to be welcomed and made to feel special. The more value you can throw in, the better. And the more people you can welcome will also help you come renewal time. Almost everyone (90%) encourages new subscribers to sign up for their newsletters. However, only some publishers send educational information about how to use their products (46%) or send personal notes from a person in the newsroom (43%).

Dedicate specific space on your site. The Health Industry Distributors Association (HIDA) created a new member guide and a special page on their website with practical tips for new members. During the pandemic, HIDA went away from sending out physical packets but then heard from members who preferred receiving something tangible in the mail. Perhaps you could get a sponsor for that.

Provide the breadth of what you do. During the pandemic, customers may have come to you for one special thing, be that COVID coverage or ways to move forward perhaps. So it’s important that you expose them to everything else that you do now. “If you are one of the almost a million people who subscribed to our COVID-19 email newsletter, what are the other newsletters that may be valuable to you?” asked Jeremy Gilbert, then of The Washington Post, now of Medill, early on in the pandemic. “What kinds of coverage did you click through from the email newsletter and how can we use those interactions with our site or native apps to get you to stay?”

Show and tell. In the personalized onboarding webinars that Lia Zegeye, senior director of membership at the American Bus Association, conducts, she “shows a short promotional video from ABA’s tradeshow, providing a testimonial about the value of the event. Zegeye said she often gets thank-you notes from those webinar attendees who say, “Wow, I had no idea you guys did all of these things!” “It’s a great way for me to connect with our members.” On their website, there’s a pdf guide titled How to Access and Utilize My ABA. The webinars immediately put a face with a name.

nealwinner

Neal Leadership Awards Spotlight Top Performers; Deadline Approaching for 2023 Submissions

by Media

The folks who won our Leadership Awards—part of the Neals—last year are some of the most innovative and successful in the industry. The awards, which sometimes can get lost amid all the substantial Neals categories, are in play again this year. There’s no cost to enter, but the submission deadline is approaching fast. Here’s a look at those winners and more awards details.

“I’m surprised often by how much I see really short headlines in an online space,” Erin Hallstrom, director of digital content strategy, Food Processing, for Endeavor Business Media, told us in our Editorial Training Series session on Search Engine Optimization last year. “I have this conversation with people sometimes, and I hear a lot of, ‘I’m used to keeping things short’ or’ ‘We have to keep things short.’

“My number one top recommendation is, resist that urge. When it comes to SEO, remember not everyone knows who you are—not everyone’s going to know what it is that your content is about… Include company or people’s names whenever possible in the headlines; spell out names.”

Last year’s Neal Awards turned out nothing short of very favorable for Hallstrom. Not only did she co-host the in-person event in New York and do a wonderful job—so wonderful that she’ll do it again this year—but she was named the Marianne Dekker Mattera Mentor Award winner. That award is just one of a proud batch of Leadership Awards that the AM&P Network offers as part of the Neal Awards.

The others are:

– The G.D. Crain, Jr. Award, given annually to an individual who has made outstanding contributions to the development of editorial excellence in business media. Nancy Perry from Lexipol was last year’s winner.

– The Timothy White Award, recognizing exemplary leadership in the face of challenges and pressures that editors face daily. Robert Brelsford, also of Endeavor, won last year.

– The McAllister Editorial Fellowship and the McAllister Top Management Fellowship go to an editor and an executive, respectively. Cassandra West of Crain’s Chicago Business won the editorial award, while Sean Griffey, CEO of Industry Dive, was named the management fellow and will receive that special award at BIMS 2023, Feb. 23-24 in Orlando. Elizabeth Green, CEO of Brief Media, won that honor last year. (Medill’s Abe Peck helped us document Green and her staff’s experience at the school.)

While Neal Award submissions are in and being deliberated on, Leadership Award nominations can be submitted here through this Friday, Feb. 3, and self-nominations are accepted. There is no cost. Submissions also go through the Neal Awards entry portal. (The Mattera and Timothy White Awards can especially use more entries. There is no submission process for the McAllister Editorial Fellowship. The winner is chosen among the Neal Award finalists.)

We’re excited to present the award to Griffey. Here, he explained some of the success of Industry Dive: “When we really started to explode was when we said it’s not just about saving people time, it’s about real insight about what’s happened, what this means to their industry. So the mainstream news can do a great job of saying what happened with a deal, or announcing a deal and getting the terms. But for niche publishers and business publishers, what you really need to do is talk about: What does this mean for your company? For your job? For the future?”

At her SEO training session last year, Hallstrom repeated her mantra—“not everyone knows who you are”—a few times during her training session. In fact, she suggested “sending your most recent 20 headlines to somebody else on your team and say, ‘Can you take a look at these? Can you tell by reading the headline of every single one of these what that piece of content was probably about?’

“People don’t necessarily know who you are, so if they’re reading a really short headline, and [it says that a certain] last name gets a promotion, okay, great, but what does that mean for the industry? Why does it matter?”

Hallstrom emphasized that “actual keyword stuffing is one of the reasons why Google made some of their algorithm changes. Saturating your content with keywords… doesn’t play well. Actually Google really doesn’t like that, so they will demote you. They will purposely not have your content show up higher.” Hallstrom compared it to “someone who goes into a party or an event [and says,] ‘look at me, look how fabulous I am. Let me tell you all my accolades.’”