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PS22 November - Content Trends
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PS22 November - Content Trends
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Segment:0 .
HANNAH HECKNER: Excited to be here today on our final strategy session of 2022. It's been a great year. And I'm happy to be closing things out with these really great panelists. So as we think about content trends and digital meetings, we're in a really interesting space where there's a lot of uptake in putting some of this content online, but it's really-- we're pushing past that being expected.
HANNAH HECKNER: So now it's all about the value that's being brought to that content to the end users and intentionality of, here's how this organization is going to be handling a virtual event that's entirely virtual, here's how an organization can handle a hybrid experience, and here's where it's really great to have a full-on in-person experience. So as mentioned, we have a really great panelists together today that are really going to dive into the opportunities in this space, the obstacles and lessons learned in this space, and really just look at the market landscape, where we are and where we're headed in the future.
HANNAH HECKNER: So, to set the scene here, we have some audience polls. So to start out with, if you all could just let us know where your organization is right now in this space, and that would really help to ground our conversation moving forward. As you all are answering those questions, I will introduce our speakers here. We have Jessica Lawrence-Hurt from Cadmore Media, Patti Sweet from Health Affairs, and Lori Carlin from Delta Think.
HANNAH HECKNER: So do we have some answers coming in here, Stephanie?
STEPHANIE LOVEGROVE HANSEN: Yes, we've got about 17 so far. So might just give it a few more seconds to let people finish weighing in.
HANNAH HECKNER: Great. So maybe as we have folks answering these questions, it'd be great to hear from the panel just about big content trends that you all are seeing in this space. And if you could just maybe introduce yourself and just where you're coming at this new content trend, that would be great. I'll just start to my right here with Jessica.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: Hi. Thanks, Hannah. Yes, I'm Jessica Lawrence-Hurt. I am Chief Marketing Officer at Cadmore Media. We are a company that's been around for about four years, and we do streaming and hosting of video and audio content in the scholarly space. And of course, the last two years have seen a real explosion of content, particularly derived from meetings.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: So internally, we've kind of gone from educating people about why they should be recording and capturing all their content into helping people figure out, OK, now we have all this content, what do we do with it? And I think the answer is, it depends. So when you talk about what I'm seeing in terms of trends, I'm seeing basically four different areas right now. And again, I think that the market is still catching up to where this explosion of content come from and we're figuring out, OK, now what do we do with this?
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: So four things I'm seeing are basically using the meeting content with the existing proceedings packages or content that has existed for a while in terms of the papers, but then adding supplemental meeting content to it. And I've seen it just as standalone. So organizations that maybe didn't do proceedings, but still see a value in having some sort of video or audio content from the meeting and putting that into a product, either for just members or people who attended the conference or licensing it.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: I'm seeing other players-- Underline is a player in this space-- licensing, curating content from lots of different types of meetings and different subject areas and then licensing that. And then I'm seeing-- one of our clients, actually, is the British bone and joint ortho media product, and that is an Association of Orthopedics, and they are collecting content from other organizations in that space.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: So the product that they are working on has content within one subject area, but curated from a number of other organizations. So I'm seeing, at this point, about four different types of things going on, and I think we'll see that number grow as people get more familiar with the options available to them.
HANNAH HECKNER: Awesome. Thank you so much, Jessica. Over to you Patti. So where do you-- how are you approaching these opportunities at Health Affairs?
PATTI SWEET: Yeah, great. Well, I'll start by introducing Health Affairs, the nation's leading health policy journal. So during COVID-19, we published a lot of research on COVID-19, which was a great public service. And I am the Director of Digital Strategy, so I oversee a fairly aggressive five-year strategic plan to what I say is take health policy from where it was as just our-- not just, but our peer-reviewed research journal to something that people actually care about.
PATTI SWEET: Having that happen during a pandemic made health policy pretty cool really quick. But the focus that we've seen with trends is how to make our content more accessible and relatable to a wider audience, and that is how we present the content. So often I say, with the team and with an editorial team or any type of academic publishing, they think that hitting publish is the metric of success, and that's actually when a lot of the other work begins.
PATTI SWEET: So we have a big focus on taking our journal articles, which sometimes you have to be trained to read those-- in many instances, you do, or more familiar with reading them, and disseminating that content in a lot of other channels. So we do that through things like a podcast program, virtual events, video, newsletter. But the focus with that trend is really to make sure that more people can understand what we're publishing and speaking in the language that makes sense to them by taking an almost choose-your-own-adventure format approach.
PATTI SWEET: So some people will choose to read a journal article, some people will choose to listen to a podcast, some people will choose to come to our events. Some will choose to do all of them or none of them. So it's just making sure that we're taking that content and putting it in front of people in a way that makes sense. A lot of it is around accessibility, too. So these different formats are making it possible for more people to opt into engaging with their content.
PATTI SWEET: And there's also the health equity piece to content as well, making sure that we have representation across all of our touchpoints, not just within the journal, but within our digital publication and in other places, too. So the last thing I will just say on that is our brand is a traditional scholarly publishing journal, and my role is to come in and almost treat it like a startup and really move quickly to try to figure out what new content types work for our audience.
PATTI SWEET: And so that's a whole other conversation that we'll probably touch on a little bit later, but it's an important consideration for what are the trends in content? Well, it's constantly changing, so we gotta constantly be evolving.
HANNAH HECKNER: That's great. Thanks so much, Patti. Really looking forward to diving down in there in those topics, and we've certainly been in an exciting space these past few years. OK, last but not least, Lori. It'd be great for you to introduce yourself and some trends that you're seeing.
LORI CARLIN: Yeah, sure, thank you so much, Hannah and Stephanie. So yeah, so I'm Chief Commercial Officer at Delta Think, and as many of you likely know, Delta Think is a consultancy focusing on scholarly publishing, scholarly communications, association management. So we work with many of you and look out at the landscape maybe at a higher level and see what is happening across the industry. It's no surprise, obviously, that determining how to accommodate virtual, hybrid, online meetings and then what to do with that content potentially afterwards is certainly on everybody's mind.
LORI CARLIN: Interestingly, I had started getting involved in this before the pandemic. I was working with a group of early career researchers who had first written a preprint that then got published eventually, I believe, in a nature title around the inequity of in-person meetings and the inability of folks who were unable to attend to have access to that important research, and how oftentimes that meeting content just really goes away.
LORI CARLIN: It's just not accessible once the meeting is over or it's accessible for a very limited amount of time, and that there's no tie-in to other content and information from that organization or from other organizations. You may have a speaker at your meeting who then ends up publishing in another journal, but there's no connection even if they're publishing in your journal or someone else's from that starting point all along that research timeline, if you will.
LORI CARLIN: So there's a DEI component here that has emerged as well, which is really important. That's an important topic generally and related to this area as well. I would also say that we've seen a really big growth in education, working with a lot of clients on the education side of their organizations. As people are concerned about finding new revenue streams, they're looking at education as a way to bring that in.
LORI CARLIN: And having this content to support those educational goals is really important. So I would say those are two things, collaboration, new emergence of new providers in the space is also something that I'm sure we'll get into as we talk today.
HANNAH HECKNER: That's really great, Lori. Yeah, I mean, just the opportunities for organizations to really underline their impact and value to their members in the larger community I think is a huge thing here. OK, Stephanie, let's see the answers to that those initial polls. OK, so it looks like we've got a lot of folks that have recordings of live meetings, and webinars are really popular. Definitely a more well-known content asset even preceding the COVID-19 pandemic.
HANNAH HECKNER: Lots of videos being captured, that's definitely a front runner here, but with those transcripts as well. This is really great. And a lot of conversation that has-- that I myself have been a part of as Silverchair has been exploring these new content assets is the really interesting difference in approaches towards making that ephemerable-- excuse me, ephemeral meetings content more durable.
HANNAH HECKNER: And the different decisions not even across scientific disciplines, but even within disciplines. So it'd be great to hear from our panelists about the differences that they've seen or maybe even the differences in their own organization towards deciding which assets from those meetings to make lasting on online and which might not get that same touch. Patti, it might be nice to start with you just in looking at how Health Affairs has approached this.
PATTI SWEET: Yeah. Well, so I approach it from a few different angles. So from a digital SEO expert, I want all that content online and I want it to be free, or at least scrollable. And if it's a video, to have transcription or more deeper, if you will, abstract or information on the page. But we can't give away everything for free, especially when it is presentation that is about our content that is behind a paywall.
PATTI SWEET: We then don't want to just give it away in an event. So earlier this year, we actually launched a membership program alongside our subscription, and that's where we have access to all of our events. So we're monetizing it and saying, you get access to our archive of all of our video events. And that way, if something is funded for us, we can put it out freely. We'll still put it on YouTube, we'll put it on our website and we make sure that anyone can see it.
PATTI SWEET: But if it has to go behind the paywall, we've actually figured out within our platform how to put it below a login. So you can still review and look at the video. It's still callable by the likes of search engines. But you have to be able to log in before you actually view that video content. And we do hide it. It is-- it's indexed, but hidden on YouTube as well as on our website.
PATTI SWEET: So what that means is that we're able to make some of those business decisions with sometimes revenue, yes, but also readership in mind to catalog the content in that way. But launching that membership program was a risk for us. We'd never done it before ever. We'd only had our one paid-for product since the inception of Health Affairs in 1981. And uptake has been pretty strong.
PATTI SWEET: So people are willing to pay for it. We did a lot around price point testing, market research, stakeholder interviews. I'm sure many people on this call experience it. Our end user is not the person who currently gives us money. It is the institution that gives us money. And we want to figure out how to get to the end user that is using our content, that's having their career made from the content that they publish with us, all of those other things.
PATTI SWEET: So with the membership, we put it at a very low price point, and our target market is all of our users that have free access. So it's continuing to grow. It's only been launched since May 24, I remember the exact moment in time. But it's something that we've done to try to bundle and monetize events that otherwise weren't behind a paywall.
PATTI SWEET: I will also say the strategy behind that was to put a low price point because if I can identify you a super user who has free access through their institution, I can identify who you are, I can give you much better messaging, I can send you emails with targeted messaging, I can make sure that, hey, you're reading this content over here, did we have this event over here? Or we have this podcast over here or whatever it is.
