At Penton, I used to moderate an emedia discussion forum on our intranet, “The Loop.” I loved the idea sharing, problem solving, and community that we developed out there. Not only was it incredibly useful, but it was a lot of fun as well. So I’ve decided to launch an emedia discussion forum right here, on eMedia Strategist. I created this forum to help publishers and event producers build their online communities and business. Whether you are in business development, publishing management, sales, editorial production, or technology, this is a place to connect with your peers...

Another post live from the Minday summit. In a session about growing your online audience and Jamie Pallot with CondeNet just dropped a term that is gaining new momentum with online audience development: SMO. What is SMO? Social Media Optimization … getting your content integrated into blogs, forums, social bookmarking sites, video sites (like YouTube), and other social media outlets. So we finally have a good term and another discipline that your audience development team needs to add to their arsenal. First was SEO and SEM, and now SMO.

I’m here at the Minday Summit in New York with a packed room listening to a panel speaking on community development. This is obviously a hot topic for any publisher today. All of the speakers talk about the cool community features they’ve been developing (and many of them are indeed cool). But in both this session and other sessions I’ve heard on the subject, there isn’t much discussion about the revenue side and how to monetize online communities. The big win, of course, is generating large traffic volumes. Gus Venditto with Jupitermedia is on the panel and said that of the...

John Payne with MedTech Publishing forwarded me a note from a reader who was complaining about the number of irritating, flashing, bright-colored ads on his site, Healthcare IT News. John asked a great question about whether these flashing ads were a norm online and if this was more of a rogue comment or a real problem in publishing. With his permission, I have attached an exerpt from my reply to him and a screenshot of this site the reader was talking about. John, overall, the site’s not too bad. There are 12 paid ad positions per page (or 16 depending on how you count it) and that...

It’s been incredibly busy recently so I’ve been a little negligent at posting to my blog. But during this time, I’ve had the opportunity to converse via email with several friends, media execs, and P.E. firms about various topics. My next couple posts will be excerpts from those conversations. I thought you might find the dialog interesting and, yes, I did get permission to post these. (I always consider all non-public posted conversations confidential.) Enjoy! Question: You had mentioned there’s a person at the brand level who helps sell emedia programs? Is that a salesperson?...

It’s still early in the summit, but so far the biggest theme seems to be about the human element … how do you find, train, recruit, and organize people and define jobs / roles to help publishers go after the emedia opportunity. Speaker after speaker have talked about how sales, circulation, editorial, and every other job within media MUST adapt to emedia and how hard it is to find these folks. A couple speakers estimated that up to 35% of the workforce at their company will not make the transition successfully. That means there will be a lot of jobs and opportunities for those who do...