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October 31, 2008

Health Insurance Blues

We're getting close to the annual Open Enrollment period for our health benefits. A note describing our plans and the process for signing up will be distributed shortly, and then Felicia White and Tom Kiley from HR will be making themselves available over the next few weeks to help everyone through the process. For those who have heard me discuss the health insurance fiasco in this country, you'll know that this is not my favorite time of year. As in the past, our health insurance provider came at us with another completely outrageous price increase proposal. Through a lot of work by Felicia, Tom, Allison Hoffman and our insurance consultants, we were able to knock that down to an increase...

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Posted by Bill Pollak at 7:22 AM | | Comments (1)

October 30, 2008

Here's Your Chance

Every week now I'm receiving a report on pageviews and unique visitors to this blog. Last week page views were up 29% to 2,464 and the number of weekly unique visitors rose 33% to 562. Pretty soon we can start selling ads! (Only kidding). I'm assuming that means somewhat more than half the staff of Incisive North America is checking out my scribblings--not a bad start. And pretty soon the marketing department will be distributing a little desktop widget which will make it even easier for you to check out the latest postings. That's right...transparency brought right to your desktop. I'm also beginning to get a feel for which kinds of postings the "audience" wants to read. News on our...

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Posted by Bill Pollak at 6:52 AM | | Comments (10)

October 29, 2008

Future of Business Media

I attended yesterday's Future of Business Media conference in NYC and spoke on a panel about the internationalization of B2B publishing companies. Although Incisive has substantial presence around the world, I'm not convinced that we are truly a "global" business, in the sense that very few of our individual brands actually travel beyond a single country's borders. There is much we can learn from others, like United Business Media, about cross-border business development and idea-sharing. Meanwhile, most of the talk at the conference was about the impact of the economy on our various business models. Media companies like Incisive North America are clearly better positioned than many others out there--partially because so much of our business comes from the legal...

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Posted by Bill Pollak at 12:05 PM | | Comments (0)

October 26, 2008

"Twitter: As Silly For Lawyers As For Anyone Else?"

Legal Pad, the blog published by our reporters and editors in northern California, had a post the other day asking whether Twitter could possibly be a useful tool for lawyers. Turned out to have been the most commented on posting of the week. And most of the comments come from people who are finding creative ways to use Twitter (and, I suspect, other social networking tools) to build relationships and find like-minded potential clients. If it works for lawyers, I don't know why it wouldn't work for other kinds of professionals, including those in the media. Legal Pad's posting can be found here: http://legalpad.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/10/twitter-any-sillier-for-lawyers-than-for-everyone-else.html#more...

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Posted by Bill Pollak at 7:49 PM | | Comments (0)

October 25, 2008

Lessons from the Chief

A friend of mine is a Captain in the US Naval Reserve. Late last year his unit was called up, and for the last 9 months he has been stationed in Kabul, Afghanistan as the senior naval officer attached to the United Nations Command (that's him on the left above with fellow officers from Afghanistan and Pakistan). Every month he sends an email out to his friends to let us know that he's okay and to share some of his adventures. Recently he included in his note some remarks he made at a promotion ceremony for three men being promoted to the rank of Chief Petty Officer. The Chief is one of the senior non-commissioned officers--responsible for groups of...

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Posted by Bill Pollak at 4:18 PM | | Comments (0)

October 24, 2008

Hildebrandt's View of the Big Law Firm World

Hildebrandt has put out their view on how the current economic turbulence will impact the Biglaw market. (Tip of the hat to Alicia Brown for sending it my way). I particularly like suggestion #8, which urges firms not to cut back on their marketing. I just hope they listen! http://www.hildebrandt.com/Documents.aspx?Doc_ID=2738...

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Posted by Bill Pollak at 11:00 AM | | Comments (0)

October 22, 2008

Marketing Our Brands Using the Social Networks

In addition to marketing our events on LinkedIn and other social networks, there are also some attempts to market our brands--primarily our publications--by forming groups or associations on the various social networks. One ambitious experiment involves Legal Times and its blog, The Blog of Legal Times (BLT). David Brown, editor and publisher, tells me that he is putting together a Facebook fan page for LT and BLT . The objective there is to find our most loyal customers, give them new ways to interact with our reporters/editors, while creating new opportunities for advertisers wanting to reach our audience. Plus, we'll be promoting our own events and other products. David is also looking to create a Wikipedia page about Legal Times...more...

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Posted by Bill Pollak at 7:37 AM | | Comments (3)

October 21, 2008

Marketing Events Using the Social Networks

We do a lot of events as a company--a couple of big tradeshows (LegalTech and SES), some large conferences in our Legal, Real Estate and Events divisions, and numerous roundtables, breakfasts, dinners and smaller events. I have always believed that the best of these were actually about community networking, providing opportunities for members of a given community to come together for information sharing, discussion, deal making and, frequently, a good time. The community might consist of Canadians involved in the Media and Entertainment industry, or commercial property sellers and developers in a given city, or legal technologists. But they are a community that wants to come together, and Incisive provides the forum and the "excuse" to do that. My dream...