PATTI SWEET: But yeah, so it's a lot around how do we make the best use of our time when it comes to the events and new content, but I will say that it continues to be a challenge for us, and that's where I spend a lot of my time from overseeing the strategy and analysis. Is it worth us to launch this event? Or do we not get people to show up-- enough people to show up for it?
PATTI SWEET: Do we not make enough money off of it? Do we not get an advertiser or sponsor for it? So it's a complex ecosystem, but we're making movements in the right direction, and that, to us, is success at this point in time with such an early product.
HANNAH HECKNER: That's great and really helpful. And obviously Health Affairs, thinking about public health, health policy, probably a group that is far more pro getting the word out and engaging with--
PATTI SWEET: Open access. Everything should be open, free all the time. Yes.
HANNAH HECKNER: Yeah. So Jessica, obviously when people come to work with Cadmore, they're deciding to make videos of things and want them to be discoverable. It'd be great to hear about some of Cadmore's experiences or things that you're seeing where maybe someone-- maybe you're working with an organization that's saying, we want this video, but we only want it to be available for the first, say, three months after a meeting.
HANNAH HECKNER: Or, just, are you seeing some time-based sensitivity? Or we don't want these videos posted, we only want these to go to a small group of people. Any interesting takeaways you've seen from different approaches there?
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: Well, the answer to that is yes, we've seen all of it. Everything from, we want all of this content in front of the paywall for anyone who wants to access it, and that's going to be sometimes more of like what Patti's doing in terms of public policy or public communication messaging where you want-- the goal is to just get the word out, and it may be sponsored or funded in some way. All the way to this is really high-value content that people paid a lot of money to access in-person, and we also want to get some revenue from people accessing it after the fact.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: Maybe not as much as the in-person attendees, but we still want people to pay for it. Fairly commonly in the past has been when you do-- you have a virtual meeting and you allow in-person attendees to access the content up to 30 or 60 days after the fact, and usually there's not an add-on for that. Usually that's kind of part of your attendance.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: And we all know, we've all been to meetings where we spent all our time meeting other people instead of actually attending sessions. So I personally really appreciate being able to go and actually watch the sessions that I missed when I was an in-person attendee. So that's one great way that people are seeing added value from the content. But I think more and more, the goal really is to not just speak to people who attended the conference or whether it's some portion of it or not, it's really to reach people who, for whatever reason, and there are many valid reasons, did not attend the conference, and probably won't attend a meeting of this sort in the future.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: Certainly it could be due to global travel, early career researchers, people who aren't willing to travel to certain areas due to our current political climate, which is completely valid, or just health concerns, there's so many legitimate reasons that people can't attend due to funds or personal beliefs, but the content is definitely of interest. We're also seeing so much more-- someone would never attend pay thousands of dollars to travel and attend an event that's a little bit next to their space.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: So when you're in a subject area, you generally have, OK, there's these three events every year that I have to attend. Those are the main ones in my space, that's where I meet my colleagues, it's where I hear about other research. But there's like five other spaces that are adjacent to mine and that maybe I have to teach one class in that a year, or maybe there's some overlap there and I'm interested in what's happening there.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: And so getting the word out to those people that you don't have to spend thousands of dollars to come in-person to this conference, but maybe there's five or 10 sessions that would be of relevance to your research. And reaching those people, and that's where marketing comes in. And of course, I'm in marketing, so of course I would say that. But I get-- sometimes we'll hear like, well, we put videos online and nobody came and watched them.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: It's like, well, how did you-- what did you tell people about them? How did you make it easy for them to access it? Did you make it easy for them to purchase it or to watch it on the device of their choice? How did you reach the people who-- how did you determine who to market it to? Who are you actually think is the potential audience for you? And it may not be just the people who attended the meeting last year.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: It may very well be people who have never attended any events in the past. And definitely during the pandemic when everything went virtual, there were some really interesting statistics. In certain subject areas-- and again, this is all-- I feel like I have to keep saying this, it depends, it depends. Because subject areas are so-- have such different unique preferences within fields.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: But in some subject areas, they were seeing something like 50, 60, 70% of attendees were people who had never attended a program from that-- through that from that society in the past. So that that's pretty powerful, and that means that there is an audience for this content out there, but it's probably not the people you've been marketing to up to this point. And so there's some research that needs to be done to figure out how to reach those people, because they do exist.
HANNAH HECKNER: That's really helpful. And Lori, I'd love for you to talk towards this ephemeral, durable decision point with organizations. But as a consultant, you've likely been pulled into a lot of strategic conversations with organizations as they look at this opportunity. And obviously this is a time of really significant change for a lot of organizations because of a lot-- across a whole host of different levers.
HANNAH HECKNER: So how has Delta Think-- like what trends have you seen? What changes have you seen and projects have you undertaken to help organizations to see some changes in the market and act on them and look at their overall approach towards these new content types, how to preserve them, how to possibly speak to new audiences?
LORI CARLIN: Yeah.
HANNAH HECKNER: Just a really easy yes-or-no question.
LORI CARLIN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was going to say. I think I'll-- I should say also, in my introductions I didn't mention that in my spare time, I'm the SSP Annual Meeting Co-Chair. So I have a little bit of a meetings hat from that side as well. So that factors in sometimes. It's a little bit different because most of us are dealing more in scientific research and information at our professional employment meetings.
LORI CARLIN: And SSP is professional, but it's not necessarily scientific, doesn't lead to journal articles and things like that, but there's a lot of things that align. I'm going to start with where Jessica ended a bit on the market research because I feel like I am a research hound, if you will. And if you don't understand your market, then you don't know how to engage with them.
LORI CARLIN: You don't know what they want, you don't know how they want it, and you don't know how to speak to them in a way that's going to resonate with them. So that's all really important. We do not live in a "build it, they will come" society. And many scholarly publishers did start out that way in our development, but just like anything else in this world, it doesn't work that way with these markets either, and you need to understand what your organizations, what your communities are interested in.
LORI CARLIN: of the things I find really interesting is we did a project where we were looking at this question of enduring materials and how organizations felt about making this information available for more than the three months or six months that many do. And what we found is that there wasn't a lot of consistency within any particular groups. There were medical folks who were doing things like this and others who were very much against it.
LORI CARLIN: This is my research at a point in time and I do not want it living on beyond that. There were physical science, engineering. Across the board, there were folks in both camps. And what that tells me is to a certain extent, that's cultural within that organization, within that community. And it's also perhaps a learned behavior. So that when it's done, when you figure out through your research why it's important, why folks should want this information, what they're going to learn from it, what the benefit is to them, not the benefit to your organization, but the benefit to your customer, then you can speak to them about that and you can educate them in understanding why it's important to make this information enduring and have it continue to be available.
LORI CARLIN: If you think about the half-life, if you will, of a scientific journal article, not all citations happen the first three months, six months, year that a paper is published. Same thing with this meeting information, with this content that is coming out of meetings. There are needs and uses for it all along the way where people may want to go back and see, even if it's for historical purposes, to recount where we were and where we are now.
LORI CARLIN: There is a value in that. Understanding that value yourselves and making sure that your community understands it is really important. And I talked about education before. Education is really something that organizations are very much interested in expanding and exploring. A lot of organizations have-- they're better, much better, but they're still silos of education, meetings, publications.
LORI CARLIN: So being able to bring all that content together, being able to understand this piece of information from a meeting along with this textbook, along with this journal article can inform a complete set of information is really a value to your communities and can be something that you can build revenue streams off of as well.
HANNAH HECKNER: That was really helpful, Lori. And I think it also brings us to our next slated audience question. We've been talking around this topic. So if the audience members could answer this question, what are you-- if you're hosting these digital events, what are you doing with that content output? And while folks are answering this question, Patti, it would be great to hear about how Health Affairs approach this-- you emphasized that you really want to meet your users where they are.
HANNAH HECKNER: You want to come to them with evidence, thoughtfulness, and collect data and act on it. So how exactly does your organization do that? I know you said you guys get to act like a startup within the larger organization, but sometimes moving the needle within an organization can be a tough thing, even if you have data backing you up.
PATTI SWEET: Yeah. I think that's a whole other session. [LAUGHTER] Yeah. But that's been fun. Yeah, so our-- we've really looked at a lot of our internal processes and we've started to input a lot of data. So I will say, when I started, we didn't have advanced data and analytics, and we invested a lot in making sure that we had the data to answer questions.
PATTI SWEET: And even internally, some things that happened, someone will say, oh, our users do this or our audience wants this. I'm like, great, that's a good hypothesis, let's add it to our testing program, because unless you have data to show me that is one thing to be true, we gotta prove it or disprove it. But a lot of what we do is try to launch something to get proof of concept, which is evident with our podcast and with our events program.
PATTI SWEET: And part of doing that is being able to-- I know this is controversial for the publishing industry, but launch things that aren't 100% perfect, that are maybe 80% perfect. And do it in a way that you're setting it up to be able to optimize along the way in scale. So even with our events, we launched on Zoom in April 2020. And we had three sessions for something that would have formerly been an in-person briefing at the National Press Club in DC.
PATTI SWEET: And people were nervous. So we recorded the sessions before we published them on Zoom. Just let that sink in. Can you remember what that would be like? Because we could control it. And it didn't go well. And afterwards it was like, OK, what do we learn from that? Let's not do that, doesn't feel authentic-- there were a lot of tech issues-- and how can we do this better?
PATTI SWEET: So then we figured out, who are our partners to be able to scale up? So we now have some providers like WebiNerd, which is a-- kind of events consulting, and Zoom where we can do things cheap and cheerful ourselves. And then we have a full production team when we need to do a fully produced, very high-brow event that's online. We've also tried to publish our events on LinkedIn.
PATTI SWEET: And I don't know if you used LinkedIn, if you're a frequent user, but you sign in and it says, Health Affairs is hosting this event right now, log in, it's live. That's been proven to be beneficial for us, and then we even take that to our hybrid model when we do have in-person events. Often they're closed because of COVID or there's a bit more strict regulation in terms of numbers and then we'll do it in both places.
PATTI SWEET: But I think in terms of figuring out what our audience needs and when, we've engineered a fairly, what I would say, is advanced or innovative internal process for what we do with our content. And we do it months out. So probably three months out from the-- we have a monthly publication. So we don't have continuous publication for our journal. And members of every single department with every single reason why we might want to talk to our audiences in there-- it's a group of about eight to 10 of us-- so we have someone from marketing communications, we have someone from editorial, we have someone-- our editor-in-chief, of course, we have someone from publishing, we have some of our editors that are experts in the field, and we have our health equity director.
