The Encyclopedia Britannica made headlines earlier this week when it announced that it was “stopping the presses” and ceasing publication of its print edition after a strong 244-year run. From a business standpoint, one can understand why this inevitably needed to happen: Encyclopedia Britannica Inc. has sold just 8,000 sets of its latest 32-volume, $1,395 print edition released in 2010, with another 4,000 sitting in a warehouse waiting to be ordered. When the last set is shipped, that will be that. Sales of Britannica’s print edition peaked around 1990 at 120,000 sets, with significant decreases in volume through the 1990′s and into the 2000′s. For the company itself, the print edition represented only a small portion of revenue, with the majority derived from selling curriculum products to schools, as well as online subscriptions and other digital versions of its content.

In my view, this move is not revolutionary, but it is certainly evolutionary. It serves as a reflection point on multiple fronts, including the transformation occurring in the publishing industry and in education; it also highlights the true impact that the Internet and digital media continue to have in the way we learn, work, and play.

Is the sunsetting of Encyclopedia Britannica’s printed set just another death knell for the demise of the printed book or other printed publications? No… BUT… it does serve as a reminder that it is imperative for publishers to have a digital media strategy. Luckily for Encyclopedia Britannica, the company has been working to publish its vast repository of the world’s facts and figures to digital channels since the 1980′s. It released the first CD-ROM (remember those?) of Britannica in 1989. It put its collection online in 1994, which was seven years before Jimmy Wales launched Wikipedia in 2001.

Encyclopedia Britannica was actually ahead of its time in its digital publishing efforts, and ensured that it built up a strong digital business before deciding to end its print edition. The company reports having 500,000 subscribers to its $69.95/year premium Britannica Online service, which users can access via the Web and also through its iPad application. Think about that: what was once a 129-pound set of books now fits on a device of just over 1 pound… and it’s searchable, browsable, interactive, and constantly updated.

Some are of the opinion that more searchable and hyperlinked content, while efficient, takes away some of the serendipitous nature of perusing through a printed encyclopedia or other printed publications. Apparently those people have never gone on a Wikipedia bender, letting the hours melt away while clicking through dozens (or hundreds) of interconnected articles. Of course, there is definitely something about looking through a tome like Encyclopedia Britannica that is hard to replicate in the digital world, but the reality is that in today’s world, efficiency is paramount. Furthermore, I believe that information is power, and limiting that type of high-quality, trusted reference information to the confines of a fixed-length format is, in the end, inhibitive.

Another thing this news made me really reflect on is the impact of technology on education. While print is going to continue to play an important role in education well into the future, digital media can be used in conjunction or even on its own to more effectively help students learn new concepts and expand their knowledge. A lighthouse example of how digital media can be used as an effective teaching tool is Khan Academy, whose mission is “to provide a free world-class education to anyone anywhere.” Now that is revolutionary.

Through short, instructive video lessons often taught by the site’s founder, Sal Khan, students can work their way from the basics of a particular subject all the way through to the most complex applications. While the information is freely available online, the not-for-profit is piloting programs in 23 schools with its math curriculum, where the video lessons are their primary instructor and teachers are used in more of a support role. Students’ progress is tied back to analytics that help pinpoint where they are having problems and in what subject. Sal Khan and his team may have cracked the code for how to effectively use the Web and digital media to enhance learning.

In the 60 Minutes piece on Khan Academy from this past weekend, Sal Khan was asked how he approaches learning about a topic he is going to create a video for. His answer? Textbooks. “If I’m doing something that I haven’t visited for a long time, you know, since high school I’ll go buy five textbooks in it. And I’ll try to read every textbook,” says Khan. He, of course, also uses the Internet. Clearly there is still value in trustworthy, authoritative reference information, and print is a symbol of that trust. Digital media, however, is becoming just as trustworthy, and its use along with other technology can help optimize the learning experience like never before.

What do you think? Are you lamenting the loss of Encyclopedia Britannica’s print edition or is it inconsequential?

“Personalization” continues to be a prominent topic in a number of different circles: marketing, publishing, eCommerce, social networking, and search. It’s no wonder why: personalization helps boost response rates and profitability in cross-media campaigns, helps marketers drive conversion on their Websites & landing pages, and much more.

Wikipedia provides a very broad definition of personalization, which I do like: “using technology to accommodate the differences between individuals.” Specific to the groups that I am referring to, I believe that personalization can be more precisely defined as leveraging data to deliver relevant content to specific individuals.

That’s still pretty broad; what kind of data? what kind of content? what channels are being used? With this many constituencies looking to use personalization in their own ways to meet specific goals, those answers can range extensively. Furthermore, when these groups end up talking to each other about personalization, it can cause confusion and miscommunication. To clear the air, so-to-speak, I wanted to shed some light on the different ways personalization is being employed by these different groups.