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Posted by Bill Pollak at 10:53 AM | | Comments (0)

October 15, 2008

Digital Technology Examples

Some examples have been floating around about the ways in which editors and advertisers can take advantage of Digital Edition technology. Check these out. 1. A video Editor's Note from BabyTalk Magazines http://www.digitalbabytalk.com/babytalk/sample/?fm=2 2. A video within an advertisement (click on the airplane in the Breitling ad) http://demo.texterity.com/demos/calabasas/?fm=2 3. Animation http://demo.texterity.com/demos/calabasas/?fm=2 All of these are available now for those of our publications which produce digital editions via Texterity--including all of our Real Estate magazines, The American Lawyer, Corporate Counsel, Law Technology News and IP Law & Business. I have asked our Audience Development teams in the Legal and Real Estate groups to assess how we might more aggressively expand the numbers of readers receiving Digital Editions of our controlled distribution...

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Posted by Bill Pollak at 1:57 PM | | Comments (1)

Going Mobile

Congratulations to the Digital Media Group for launching a mobile edition of law.com's daily newswire! We know that there's been a proliferation of Blackberrys and similar devices among not just lawyers but also others we serve. And industry predictions are that the use of the mobile platform for accessing digital resources will grow dramatically in coming years. So it's good to know that lawyers can now begin to access our legal content anywhere, anytime in a format that should look good on whatever device they are using. To check it out, the mobile address is: http://www.law.com/jsp/law/newswire_mobile.jsp...

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Posted by Bill Pollak at 8:49 AM | | Comments (0)

October 14, 2008

September Financial Results

A few weeks ago I reported on our financial results through the end of August. A look at our results through the end of September shows a continued slowdown in several important revenue areas, reflecting both the general slowdown in the economy and, perhaps, the psychological downturn caused by Wall Street's turbulence. Overall, our total revenues for the nine months ending September 30th are now 10.1% behind budget, a bit worse than we saw last month. All of the trends which we saw for the first eight months of the year remain in force. As before, the Legal Notice and Book businesses both remain above budget (+8.5% and +6.0%, respectively), while other revenue areas struggle. Display/B2B advertising weakened a little...

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Posted by Bill Pollak at 2:52 PM | | Comments (0)

October 12, 2008

Twitter

Last week Kevin O'Keefe, CEO of LexBlog, came to visit our offices. Kevin's company works with lawyers to help them use blogging as a form of business development, which makes Kevin an evangelist for the power of Web 2.0 tools. During his visit, he spent a good deal of time talking to me about Twitter which, as you may know, is an extension of instant messaging social communication. Messages are limited to 140 characters, and are distributed via the web or as a text mesaage on your phone. Kevin is convinced that Twitter can become an effective tool for sales and marketing, meeting new clients or keeping up with existing ones. So here's my question: are you using Twitter? What...

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Posted by Bill Pollak at 4:18 PM | | Comments (9)

October 11, 2008

The Last Lecture

Randy Pausch was a 42 year-old professor at Carnegie Mellon University when, in the summer of 2007, he was diagnosed with inoperable liver cancer. In keeping with tradition at Carnegie Mellon, he was given the opportunity to give a "last" lecture to his students and colleagues, a way to sum up all that he had learned and experienced. He grabbed at the chance, and used it as a way to leave some words of wisdom to his young children who would likely grow up without really knowing him. The result was a phenomenon...a videotape of the lecture was posted on YouTube and became one of the most watched videos of the past year. And his book, published just after he...

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Posted by Bill Pollak at 3:35 PM | | Comments (1)

October 5, 2008

Budget Notes

Having spent the last week reviewing our 2009 budgets, here are some observations that I thought you might find helpful. 1. All of our business leaders seems to recognize that next year will be a challenge, and are keeping their revenue growth goals at a very modest level. Unlike past years, where I have found myself trying to convince people to set higher goals, this year I find myself concerned about whether the goals being set are too high given the state of the economy and its uncertain impact on the markets we serve. 2. Keeping revenue growth goals more modest means keeping expenses very tight so we can protect our bottom-line. And since some cost increases are largely out...

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Posted by Bill Pollak at 6:19 PM | | Comments (0)

October 2, 2008

Online Awards in the UK

The Association of Online Publishers (AOP) in the UK is the leading organization for a wide variety of consumer and B2B online publishers. Its annual awards are considered to be the standard for judging media websites. In early September the AOP announced their short-lists for various award categories, and it was gratifying to see Incisive as finalists for five of the awards (including LegalWeek). Yesterday, the AOP announced the winners, and the company's Accountancy Age won the award for "Editorial Team--Business Publishing" for its site (www.accountancyage.com). Notice of the award included the following comment: "The judges were impressed by the microsegmentation of content and the excellent use of innovative technologies to address these niches.” As we are about to embark...

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Posted by Bill Pollak at 8:40 AM | | Comments (0)

October 1, 2008

Getting More Out of Data

I recently ended my term as chair of American Business Media's Business Information Council, but I remain interested in the concept of building more data-driven businesses. Those businesses offer the advantage of providing potentially valuable information to our existing customers while giving us a way to reach out to new markets. We now have several products in the works that are fundamentally data-driven, relying for their revenues on subscriptions and one-off sales rather than advertising or sponsorship. But I'd like to see us develop more in the future, not just in the Legal Division but in our Real Estate group as well as in the Interactive Marketing area. The Harvard Business Review recently published an article called "Put Your Data...

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Posted by Bill Pollak at 8:16 PM | | Comments (1)

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