PATTI SWEET: And we all get together and we identify, from this list of articles, which ones do we think are going to have impact? And what does impact mean? For me, impact is getting a bunch of eyeballs on it or people to listen to it. For the publisher, it's making sure that this is influencing policy. And in some instances, it's setting the agenda.
PATTI SWEET: And so we've all come at it in a different way, and from that, we decide, this article is going to be a big deal. This also needs to be a podcast. This also needs to be an event. Actually, do we want to invite some additional perspectives that we can have on our forefront, which is our daily digital publication? Or do we want to invite one of these voices to take over our email newsletter that goes to tens of thousands of people?
PATTI SWEET: And so we do it three months out, and it gives us the opportunity to be more flexible in creating that content. Often when it comes to digital content-- I'd be preaching to the choir here, but people are then, you can do that really quickly, right?
HANNAH HECKNER: Yeah.
PATTI SWEET: It doesn't take that much time to do that. No, it does take months to prepare this and to put together the background research, the agenda, the actual marketing communications for it. So the fact that we have a cross-departmental team that strategizes on a regular basis, it means that our content is better and it's more informed. And then what I do at the other side of it is take that information with the team, because we do have a reporting team, and we say, here's what we thought was going to be a really big deal.
PATTI SWEET: We thought that it was going to end up in national press, we thought that we'd get x number of people to attend. And we set targets in the way that a commercial organization will. And then afterwards, we say, did we do that or not? And if we didn't, why? Did we choose the wrong paper to elevate, not to choose the wrong paper to elevate, but was this other one much more popular at the time?
PATTI SWEET: Were there external factors that were impacting whether or not that research was elevated? Because often something happens in the world and then our research gets elevated. I mean, we have a nine-year-old article that is still one of our best performing articles, but I'm like, OK, this is the gift that keeps on giving. So it's taking more of that commercial approach to content so that we know, are we providing something for our audience that is actually meeting their needs?
PATTI SWEET: And the last thing I will say on that, though, is that our brand is quite strong within the space that we operate. So it's really fun that when we try something, it's like pulling a little lever. And I know rather quickly if it's going to work or not. And sometimes I'm like, please work. Nothing's happened, nothing's happened. And then it hits a tipping point and I was like, yay, it worked!
PATTI SWEET: And other times I'm like, please work. No one's doing anything with this. OK, maybe we should do this.
HANNAH HECKNER: Yeah.
PATTI SWEET: But we approach all of our new products and our new content in that same way so that we are able to be agile and flexible and all the words that people use in product development and startup culture. And it's proven to help us in our journey to be better at what we're doing.
HANNAH HECKNER: There's a question here in the chat about tweaking frequency of things that you put out. So does that come up in meetings like this? Have you all thought about testing the frequency?
PATTI SWEET: Absolutely. It comes up often because especially for our podcast, our editor-in-chief is the host. So he'll say, is this the best use of my time or should I be trying to write an article on Forefront? Or should I be trying to host another event? And everyone's like, oh, great, here comes the existential question. It's great that he asks this and I love the challenge. So we do see correlation with frequency and consumption.
PATTI SWEET: And I want those consumption numbers because I also oversee our advertising and sponsorship program, so I want to be able to go to clients and say, we have over-- which we do at this point in time, which is exciting-- over 225,000 downloads of our podcast program. I'm not going to hit that number if I reduce the frequency. So there are things that we do along the way. We do have by bi-weeks, and we will just fake it, and we will republish something from the past, or we'll take something from another program and say, you're getting a bonus episode in this stream because we want you to hear from this other podcast program.
PATTI SWEET: Or we'll do the same with partners, too. So we'll-- we haven't actually done it yet, but we're hoping to cross-publish with other podcast programs. We publish their episode, they publish our episode. Podcast world is a lot different than other media in that it's newer, it's cheaper, we're all kind of figuring things out along the way. But we do see a significant impact on performance when it comes to frequency.
PATTI SWEET: So we've engineered a process for our podcast program where we only plan production maybe three to six weeks out, which is not much at all. But it lets us be agile, and if this host wasn't able to be available that we-- or sorry, this guest, we switch and we have a backup. OK, then let's switch to these papers and invite these authors instead to the conversation. In terms of our events, I think that that seasonality is completely different.
PATTI SWEET: My thinking on podcasts is people listen to podcasts at different times for different reasons. Pandemic threw a wrench in all of it, but whatever. So people would listen when they were commuting to work. Well, I don't commute to work anywhere and I don't have time to listen to a podcast. OK, well maybe when I walk my dog when I'm good enough about actually leaving the house in the morning before work, I might listen to a podcast.
PATTI SWEET: But for me, I actually listen to a podcast when I'm driving across the country at Thanksgiving to visit my family. So my podcast consumption patterns have changed versus the day-to-day. So we do see that people will go back and download our catalog. So in the lead-up to Thanksgiving, in the lead-up to Christmas when we know that health policy professionals are not reading anything else, we make a huge push for our podcast program.
PATTI SWEET: And the messaging is, listen to this when you're driving to visit family for Thanksgiving-- well, we don't actually mention the holidays. But if you're traveling this time of year, here are some podcasts that you should listen to, or don't miss these ones that were the hottest from 2020 or 2021 or whatever it is. So we also plan in those breaks throughout the year. So we plan in a break at Thanksgiving, we plan in a break at the end of the year.
PATTI SWEET: We're actually planning a break in August because we find that a lot of our staff takes vacation then. But the frequency is important. Your users are going to want it. So even if you're not publishing that next episode, they're going to be looking for it, so figure out a way to give them some other type of content that's related to what you're doing.
LORI CARLIN: And I think also, to put a bow on what Patti's is talking about here, is that the analytics are really important. And whatever analytics you can get to, you need to be tracking, you need to be looking at the trends however frequently you can get to them. You may not have a robust analytics program. You may not think of yourself as a data analyst, but there are metrics that you can be tracking on a regular basis, even if they're simple, so that you can gather the kind of information that Patti's talking about and utilize that to better improve your programs.
PATTI SWEET: Absolutely. And there are very, very simple tools to track podcast consumption, very simple tools to track some of the event stuff. Sometimes when it comes to analytics, we get afraid of it because it seems too overwhelming and cumbersome, but we use-- like we don't only use our web provider or Google Analytics to monitor performance. We do-- like we have a tool for our podcast program.
PATTI SWEET: We couldn't get the RSS feed to work with our web provider, great. So we actually found another one and it's working just fine for us. And it's cheap and it gives us a beautiful reporting dashboard that anyone on my team has access to. So yeah, I'm definitely with that, Lori.
HANNAH HECKNER: OK, great. Maybe we can see the answers to that last question about what people are-- OK, popping up in my other-- so it looks like no big front runners. Some folks not doing anything, some loading into a conference site, member benefits, really low uptick in subscriptions, a little bit more instance of folks packaging it as a product, which is really-- which is promising.
HANNAH HECKNER: So when we look at this, I might put this question maybe to Lori first, how do we think we might see some of those numbers change? What horizon scanning are you hearing? It would also be great to hear from you, too, Jessica. Like these are still proceedings have been around for a while, but when we think about the digital artifacts that come from meetings or even other ancillary digital artifacts like a podcast, say, they're certainly becoming increasingly valuable to organizations.
HANNAH HECKNER: They're becoming first-class objects on platforms. Do we see this being part of an institutional subscription in the future?
LORI CARLIN: Yeah, I think that's a great question. And I think there is an institutional play here for this information, again, if you've got your messaging down correctly and you understand the value of the content and what it will bring to the institution for their faculty for their researchers, for their community, and how they can use it. I think also that organizations are struggling a bit with having the content and then what to do with it, where to put it, how to make it accessible, really, in a way that's seamless, that works well for their community.
LORI CARLIN: Doesn't require a whole new implementation of something with-- a.k.a., lots of money. And so those are the areas where I think organizations are wondering what to do. I've spoken to organizations who have all of their content, all of their video or something similar content from a conference stored, but they haven't figured out how to make it accessible.
LORI CARLIN: And I think that's why you're seeing organizations are interested, but they're not quite sure how to implement it. And I think we also come back to that classic builder by, if there are folks out there who have products and services that can help support this, those collaborations, those partnership are going to be really important going forward. Why reinvent the wheel? It's much better to utilize something that is already available for you.
LORI CARLIN: Patti talked about some of the simple tools that are out there that you can utilize without a lot of investment and expense. There are-- everything from simple to more robust available that organizations can use to make this content accessible and available and have it rolled into your institutional subscriptions. And those subscriptions may be waning, but what else can you provide?
LORI CARLIN: Somebody said to me a little while ago, and I've mentioned it a couple of times now, so it's-- I'm waiting for it to become part of the industry lingo. That there is a convenience to some of this and folks are willing to pay for the convenience. We're willing to pay for a food delivery service to get our food and bring it to us even if it costs more than us going-- even if the food itself costs more than us going to the restaurant and getting it ourselves.
LORI CARLIN: So what convenience can you offer these institutions? What's the value and what's the convenience? And if you can find that in your content, package it up with other content that they're already subscribing to or that they have been subscribing to, then you can expand your revenue and your connection with that institution.
HANNAH HECKNER: That's great, Lori. So Jessica, as one of those really integral partners to a lot of organizations in carrying out their meetings and posting video content, how has Cadmore helped with organizational decisions to maybe make that leap in putting a paywall in front of video, meeting content, or help to inform any ongoing business model strategy?
