Publishing->Participation

“Publishing->Participation,” This was just one entry in a chart comparing Old Media and New Media in the book, Now is Gone: A Primer on New Media for Executives and Entrepreneurs by Geoff Livingston and Brian Solis. But coming on the heels of the AEP Summit: “Publishing in the World of Free,” it seemed to suggest some concepts worth exploring. What could this mean in the context of educational academic publishing? And what keeps me, and I’m sure many others in the industry up at night, is what does this look like as a business model?

I don’t have a specific answer of course, but I think that an overall goal is to preserve the value of the publishers’ role— identifying and providing access to high quality information while filtering out inaccurate or poorly presented information—while at the same time creating a model that is not tied to selling fixed units of information.
This is suggestive of some changes the industry has been discussing and pursuing with varied enthusiasm, such as unbundling and micropayments, but it also suggests a social aspect that needs to be explored.

Increasingly, those who are seen as experts in their subject areas are not authors of “the definitive book on the subject”, they are the bloggers and twitterers who answer questions or share their insights on a daily or hourly basis, in short, who demonstrate their expertise in real time.

Daily immersion in the living intellectual life of their customers and peers on the part of a publisher’s authors and editors is going to be a necessary aspect of the move to a participation model. It doesn’t mean that all information has to be free; conversation needs to be free, hints and advice need to be free, but people will still pay for detailed, well-structured information from a source they trust (many bloggers are selling books). That trust, however, has to be built not on reputation but on demonstrating one’s knowledge. And the context those conversations provide is important; unbundling content and making it available online is essentially just a version of the web we have now.

So what are we talking about—does a publisher become a big, global, digital reference desk? Yes, I think, to some degree. But the librarians need to come out from behind their desks and ask questions as well as answer them, and the library needs to have unlimited interlibrary loans. Another key to our new “Wikinomic” world is openness and collaboration. If I am an expert in a particular field I probably know not only of some great content I have authored with my publisher, but also of information by my peers that is published elsewhere. We need a model that would allow and encourage an expert to point someone to both pieces of information and for the creator and publishers of this information to be compensated. Maybe we need an agreed-upon micropayment standard for the industry as well as something like a commission structure for the source of the referral – think affiliate networks.

The book, Wikinomics, by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams provides many examples of struggling companies in moribund industries such as mining that reinvented themselves into profitable juggernauts by rethinking their businesses in the context of participation and collaboration.

And in that spirit, I’ll end my piece here. No closure. No conclusion. An open question for discussion and collaboration.

75 Ways to Use Social Networking in Educational Publishing

Last week I moderated a session at the Association of Educational Publishers Summit “Publishing in the World of Free.” The panelists were Andrew Pass of Pass-Ed a developer of curriculum materials employing web 2.0 technologies, and Lisa Schmucki of EdWeb.net a social networking site for educators. The title of the session was “75 Ways to Use Social Networking in Educational Publishing” don’t worry the panelists did not try to fit all 75 into the session—the full list was handed out at the end. If you missed the handout, download it here.

My purpose was just to set the stage for the discussion and to provide input from the publisher’s perspective.   Here’s my introduction:

Good Afternoon:

Thank you for joining us for 75 Ways to Use Social Networking  in Educational Publishing.  Our panelists today are Andrew Pass of Pass-Ed and Lisa Schmucki of EdWeb.net

Over the past couple of years the world has seen a virtual “big bang” in Social Networking, that has spawned, among other things, a “blogosphere,” a “twitterverse,” and a friendly but strange world called Facebook, in which one is constantly offered drinks yet remains thirsty!

Even for those publishers who have yet to “Digg,” “Tweet,” or “blog,” the concepts of social networking are not completely new.  Many of the old school have used tools such as listservs and online discussion groups to share expertise, promote products, and to monitor the reputations of their authors and brands.

However, the latest proliferation of social networking tools and sites, and their embrace by the public is unprecedented—earlier this year Facebook crossed the 200 million user mark, making it the 4th most trafficked site on the Internet (new numbers in last week suggest it may now be #3), and Twitter was the cover story in last week’s Time Magazine.  For businesses and organizations, the opportunities and challenges this new environment presents can seem daunting. For publishers, the silver lining is  that this new environment doesn’t favor those with large marketing budgets so much as  those with compelling content.  In the panel today we will help you make sense of some of the tools available and their uses in both product development and marketing contexts. The panelists will touch on a number of examples of how to use social networking, however the “75 ways” referred to in the program title are all listed in your handout…

I hope it was a valuable session for everyone. The room was packed so there are a lot of publishers trying to figure out the social networking thing. As might be gleaned from the title of the summit, there was a lot of discussion about the “problem” of free content, but one thing we hoped to point out was the other side of the coin—how many free resources and tools are available that make the barriers to getting into social media very low.