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: Absolutely. It's sort of the Wild, Wild West a little bit right now. What we are seeing, though, a lot more of is-- I mean, when you look at library institutional budgets, the only positive expansion that's happening in library budgets is in their media budget. So even if the overall budget isn't increasing, the percentage of resources devoted to media is increasing, that's going up. There was the Ithaca survey that came out this spring showed that was expected about a 5% to 7% increase in media budgets over the next couple of years.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: There's a strong desire for these types of resources. And in terms of publishers, we're looking beyond book and journal revenue and looking for alternative sources of revenue. So that's where the two are matching up. Especially proceedings have been-- for a lot of organizations, proceedings have been on a downward trend. Adding multimedia content is a great way to liven that up.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: Also, if you already have an institutional subscription, if you already have a process where by your production, editorial, and you have a project-- a product development team and you have a sales and marketing team that's already working with institutions, this gets a lot easier. The whole product creation process sort of fits into something that's already been happening. If you don't have those things, that's where it's better to start looking outward for partners.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: Of course, so we-- Cadmore offers the technology. We don't license the content. You can do with whatever you want with the content, but you're probably not going invest in your own digital media hosting platform strategy right off the bat, especially if you're just getting into this. You're probably going to want to outsource that to someone who can do that for you and keep updated on all the accessibility guidelines out there.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: But there's other partners out there who will do sales for you if you're interested in selling to institutional markets. There are external third parties to do that. But I think probably most importantly is to just come back to something that publishers do really well, and that is curation. And we haven't-- I haven't heard the curation word yet too much today, which I'm kind of surprised by, because it encompasses such a broad variety of things.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: But I think it's clear that there is a market for this type of content, but it's not for everything. It is going to be the good content, the good stuff. And I think that libraries are going to be very strategic about purchasing meeting content, and we need to acknowledge that, and we need to figure out what portion of each individual organization's content is going to be of interest.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: And what's of interest to the institutional market may not be what's of interest to the membership market. So it doesn't mean that there isn't an opportunity to generate revenue from different types of content, but if you're looking at institutional content licensing, they're typically only going to want the very top-- the meetings in certain subject spaces that are really highly rated, that their faculty speak at, that have the brand appeal.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: Health Affairs has a great brand, and that's going to help in terms of institutional licensing. What was I going to say? The whole curation aspect there. Though, really, identifying what's really interesting, what's important, that's what publishers do well.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: And especially with meeting content, we're seeing a lot more collaboration internally within-- Lori already talked about within education, within publishing, and within the meetings teams. And what publishers do really well, what publishing departments do really well is this workflow. Taking it, making it-- adding permanent URLs to it, making it accessible, making it identifiable, making it indexed and abstracted and all these things that actually put a workflow around this type of content and make it meaningful, make it able to be consumed in, again, as Lori was saying, a convenient way.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: And so it's really about the internal partnerships and making sure you have internal buy-in and executive buy-in to doing this, as well as experimenting with a few different things and getting the analytics, understanding who-- which of your audiences want which types of content and then creating little bite-sized content for each one of those segments. Also, excuse me, we're also seeing, depending on the content type-- again, this is going to be more popular in medical and health areas, but a lot of pharmaceuticals are licensing content.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: And so particularly meeting content that is-- keynote speakers are really popular, faculty who are speaking or topics that are particularly relevant to pharmaceuticals, that might be another revenue stream that's worth pursuing.
LORI CARLIN: I was going to say, too, that we should think a little bit outside the norm. We all know that library budgets only really go in one direction or two, flat or down. But who else in an institution might be your buyer and has budget for this type of information? So I think that's important to think about, too. Going along with what Jessica was saying with pharmaceutical companies and things of that nature But even at a university, are there other decision-makers within that organization that may be interested in this content?
HANNAH HECKNER: I think we just went over all of the things that organizations should think about when getting a digital content strategy together. But as we think about all of those things, curation, knowing your user, knowing your content, and putting some structure around it to make it more discoverable, collecting analytics and acting on it and hopefully like getting through some of the silos in an organization, as well as seeking out best-in-class partners that are really good at things that you might not be good at.
HANNAH HECKNER: So there's a lot of things that folks can do and should do in pursuing this, but what is one thing that you would say publishers of a range of sizes, what's the one thing they should do in order to get started? Lori, I'll start with you, you're unmuted.
LORI CARLIN: Know your audience. Know your community and know your customers. And it doesn't require months and months and months of market research. If you have that time, that's great, but you can do things quickly and easily to understand what's important, what they need, what's going to resonate with them, why is this a benefit to them. And that will point you to where are the gaps, what are the challenges, what are the opportunities where you can develop something that will meet that need?
HANNAH HECKNER: Great. OK, Patti, you cannot say no to your users, so what is one thing that organizations should do if they are looking into getting into this space?
PATTI SWEET: I don't even know. I'm just going to say-- I am going to say two things. Just building on know your user, just test things and see what works, just try. But in terms of this content in particular, it is important to think about cataloging everything in the same way that you would print content. And making sure that you're following best practices for how you catalog it.
PATTI SWEET: If you're putting it on YouTube, like the right metadata, the right user experience. Even like how you categorize your YouTube channel, if you take a look at ours, we spend a lot of time like creating it like a storefront like you would your website. I think often brands just put something on YouTube and are like, well, let's just link to it on our website. But the user can still find your content via YouTube.
PATTI SWEET: But this is the second largest search engine, so it's important. But even with cataloging of content, I will say that we had a year of events for. This membership program, we launched it for eight to 10 months, and then we put it behind a paywall. So it's eight to 10 months of content that we now have to put behind a paywall. We didn't have somebody to do all of that at one point in time, and it was like, well, we have to launch with everything, catalog, perfect.
PATTI SWEET: I was like, no, no. We'll launch with what we got and then we'll go back and put all of the content in the way-- in the places that it needs to. And that's something that even a junior-level person can do if you give them the tools and you give them the framework. So it is around that process to be able to catalog the content so that it does become evergreen in the long-term regardless of if it's hot and newsworthy at that point in time or not.
HANNAH HECKNER: Awesome. OK, Jessica, one thing that organizations should be thinking about-- or two things they should be thinking about when they're pursuing this.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: Well, I totally agree with both-- what Lori and Patti both said, especially about knowing your user. And I do think that this is something that societies and associations generally do pretty well, is they do understand-- and it differs so much between organizations and between subject areas, but you really do have to know who your potential audiences are, and they're usually multiple ones.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: So aside from what Lori said, I would also say, talk to other people out there. This is a great community. People are really willing to talk about their successes, but also their challenges and even failures. And I would-- there's a lot of experimentation taking place. We're all figuring it out together. So reach out to partners.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: I mean, I know-- certainly know people at Cadmore, I'm sure at Delta Think as well, and at Silverchair all would be happy to talk about what they're seeing in the marketplace, good stories and bad. Talk to other organizations in similar subject areas to yours and find out what they're doing. I would look for opportunities to collaborate. You really don't have to do this alone.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: I think there's a lot of potential partners, whether in curating content or the production aspects or the licensing it, there's a lot of potential partners out there. So I would just say talk to-- in addition to getting your analytics in order, making sure you're capturing your content at the bare minimum, and then just talk to others and experiment a little bit.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: Patti's absolutely right, publishing needs to move more towards waiting to launch a perfect product and launching something that's 80% good and then iterating on it and doing better the next time around. And I think these type of products really lend themselves well to that iterative process.
HANNAH HECKNER: Mm-hmm. I love that. It's like they're becoming first-class objects, but they can still be experimental in some ways, that's great.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: Right.
HANNAH HECKNER: So in speaking about knowing more about the audience and the opportunities that there might be at institutions for revenue opportunities, Lauren Miller asked in our panelist chat, who do you all see as the key buyers of digital education for institutions? Like what roles do they serve within the organization? So different than librarians, maybe still at the library. Insights there?
LORI CARLIN: It depends. I'll steal from-- I'll steal from Jessica a bit. It depends. One group that you can loo at-- and again, takes a little research to see, are deans, provosts, people in that area if you're talking about a university, because they may have budget for these educational-- more of the educational-type products. Don't count the library out because many institutions, it is at the library.
LORI CARLIN: But we also know that some libraries have their budget, and then when they need additional content or information, they will go to the individual departments and ask them to feed into their library budget from their department budgets in order to get-- in order to have the content that their faculty or researchers or students need. So that would be one place I would look.
HANNAH HECKNER: Great.
PATTI SWEET: We-- yeah, so there's that, no, we can't figure it out. We can't figure out how or what the position is to package it to institutions. So we have made a concerted effort to make our product just to individuals and putting it at that lower price point. But we are constantly like, yeah, but then how do-- I was like, yeah, but if we give it to institutions, we've just broken our entire strategy for trying to build this individual audience.
PATTI SWEET: And it is a lot-- that product is a lot about curation. Hannah, I did just see there's a question from Howard asking if we use-- do we ever use digital objects? Not DOIs, but it is cataloged, so we do show up on Google. Not Google Scholar. We do show up in Google News for our events. But then we actually-- the one that I dropped in the post is a public event.
PATTI SWEET: And then I'm also going to just drop a private event that you have to be a member for, and you can see how the paywall is served. So you can see when you get stuck at the paywall but it still is a digital object.
HANNAH HECKNER: Awesome.
PATTI SWEET: It's a fun journey to go on. I will just tell you, here's how we did it.
HANNAH HECKNER: Yeah.
PATTI SWEET: We just-- it's a-- we have other digital objects. We just put the content below a certain point, and at that point, the trigger is you have to sign in to view this content, similar as you would with the journal. So like when you put that point underneath the abstract, it's the same model.
HANNAH HECKNER: Great. Well, we are-- oh sorry, go ahead, Jessica.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: Oh no, I was just going to say, I love DOIs, I highly encourage them. That's definitely an option. And it's-- I really think treated video like other content book internal content is really important, and having that DOI is absolutely something that people should think about in this-- one of the many things that people should think about doing with their video.
HANNAH HECKNER: Talk to Cadmore about video metadata. [LAUGHTER] Well, thank you, panelists. Thank you, attendees. This has been a really great way to close out our official Strategies Sessions of '22. And I'll hand it over to Stephanie because I think she has some administrative notes. STEPHANIE LOVEGROVE
HANSEN: Perfect, yes.
HANSEN: I just want to reiterate, thank you, everybody, again for joining us today. And a reminder that if you want to continue this conversation, that you can join us for the roundtable discussion in the coming weeks. So just let us know if you'd like an invite for that. And as Hannah's mentioned, that's a wrap on the 2022 series. We are already working on plans for 2023 and we look forward to sharing those with you in the coming months.
HANSEN: If you want to be the first to hear about those events and other news, please subscribe to our monthly newsletter, Silverchair News, and there will be a link for that along with the recording. So with that, thanks, everybody. Have a good rest of your day.
HANNAH HECKNER: Thank you.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: Thanks so much.
LORI CARLIN: Thanks, everybody.
Segment:0 .
HANNAH HECKNER: Excited to be here today on our final strategy session of 2022. It's been a great year. And I'm happy to be closing things out with these really great panelists. So as we think about content trends and digital meetings, we're in a really interesting space where there's a lot of uptake in putting some of this content online, but it's really-- we're pushing past that being expected.
HANNAH HECKNER: So now it's all about the value that's being brought to that content to the end users and intentionality of, here's how this organization is going to be handling a virtual event that's entirely virtual, here's how an organization can handle a hybrid experience, and here's where it's really great to have a full-on in-person experience. So as mentioned, we have a really great panelists together today that are really going to dive into the opportunities in this space, the obstacles and lessons learned in this space, and really just look at the market landscape, where we are and where we're headed in the future.
HANNAH HECKNER: So, to set the scene here, we have some audience polls. So to start out with, if you all could just let us know where your organization is right now in this space, and that would really help to ground our conversation moving forward. As you all are answering those questions, I will introduce our speakers here. We have Jessica Lawrence-Hurt from Cadmore Media, Patti Sweet from Health Affairs, and Lori Carlin from Delta Think.
HANNAH HECKNER: So do we have some answers coming in here, Stephanie?
STEPHANIE LOVEGROVE HANSEN: Yes, we've got about 17 so far. So might just give it a few more seconds to let people finish weighing in.
HANNAH HECKNER: Great. So maybe as we have folks answering these questions, it'd be great to hear from the panel just about big content trends that you all are seeing in this space. And if you could just maybe introduce yourself and just where you're coming at this new content trend, that would be great. I'll just start to my right here with Jessica.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: Hi. Thanks, Hannah. Yes, I'm Jessica Lawrence-Hurt. I am Chief Marketing Officer at Cadmore Media. We are a company that's been around for about four years, and we do streaming and hosting of video and audio content in the scholarly space. And of course, the last two years have seen a real explosion of content, particularly derived from meetings.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: So internally, we've kind of gone from educating people about why they should be recording and capturing all their content into helping people figure out, OK, now we have all this content, what do we do with it? And I think the answer is, it depends. So when you talk about what I'm seeing in terms of trends, I'm seeing basically four different areas right now. And again, I think that the market is still catching up to where this explosion of content come from and we're figuring out, OK, now what do we do with this?
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: So four things I'm seeing are basically using the meeting content with the existing proceedings packages or content that has existed for a while in terms of the papers, but then adding supplemental meeting content to it. And I've seen it just as standalone. So organizations that maybe didn't do proceedings, but still see a value in having some sort of video or audio content from the meeting and putting that into a product, either for just members or people who attended the conference or licensing it.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: I'm seeing other players-- Underline is a player in this space-- licensing, curating content from lots of different types of meetings and different subject areas and then licensing that. And then I'm seeing-- one of our clients, actually, is the British bone and joint ortho media product, and that is an Association of Orthopedics, and they are collecting content from other organizations in that space.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: So the product that they are working on has content within one subject area, but curated from a number of other organizations. So I'm seeing, at this point, about four different types of things going on, and I think we'll see that number grow as people get more familiar with the options available to them.
HANNAH HECKNER: Awesome. Thank you so much, Jessica. Over to you Patti. So where do you-- how are you approaching these opportunities at Health Affairs?
PATTI SWEET: Yeah, great. Well, I'll start by introducing Health Affairs, the nation's leading health policy journal. So during COVID-19, we published a lot of research on COVID-19, which was a great public service. And I am the Director of Digital Strategy, so I oversee a fairly aggressive five-year strategic plan to what I say is take health policy from where it was as just our-- not just, but our peer-reviewed research journal to something that people actually care about.
PATTI SWEET: Having that happen during a pandemic made health policy pretty cool really quick. But the focus that we've seen with trends is how to make our content more accessible and relatable to a wider audience, and that is how we present the content. So often I say, with the team and with an editorial team or any type of academic publishing, they think that hitting publish is the metric of success, and that's actually when a lot of the other work begins.
PATTI SWEET: So we have a big focus on taking our journal articles, which sometimes you have to be trained to read those-- in many instances, you do, or more familiar with reading them, and disseminating that content in a lot of other channels. So we do that through things like a podcast program, virtual events, video, newsletter. But the focus with that trend is really to make sure that more people can understand what we're publishing and speaking in the language that makes sense to them by taking an almost choose-your-own-adventure format approach.
PATTI SWEET: So some people will choose to read a journal article, some people will choose to listen to a podcast, some people will choose to come to our events. Some will choose to do all of them or none of them. So it's just making sure that we're taking that content and putting it in front of people in a way that makes sense. A lot of it is around accessibility, too. So these different formats are making it possible for more people to opt into engaging with their content.
PATTI SWEET: And there's also the health equity piece to content as well, making sure that we have representation across all of our touchpoints, not just within the journal, but within our digital publication and in other places, too. So the last thing I will just say on that is our brand is a traditional scholarly publishing journal, and my role is to come in and almost treat it like a startup and really move quickly to try to figure out what new content types work for our audience.
PATTI SWEET: And so that's a whole other conversation that we'll probably touch on a little bit later, but it's an important consideration for what are the trends in content? Well, it's constantly changing, so we gotta constantly be evolving.
HANNAH HECKNER: That's great. Thanks so much, Patti. Really looking forward to diving down in there in those topics, and we've certainly been in an exciting space these past few years. OK, last but not least, Lori. It'd be great for you to introduce yourself and some trends that you're seeing.
LORI CARLIN: Yeah, sure, thank you so much, Hannah and Stephanie. So yeah, so I'm Chief Commercial Officer at Delta Think, and as many of you likely know, Delta Think is a consultancy focusing on scholarly publishing, scholarly communications, association management. So we work with many of you and look out at the landscape maybe at a higher level and see what is happening across the industry. It's no surprise, obviously, that determining how to accommodate virtual, hybrid, online meetings and then what to do with that content potentially afterwards is certainly on everybody's mind.
LORI CARLIN: Interestingly, I had started getting involved in this before the pandemic. I was working with a group of early career researchers who had first written a preprint that then got published eventually, I believe, in a nature title around the inequity of in-person meetings and the inability of folks who were unable to attend to have access to that important research, and how oftentimes that meeting content just really goes away.
LORI CARLIN: It's just not accessible once the meeting is over or it's accessible for a very limited amount of time, and that there's no tie-in to other content and information from that organization or from other organizations. You may have a speaker at your meeting who then ends up publishing in another journal, but there's no connection even if they're publishing in your journal or someone else's from that starting point all along that research timeline, if you will.
LORI CARLIN: So there's a DEI component here that has emerged as well, which is really important. That's an important topic generally and related to this area as well. I would also say that we've seen a really big growth in education, working with a lot of clients on the education side of their organizations. As people are concerned about finding new revenue streams, they're looking at education as a way to bring that in.
LORI CARLIN: And having this content to support those educational goals is really important. So I would say those are two things, collaboration, new emergence of new providers in the space is also something that I'm sure we'll get into as we talk today.
HANNAH HECKNER: That's really great, Lori. Yeah, I mean, just the opportunities for organizations to really underline their impact and value to their members in the larger community I think is a huge thing here. OK, Stephanie, let's see the answers to that those initial polls. OK, so it looks like we've got a lot of folks that have recordings of live meetings, and webinars are really popular. Definitely a more well-known content asset even preceding the COVID-19 pandemic.
HANNAH HECKNER: Lots of videos being captured, that's definitely a front runner here, but with those transcripts as well. This is really great. And a lot of conversation that has-- that I myself have been a part of as Silverchair has been exploring these new content assets is the really interesting difference in approaches towards making that ephemerable-- excuse me, ephemeral meetings content more durable.
HANNAH HECKNER: And the different decisions not even across scientific disciplines, but even within disciplines. So it'd be great to hear from our panelists about the differences that they've seen or maybe even the differences in their own organization towards deciding which assets from those meetings to make lasting on online and which might not get that same touch. Patti, it might be nice to start with you just in looking at how Health Affairs has approached this.
PATTI SWEET: Yeah. Well, so I approach it from a few different angles. So from a digital SEO expert, I want all that content online and I want it to be free, or at least scrollable. And if it's a video, to have transcription or more deeper, if you will, abstract or information on the page. But we can't give away everything for free, especially when it is presentation that is about our content that is behind a paywall.
PATTI SWEET: We then don't want to just give it away in an event. So earlier this year, we actually launched a membership program alongside our subscription, and that's where we have access to all of our events. So we're monetizing it and saying, you get access to our archive of all of our video events. And that way, if something is funded for us, we can put it out freely. We'll still put it on YouTube, we'll put it on our website and we make sure that anyone can see it.
PATTI SWEET: But if it has to go behind the paywall, we've actually figured out within our platform how to put it below a login. So you can still review and look at the video. It's still callable by the likes of search engines. But you have to be able to log in before you actually view that video content. And we do hide it. It is-- it's indexed, but hidden on YouTube as well as on our website.
PATTI SWEET: So what that means is that we're able to make some of those business decisions with sometimes revenue, yes, but also readership in mind to catalog the content in that way. But launching that membership program was a risk for us. We'd never done it before ever. We'd only had our one paid-for product since the inception of Health Affairs in 1981. And uptake has been pretty strong.
PATTI SWEET: So people are willing to pay for it. We did a lot around price point testing, market research, stakeholder interviews. I'm sure many people on this call experience it. Our end user is not the person who currently gives us money. It is the institution that gives us money. And we want to figure out how to get to the end user that is using our content, that's having their career made from the content that they publish with us, all of those other things.
PATTI SWEET: So with the membership, we put it at a very low price point, and our target market is all of our users that have free access. So it's continuing to grow. It's only been launched since May 24, I remember the exact moment in time. But it's something that we've done to try to bundle and monetize events that otherwise weren't behind a paywall.
PATTI SWEET: I will also say the strategy behind that was to put a low price point because if I can identify you a super user who has free access through their institution, I can identify who you are, I can give you much better messaging, I can send you emails with targeted messaging, I can make sure that, hey, you're reading this content over here, did we have this event over here? Or we have this podcast over here or whatever it is.
PATTI SWEET: But yeah, so it's a lot around how do we make the best use of our time when it comes to the events and new content, but I will say that it continues to be a challenge for us, and that's where I spend a lot of my time from overseeing the strategy and analysis. Is it worth us to launch this event? Or do we not get people to show up-- enough people to show up for it?
PATTI SWEET: Do we not make enough money off of it? Do we not get an advertiser or sponsor for it? So it's a complex ecosystem, but we're making movements in the right direction, and that, to us, is success at this point in time with such an early product.
HANNAH HECKNER: That's great and really helpful. And obviously Health Affairs, thinking about public health, health policy, probably a group that is far more pro getting the word out and engaging with--
PATTI SWEET: Open access. Everything should be open, free all the time. Yes.
HANNAH HECKNER: Yeah. So Jessica, obviously when people come to work with Cadmore, they're deciding to make videos of things and want them to be discoverable. It'd be great to hear about some of Cadmore's experiences or things that you're seeing where maybe someone-- maybe you're working with an organization that's saying, we want this video, but we only want it to be available for the first, say, three months after a meeting.
HANNAH HECKNER: Or, just, are you seeing some time-based sensitivity? Or we don't want these videos posted, we only want these to go to a small group of people. Any interesting takeaways you've seen from different approaches there?
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: Well, the answer to that is yes, we've seen all of it. Everything from, we want all of this content in front of the paywall for anyone who wants to access it, and that's going to be sometimes more of like what Patti's doing in terms of public policy or public communication messaging where you want-- the goal is to just get the word out, and it may be sponsored or funded in some way. All the way to this is really high-value content that people paid a lot of money to access in-person, and we also want to get some revenue from people accessing it after the fact.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: Maybe not as much as the in-person attendees, but we still want people to pay for it. Fairly commonly in the past has been when you do-- you have a virtual meeting and you allow in-person attendees to access the content up to 30 or 60 days after the fact, and usually there's not an add-on for that. Usually that's kind of part of your attendance.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: And we all know, we've all been to meetings where we spent all our time meeting other people instead of actually attending sessions. So I personally really appreciate being able to go and actually watch the sessions that I missed when I was an in-person attendee. So that's one great way that people are seeing added value from the content. But I think more and more, the goal really is to not just speak to people who attended the conference or whether it's some portion of it or not, it's really to reach people who, for whatever reason, and there are many valid reasons, did not attend the conference, and probably won't attend a meeting of this sort in the future.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: Certainly it could be due to global travel, early career researchers, people who aren't willing to travel to certain areas due to our current political climate, which is completely valid, or just health concerns, there's so many legitimate reasons that people can't attend due to funds or personal beliefs, but the content is definitely of interest. We're also seeing so much more-- someone would never attend pay thousands of dollars to travel and attend an event that's a little bit next to their space.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: So when you're in a subject area, you generally have, OK, there's these three events every year that I have to attend. Those are the main ones in my space, that's where I meet my colleagues, it's where I hear about other research. But there's like five other spaces that are adjacent to mine and that maybe I have to teach one class in that a year, or maybe there's some overlap there and I'm interested in what's happening there.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: And so getting the word out to those people that you don't have to spend thousands of dollars to come in-person to this conference, but maybe there's five or 10 sessions that would be of relevance to your research. And reaching those people, and that's where marketing comes in. And of course, I'm in marketing, so of course I would say that. But I get-- sometimes we'll hear like, well, we put videos online and nobody came and watched them.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: It's like, well, how did you-- what did you tell people about them? How did you make it easy for them to access it? Did you make it easy for them to purchase it or to watch it on the device of their choice? How did you reach the people who-- how did you determine who to market it to? Who are you actually think is the potential audience for you? And it may not be just the people who attended the meeting last year.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: It may very well be people who have never attended any events in the past. And definitely during the pandemic when everything went virtual, there were some really interesting statistics. In certain subject areas-- and again, this is all-- I feel like I have to keep saying this, it depends, it depends. Because subject areas are so-- have such different unique preferences within fields.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: But in some subject areas, they were seeing something like 50, 60, 70% of attendees were people who had never attended a program from that-- through that from that society in the past. So that that's pretty powerful, and that means that there is an audience for this content out there, but it's probably not the people you've been marketing to up to this point. And so there's some research that needs to be done to figure out how to reach those people, because they do exist.
HANNAH HECKNER: That's really helpful. And Lori, I'd love for you to talk towards this ephemeral, durable decision point with organizations. But as a consultant, you've likely been pulled into a lot of strategic conversations with organizations as they look at this opportunity. And obviously this is a time of really significant change for a lot of organizations because of a lot-- across a whole host of different levers.
HANNAH HECKNER: So how has Delta Think-- like what trends have you seen? What changes have you seen and projects have you undertaken to help organizations to see some changes in the market and act on them and look at their overall approach towards these new content types, how to preserve them, how to possibly speak to new audiences?
LORI CARLIN: Yeah.
HANNAH HECKNER: Just a really easy yes-or-no question.
LORI CARLIN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was going to say. I think I'll-- I should say also, in my introductions I didn't mention that in my spare time, I'm the SSP Annual Meeting Co-Chair. So I have a little bit of a meetings hat from that side as well. So that factors in sometimes. It's a little bit different because most of us are dealing more in scientific research and information at our professional employment meetings.
LORI CARLIN: And SSP is professional, but it's not necessarily scientific, doesn't lead to journal articles and things like that, but there's a lot of things that align. I'm going to start with where Jessica ended a bit on the market research because I feel like I am a research hound, if you will. And if you don't understand your market, then you don't know how to engage with them.
LORI CARLIN: You don't know what they want, you don't know how they want it, and you don't know how to speak to them in a way that's going to resonate with them. So that's all really important. We do not live in a "build it, they will come" society. And many scholarly publishers did start out that way in our development, but just like anything else in this world, it doesn't work that way with these markets either, and you need to understand what your organizations, what your communities are interested in.
LORI CARLIN: of the things I find really interesting is we did a project where we were looking at this question of enduring materials and how organizations felt about making this information available for more than the three months or six months that many do. And what we found is that there wasn't a lot of consistency within any particular groups. There were medical folks who were doing things like this and others who were very much against it.
LORI CARLIN: This is my research at a point in time and I do not want it living on beyond that. There were physical science, engineering. Across the board, there were folks in both camps. And what that tells me is to a certain extent, that's cultural within that organization, within that community. And it's also perhaps a learned behavior. So that when it's done, when you figure out through your research why it's important, why folks should want this information, what they're going to learn from it, what the benefit is to them, not the benefit to your organization, but the benefit to your customer, then you can speak to them about that and you can educate them in understanding why it's important to make this information enduring and have it continue to be available.
LORI CARLIN: If you think about the half-life, if you will, of a scientific journal article, not all citations happen the first three months, six months, year that a paper is published. Same thing with this meeting information, with this content that is coming out of meetings. There are needs and uses for it all along the way where people may want to go back and see, even if it's for historical purposes, to recount where we were and where we are now.
LORI CARLIN: There is a value in that. Understanding that value yourselves and making sure that your community understands it is really important. And I talked about education before. Education is really something that organizations are very much interested in expanding and exploring. A lot of organizations have-- they're better, much better, but they're still silos of education, meetings, publications.
LORI CARLIN: So being able to bring all that content together, being able to understand this piece of information from a meeting along with this textbook, along with this journal article can inform a complete set of information is really a value to your communities and can be something that you can build revenue streams off of as well.
HANNAH HECKNER: That was really helpful, Lori. And I think it also brings us to our next slated audience question. We've been talking around this topic. So if the audience members could answer this question, what are you-- if you're hosting these digital events, what are you doing with that content output? And while folks are answering this question, Patti, it would be great to hear about how Health Affairs approach this-- you emphasized that you really want to meet your users where they are.
HANNAH HECKNER: You want to come to them with evidence, thoughtfulness, and collect data and act on it. So how exactly does your organization do that? I know you said you guys get to act like a startup within the larger organization, but sometimes moving the needle within an organization can be a tough thing, even if you have data backing you up.
PATTI SWEET: Yeah. I think that's a whole other session. [LAUGHTER] Yeah. But that's been fun. Yeah, so our-- we've really looked at a lot of our internal processes and we've started to input a lot of data. So I will say, when I started, we didn't have advanced data and analytics, and we invested a lot in making sure that we had the data to answer questions.
PATTI SWEET: And even internally, some things that happened, someone will say, oh, our users do this or our audience wants this. I'm like, great, that's a good hypothesis, let's add it to our testing program, because unless you have data to show me that is one thing to be true, we gotta prove it or disprove it. But a lot of what we do is try to launch something to get proof of concept, which is evident with our podcast and with our events program.
PATTI SWEET: And part of doing that is being able to-- I know this is controversial for the publishing industry, but launch things that aren't 100% perfect, that are maybe 80% perfect. And do it in a way that you're setting it up to be able to optimize along the way in scale. So even with our events, we launched on Zoom in April 2020. And we had three sessions for something that would have formerly been an in-person briefing at the National Press Club in DC.
PATTI SWEET: And people were nervous. So we recorded the sessions before we published them on Zoom. Just let that sink in. Can you remember what that would be like? Because we could control it. And it didn't go well. And afterwards it was like, OK, what do we learn from that? Let's not do that, doesn't feel authentic-- there were a lot of tech issues-- and how can we do this better?
PATTI SWEET: So then we figured out, who are our partners to be able to scale up? So we now have some providers like WebiNerd, which is a-- kind of events consulting, and Zoom where we can do things cheap and cheerful ourselves. And then we have a full production team when we need to do a fully produced, very high-brow event that's online. We've also tried to publish our events on LinkedIn.
PATTI SWEET: And I don't know if you used LinkedIn, if you're a frequent user, but you sign in and it says, Health Affairs is hosting this event right now, log in, it's live. That's been proven to be beneficial for us, and then we even take that to our hybrid model when we do have in-person events. Often they're closed because of COVID or there's a bit more strict regulation in terms of numbers and then we'll do it in both places.
PATTI SWEET: But I think in terms of figuring out what our audience needs and when, we've engineered a fairly, what I would say, is advanced or innovative internal process for what we do with our content. And we do it months out. So probably three months out from the-- we have a monthly publication. So we don't have continuous publication for our journal. And members of every single department with every single reason why we might want to talk to our audiences in there-- it's a group of about eight to 10 of us-- so we have someone from marketing communications, we have someone from editorial, we have someone-- our editor-in-chief, of course, we have someone from publishing, we have some of our editors that are experts in the field, and we have our health equity director.
PATTI SWEET: And we all get together and we identify, from this list of articles, which ones do we think are going to have impact? And what does impact mean? For me, impact is getting a bunch of eyeballs on it or people to listen to it. For the publisher, it's making sure that this is influencing policy. And in some instances, it's setting the agenda.
PATTI SWEET: And so we've all come at it in a different way, and from that, we decide, this article is going to be a big deal. This also needs to be a podcast. This also needs to be an event. Actually, do we want to invite some additional perspectives that we can have on our forefront, which is our daily digital publication? Or do we want to invite one of these voices to take over our email newsletter that goes to tens of thousands of people?
PATTI SWEET: And so we do it three months out, and it gives us the opportunity to be more flexible in creating that content. Often when it comes to digital content-- I'd be preaching to the choir here, but people are then, you can do that really quickly, right?
HANNAH HECKNER: Yeah.
PATTI SWEET: It doesn't take that much time to do that. No, it does take months to prepare this and to put together the background research, the agenda, the actual marketing communications for it. So the fact that we have a cross-departmental team that strategizes on a regular basis, it means that our content is better and it's more informed. And then what I do at the other side of it is take that information with the team, because we do have a reporting team, and we say, here's what we thought was going to be a really big deal.
PATTI SWEET: We thought that it was going to end up in national press, we thought that we'd get x number of people to attend. And we set targets in the way that a commercial organization will. And then afterwards, we say, did we do that or not? And if we didn't, why? Did we choose the wrong paper to elevate, not to choose the wrong paper to elevate, but was this other one much more popular at the time?
PATTI SWEET: Were there external factors that were impacting whether or not that research was elevated? Because often something happens in the world and then our research gets elevated. I mean, we have a nine-year-old article that is still one of our best performing articles, but I'm like, OK, this is the gift that keeps on giving. So it's taking more of that commercial approach to content so that we know, are we providing something for our audience that is actually meeting their needs?
PATTI SWEET: And the last thing I will say on that, though, is that our brand is quite strong within the space that we operate. So it's really fun that when we try something, it's like pulling a little lever. And I know rather quickly if it's going to work or not. And sometimes I'm like, please work. Nothing's happened, nothing's happened. And then it hits a tipping point and I was like, yay, it worked!
PATTI SWEET: And other times I'm like, please work. No one's doing anything with this. OK, maybe we should do this.
HANNAH HECKNER: Yeah.
PATTI SWEET: But we approach all of our new products and our new content in that same way so that we are able to be agile and flexible and all the words that people use in product development and startup culture. And it's proven to help us in our journey to be better at what we're doing.
HANNAH HECKNER: There's a question here in the chat about tweaking frequency of things that you put out. So does that come up in meetings like this? Have you all thought about testing the frequency?
PATTI SWEET: Absolutely. It comes up often because especially for our podcast, our editor-in-chief is the host. So he'll say, is this the best use of my time or should I be trying to write an article on Forefront? Or should I be trying to host another event? And everyone's like, oh, great, here comes the existential question. It's great that he asks this and I love the challenge. So we do see correlation with frequency and consumption.
PATTI SWEET: And I want those consumption numbers because I also oversee our advertising and sponsorship program, so I want to be able to go to clients and say, we have over-- which we do at this point in time, which is exciting-- over 225,000 downloads of our podcast program. I'm not going to hit that number if I reduce the frequency. So there are things that we do along the way. We do have by bi-weeks, and we will just fake it, and we will republish something from the past, or we'll take something from another program and say, you're getting a bonus episode in this stream because we want you to hear from this other podcast program.
PATTI SWEET: Or we'll do the same with partners, too. So we'll-- we haven't actually done it yet, but we're hoping to cross-publish with other podcast programs. We publish their episode, they publish our episode. Podcast world is a lot different than other media in that it's newer, it's cheaper, we're all kind of figuring things out along the way. But we do see a significant impact on performance when it comes to frequency.
PATTI SWEET: So we've engineered a process for our podcast program where we only plan production maybe three to six weeks out, which is not much at all. But it lets us be agile, and if this host wasn't able to be available that we-- or sorry, this guest, we switch and we have a backup. OK, then let's switch to these papers and invite these authors instead to the conversation. In terms of our events, I think that that seasonality is completely different.
PATTI SWEET: My thinking on podcasts is people listen to podcasts at different times for different reasons. Pandemic threw a wrench in all of it, but whatever. So people would listen when they were commuting to work. Well, I don't commute to work anywhere and I don't have time to listen to a podcast. OK, well maybe when I walk my dog when I'm good enough about actually leaving the house in the morning before work, I might listen to a podcast.
PATTI SWEET: But for me, I actually listen to a podcast when I'm driving across the country at Thanksgiving to visit my family. So my podcast consumption patterns have changed versus the day-to-day. So we do see that people will go back and download our catalog. So in the lead-up to Thanksgiving, in the lead-up to Christmas when we know that health policy professionals are not reading anything else, we make a huge push for our podcast program.
PATTI SWEET: And the messaging is, listen to this when you're driving to visit family for Thanksgiving-- well, we don't actually mention the holidays. But if you're traveling this time of year, here are some podcasts that you should listen to, or don't miss these ones that were the hottest from 2020 or 2021 or whatever it is. So we also plan in those breaks throughout the year. So we plan in a break at Thanksgiving, we plan in a break at the end of the year.
PATTI SWEET: We're actually planning a break in August because we find that a lot of our staff takes vacation then. But the frequency is important. Your users are going to want it. So even if you're not publishing that next episode, they're going to be looking for it, so figure out a way to give them some other type of content that's related to what you're doing.
LORI CARLIN: And I think also, to put a bow on what Patti's is talking about here, is that the analytics are really important. And whatever analytics you can get to, you need to be tracking, you need to be looking at the trends however frequently you can get to them. You may not have a robust analytics program. You may not think of yourself as a data analyst, but there are metrics that you can be tracking on a regular basis, even if they're simple, so that you can gather the kind of information that Patti's talking about and utilize that to better improve your programs.
PATTI SWEET: Absolutely. And there are very, very simple tools to track podcast consumption, very simple tools to track some of the event stuff. Sometimes when it comes to analytics, we get afraid of it because it seems too overwhelming and cumbersome, but we use-- like we don't only use our web provider or Google Analytics to monitor performance. We do-- like we have a tool for our podcast program.
PATTI SWEET: We couldn't get the RSS feed to work with our web provider, great. So we actually found another one and it's working just fine for us. And it's cheap and it gives us a beautiful reporting dashboard that anyone on my team has access to. So yeah, I'm definitely with that, Lori.
HANNAH HECKNER: OK, great. Maybe we can see the answers to that last question about what people are-- OK, popping up in my other-- so it looks like no big front runners. Some folks not doing anything, some loading into a conference site, member benefits, really low uptick in subscriptions, a little bit more instance of folks packaging it as a product, which is really-- which is promising.
HANNAH HECKNER: So when we look at this, I might put this question maybe to Lori first, how do we think we might see some of those numbers change? What horizon scanning are you hearing? It would also be great to hear from you, too, Jessica. Like these are still proceedings have been around for a while, but when we think about the digital artifacts that come from meetings or even other ancillary digital artifacts like a podcast, say, they're certainly becoming increasingly valuable to organizations.
HANNAH HECKNER: They're becoming first-class objects on platforms. Do we see this being part of an institutional subscription in the future?
LORI CARLIN: Yeah, I think that's a great question. And I think there is an institutional play here for this information, again, if you've got your messaging down correctly and you understand the value of the content and what it will bring to the institution for their faculty for their researchers, for their community, and how they can use it. I think also that organizations are struggling a bit with having the content and then what to do with it, where to put it, how to make it accessible, really, in a way that's seamless, that works well for their community.
LORI CARLIN: Doesn't require a whole new implementation of something with-- a.k.a., lots of money. And so those are the areas where I think organizations are wondering what to do. I've spoken to organizations who have all of their content, all of their video or something similar content from a conference stored, but they haven't figured out how to make it accessible.
LORI CARLIN: And I think that's why you're seeing organizations are interested, but they're not quite sure how to implement it. And I think we also come back to that classic builder by, if there are folks out there who have products and services that can help support this, those collaborations, those partnership are going to be really important going forward. Why reinvent the wheel? It's much better to utilize something that is already available for you.
LORI CARLIN: Patti talked about some of the simple tools that are out there that you can utilize without a lot of investment and expense. There are-- everything from simple to more robust available that organizations can use to make this content accessible and available and have it rolled into your institutional subscriptions. And those subscriptions may be waning, but what else can you provide?
LORI CARLIN: Somebody said to me a little while ago, and I've mentioned it a couple of times now, so it's-- I'm waiting for it to become part of the industry lingo. That there is a convenience to some of this and folks are willing to pay for the convenience. We're willing to pay for a food delivery service to get our food and bring it to us even if it costs more than us going-- even if the food itself costs more than us going to the restaurant and getting it ourselves.
LORI CARLIN: So what convenience can you offer these institutions? What's the value and what's the convenience? And if you can find that in your content, package it up with other content that they're already subscribing to or that they have been subscribing to, then you can expand your revenue and your connection with that institution.
HANNAH HECKNER: That's great, Lori. So Jessica, as one of those really integral partners to a lot of organizations in carrying out their meetings and posting video content, how has Cadmore helped with organizational decisions to maybe make that leap in putting a paywall in front of video, meeting content, or help to inform any ongoing business model strategy?
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: Absolutely. It's sort of the Wild, Wild West a little bit right now. What we are seeing, though, a lot more of is-- I mean, when you look at library institutional budgets, the only positive expansion that's happening in library budgets is in their media budget. So even if the overall budget isn't increasing, the percentage of resources devoted to media is increasing, that's going up. There was the Ithaca survey that came out this spring showed that was expected about a 5% to 7% increase in media budgets over the next couple of years.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: There's a strong desire for these types of resources. And in terms of publishers, we're looking beyond book and journal revenue and looking for alternative sources of revenue. So that's where the two are matching up. Especially proceedings have been-- for a lot of organizations, proceedings have been on a downward trend. Adding multimedia content is a great way to liven that up.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: Also, if you already have an institutional subscription, if you already have a process where by your production, editorial, and you have a project-- a product development team and you have a sales and marketing team that's already working with institutions, this gets a lot easier. The whole product creation process sort of fits into something that's already been happening. If you don't have those things, that's where it's better to start looking outward for partners.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: Of course, so we-- Cadmore offers the technology. We don't license the content. You can do with whatever you want with the content, but you're probably not going invest in your own digital media hosting platform strategy right off the bat, especially if you're just getting into this. You're probably going to want to outsource that to someone who can do that for you and keep updated on all the accessibility guidelines out there.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: But there's other partners out there who will do sales for you if you're interested in selling to institutional markets. There are external third parties to do that. But I think probably most importantly is to just come back to something that publishers do really well, and that is curation. And we haven't-- I haven't heard the curation word yet too much today, which I'm kind of surprised by, because it encompasses such a broad variety of things.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: But I think it's clear that there is a market for this type of content, but it's not for everything. It is going to be the good content, the good stuff. And I think that libraries are going to be very strategic about purchasing meeting content, and we need to acknowledge that, and we need to figure out what portion of each individual organization's content is going to be of interest.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: And what's of interest to the institutional market may not be what's of interest to the membership market. So it doesn't mean that there isn't an opportunity to generate revenue from different types of content, but if you're looking at institutional content licensing, they're typically only going to want the very top-- the meetings in certain subject spaces that are really highly rated, that their faculty speak at, that have the brand appeal.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: Health Affairs has a great brand, and that's going to help in terms of institutional licensing. What was I going to say? The whole curation aspect there. Though, really, identifying what's really interesting, what's important, that's what publishers do well.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: And especially with meeting content, we're seeing a lot more collaboration internally within-- Lori already talked about within education, within publishing, and within the meetings teams. And what publishers do really well, what publishing departments do really well is this workflow. Taking it, making it-- adding permanent URLs to it, making it accessible, making it identifiable, making it indexed and abstracted and all these things that actually put a workflow around this type of content and make it meaningful, make it able to be consumed in, again, as Lori was saying, a convenient way.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: And so it's really about the internal partnerships and making sure you have internal buy-in and executive buy-in to doing this, as well as experimenting with a few different things and getting the analytics, understanding who-- which of your audiences want which types of content and then creating little bite-sized content for each one of those segments. Also, excuse me, we're also seeing, depending on the content type-- again, this is going to be more popular in medical and health areas, but a lot of pharmaceuticals are licensing content.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: And so particularly meeting content that is-- keynote speakers are really popular, faculty who are speaking or topics that are particularly relevant to pharmaceuticals, that might be another revenue stream that's worth pursuing.
LORI CARLIN: I was going to say, too, that we should think a little bit outside the norm. We all know that library budgets only really go in one direction or two, flat or down. But who else in an institution might be your buyer and has budget for this type of information? So I think that's important to think about, too. Going along with what Jessica was saying with pharmaceutical companies and things of that nature But even at a university, are there other decision-makers within that organization that may be interested in this content?
HANNAH HECKNER: I think we just went over all of the things that organizations should think about when getting a digital content strategy together. But as we think about all of those things, curation, knowing your user, knowing your content, and putting some structure around it to make it more discoverable, collecting analytics and acting on it and hopefully like getting through some of the silos in an organization, as well as seeking out best-in-class partners that are really good at things that you might not be good at.
HANNAH HECKNER: So there's a lot of things that folks can do and should do in pursuing this, but what is one thing that you would say publishers of a range of sizes, what's the one thing they should do in order to get started? Lori, I'll start with you, you're unmuted.
LORI CARLIN: Know your audience. Know your community and know your customers. And it doesn't require months and months and months of market research. If you have that time, that's great, but you can do things quickly and easily to understand what's important, what they need, what's going to resonate with them, why is this a benefit to them. And that will point you to where are the gaps, what are the challenges, what are the opportunities where you can develop something that will meet that need?
HANNAH HECKNER: Great. OK, Patti, you cannot say no to your users, so what is one thing that organizations should do if they are looking into getting into this space?
PATTI SWEET: I don't even know. I'm just going to say-- I am going to say two things. Just building on know your user, just test things and see what works, just try. But in terms of this content in particular, it is important to think about cataloging everything in the same way that you would print content. And making sure that you're following best practices for how you catalog it.
PATTI SWEET: If you're putting it on YouTube, like the right metadata, the right user experience. Even like how you categorize your YouTube channel, if you take a look at ours, we spend a lot of time like creating it like a storefront like you would your website. I think often brands just put something on YouTube and are like, well, let's just link to it on our website. But the user can still find your content via YouTube.
PATTI SWEET: But this is the second largest search engine, so it's important. But even with cataloging of content, I will say that we had a year of events for. This membership program, we launched it for eight to 10 months, and then we put it behind a paywall. So it's eight to 10 months of content that we now have to put behind a paywall. We didn't have somebody to do all of that at one point in time, and it was like, well, we have to launch with everything, catalog, perfect.
PATTI SWEET: I was like, no, no. We'll launch with what we got and then we'll go back and put all of the content in the way-- in the places that it needs to. And that's something that even a junior-level person can do if you give them the tools and you give them the framework. So it is around that process to be able to catalog the content so that it does become evergreen in the long-term regardless of if it's hot and newsworthy at that point in time or not.
HANNAH HECKNER: Awesome. OK, Jessica, one thing that organizations should be thinking about-- or two things they should be thinking about when they're pursuing this.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: Well, I totally agree with both-- what Lori and Patti both said, especially about knowing your user. And I do think that this is something that societies and associations generally do pretty well, is they do understand-- and it differs so much between organizations and between subject areas, but you really do have to know who your potential audiences are, and they're usually multiple ones.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: So aside from what Lori said, I would also say, talk to other people out there. This is a great community. People are really willing to talk about their successes, but also their challenges and even failures. And I would-- there's a lot of experimentation taking place. We're all figuring it out together. So reach out to partners.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: I mean, I know-- certainly know people at Cadmore, I'm sure at Delta Think as well, and at Silverchair all would be happy to talk about what they're seeing in the marketplace, good stories and bad. Talk to other organizations in similar subject areas to yours and find out what they're doing. I would look for opportunities to collaborate. You really don't have to do this alone.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: I think there's a lot of potential partners, whether in curating content or the production aspects or the licensing it, there's a lot of potential partners out there. So I would just say talk to-- in addition to getting your analytics in order, making sure you're capturing your content at the bare minimum, and then just talk to others and experiment a little bit.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: Patti's absolutely right, publishing needs to move more towards waiting to launch a perfect product and launching something that's 80% good and then iterating on it and doing better the next time around. And I think these type of products really lend themselves well to that iterative process.
HANNAH HECKNER: Mm-hmm. I love that. It's like they're becoming first-class objects, but they can still be experimental in some ways, that's great.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: Right.
HANNAH HECKNER: So in speaking about knowing more about the audience and the opportunities that there might be at institutions for revenue opportunities, Lauren Miller asked in our panelist chat, who do you all see as the key buyers of digital education for institutions? Like what roles do they serve within the organization? So different than librarians, maybe still at the library. Insights there?
LORI CARLIN: It depends. I'll steal from-- I'll steal from Jessica a bit. It depends. One group that you can loo at-- and again, takes a little research to see, are deans, provosts, people in that area if you're talking about a university, because they may have budget for these educational-- more of the educational-type products. Don't count the library out because many institutions, it is at the library.
LORI CARLIN: But we also know that some libraries have their budget, and then when they need additional content or information, they will go to the individual departments and ask them to feed into their library budget from their department budgets in order to get-- in order to have the content that their faculty or researchers or students need. So that would be one place I would look.
HANNAH HECKNER: Great.
PATTI SWEET: We-- yeah, so there's that, no, we can't figure it out. We can't figure out how or what the position is to package it to institutions. So we have made a concerted effort to make our product just to individuals and putting it at that lower price point. But we are constantly like, yeah, but then how do-- I was like, yeah, but if we give it to institutions, we've just broken our entire strategy for trying to build this individual audience.
PATTI SWEET: And it is a lot-- that product is a lot about curation. Hannah, I did just see there's a question from Howard asking if we use-- do we ever use digital objects? Not DOIs, but it is cataloged, so we do show up on Google. Not Google Scholar. We do show up in Google News for our events. But then we actually-- the one that I dropped in the post is a public event.
PATTI SWEET: And then I'm also going to just drop a private event that you have to be a member for, and you can see how the paywall is served. So you can see when you get stuck at the paywall but it still is a digital object.
HANNAH HECKNER: Awesome.
PATTI SWEET: It's a fun journey to go on. I will just tell you, here's how we did it.
HANNAH HECKNER: Yeah.
PATTI SWEET: We just-- it's a-- we have other digital objects. We just put the content below a certain point, and at that point, the trigger is you have to sign in to view this content, similar as you would with the journal. So like when you put that point underneath the abstract, it's the same model.
HANNAH HECKNER: Great. Well, we are-- oh sorry, go ahead, Jessica.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: Oh no, I was just going to say, I love DOIs, I highly encourage them. That's definitely an option. And it's-- I really think treated video like other content book internal content is really important, and having that DOI is absolutely something that people should think about in this-- one of the many things that people should think about doing with their video.
HANNAH HECKNER: Talk to Cadmore about video metadata. [LAUGHTER] Well, thank you, panelists. Thank you, attendees. This has been a really great way to close out our official Strategies Sessions of '22. And I'll hand it over to Stephanie because I think she has some administrative notes. STEPHANIE LOVEGROVE
HANSEN: Perfect, yes.
HANSEN: I just want to reiterate, thank you, everybody, again for joining us today. And a reminder that if you want to continue this conversation, that you can join us for the roundtable discussion in the coming weeks. So just let us know if you'd like an invite for that. And as Hannah's mentioned, that's a wrap on the 2022 series. We are already working on plans for 2023 and we look forward to sharing those with you in the coming months.
HANSEN: If you want to be the first to hear about those events and other news, please subscribe to our monthly newsletter, Silverchair News, and there will be a link for that along with the recording. So with that, thanks, everybody. Have a good rest of your day.
HANNAH HECKNER: Thank you.
JESSICA LAWRENCE-HURT: Thanks so much.
LORI CARLIN: Thanks, everybody.
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