• Cross-media Direct Marketing: You’re likely familiar with the personalization model for cross-media campaigns: a digitally-printed direct mail piece (or e-mail) with variable text and graphic elements and a personalized URL, which links to a personalized microsite with variable text and graphic elements, often highlighting the recipient’s name in some way. Personal and demographic data is primarily used to drive the personalization in these applications. Depending on the client/campaign, additional data may be used for more granular, relevant content.
• Digital Marketing: Personalization is popular with digital marketers. E-mail is a popular spot for personalization: according to a 2011 study by marketing technology provider Alterian, 72% of marketing professionals surveyed reported using personalization for their e-mail campaigns. E-mail marketing complexity ranges from mass blasts to segmentation to real-time individualization, typically using customer data and purchase history data to make recommendations. Another prominent personalization tactic for marketers is retargeting, which involves serving ads to a specific user after they have left a Website in efforts to raise brand awareness, recapture their attention, and drive people back to their Website.
• eCommerce: Business-to-consumer eCommerce was and still is a center of innovation in Web personalization, driven by Amazon.com and other eTailers looking to provide a custom-tailored experience for each individual user in hopes of getting them to buy more. For these sites, personalization often comes in the form of a recommendation engine, which tracks your browsing habits, shopping cart, wish list, reviews, purchase history, and other facets to deliver personalized recommendations on what the system thinks you would like. It should be noted that digital marketing goes hand-in-hand with eCommerce; real-time individualized e-mail marketing is common for eCommerce companies, and retargeting helps bring back shoppers that left the conversion funnel.
• Publishing: For print publishing, personalization often means mass customization, specifically in the print-on-demand model for books, where eCommerce orders trigger specific books to be printed, often in one-off fashion. Services like MagCloud and Time Inc’s Mine Magazine endeavor represent personalization efforts for magazines. On the Web and in digital media, personalization is geared more toward delivering relevant content based on an individual’s specific interests or preferences. Sometimes meeting this objective requires readers to input specific information about their tastes; other times, information like a Twitter, Facebook, or Google Reader account may be analyzed to assess your interests and deliver content based on who you’re friends with, who you follow, or what news you already read. A great example of this method is exhibited through Zite, a “personalized digital magazine” mobile app.
• Social Networking: Social networks are rife with different types of individuals’ data, making them ideal for personalization. Social networks typically employ personalization to deliver relevant content feeds from a user’s friends or connections on a network, as well as to deliver highly-targeted display advertising. For content delivery, networks may use algorithms to interpret connections, interactions, and profile information among users and deliver content based on what it believes is most relevant to each user. For advertising, networks typically act a facilitator between advertisers and users, presenting key profile characteristics of users that advertisers can choose to target.  Facebook generated over $3.5 billion in revenue through this type of advertising.
• Search: Search engines have always utilized algorithms to determine the display results of a user’s query, but these algorithms have recently started to take user information, such as profile or location data, into consideration before displaying results. Just recently, Google stepped up its game in this area, launching “Search, plus Your World“, which integrates a user’s Google+ data into everyday search queries. Advertising is a critical component to search, and generated over $35 billion in revenue worldwide for Google in 2011. Up until now, most search ads have been delivered based on the content of users’ search queries, but location information and even personal information are starting to be used to deliver more targeted search ads to users.

At its core, all that is needed to enable personalization is data, content, and a mechanism to have one drive the other. As has been covered, applying personalization for different use cases has a substantial impact on the type of data being used, the content that is being tied to that data, and the types of delivery mechanisms that enable that personalization. Understanding these differences and requirements for each application can help different stakeholders communicate more effectively when pursuing personalization, as well as open the door to new opportunities

Has anyone else been confused when trying to find the On Demand Conference? I have been a regular attendee for years and received the call for conference papers last year. When I hit the link to “Conference Info” and “Register for the Program” on the web site and ended up at Publishing Xchange I was sure I must have done something wrong. I went back to the home page and saw the separate information at the bottom of the page on Publishing Xchange and that it was now co-located with On Demand and Info 360. So I scrolled back up to the On Demand section and clicked on the highlighted phrase in the text, “new conference program”. I again ended up at the Publishing Xchange web page. After clicking around the site for awhile, FINALLY I found a link that said “Attend the Print-Centric Sessions Produced by WhatTheyThink”, and clicked through to . . . the Publishing Xchange Conference-At-A-Glance page.

The emphasis on publishing was not what I expected from On Demand; cross media communication, yes, but publishing? The Corporate sponsorship of the different tracks was also a surprise. In past On Demand conferences, the sessions provided opportunities to understand how technology, suppliers, and customers came together to solve Business Communication issues. I wondered what drove this to change from what seemed to be a very useful and well attended format. There was no communication beforehand that the title, format, just about everything had changed. Where do I go now to get information on postal issues like IMB, and on fulfillment or distribution or the many other business communications topics that On Demand was known for?

Finally after looking a couple more times and reading more of the marketing materials I concluded this was the only conference at the ON DEMAND Expo this year. Based on my positive past experience and a bit of curiosity I decided to go ahead and register for the Publishing Xchange Conference. We will have to wait until March to see if that was a smart thing to do. I am still struggling however with how Business Communications (Direct Marketing and Critical Customer Documents) are Publishing. It appears that service providers, suppliers and clients representing a broad spectrum of offerings are being driven together under Publishing, Why?

Have you seen the television show “V”, where lizard aliens look human until they are wounded and you can see the lizard underneath? It appears On Demand has suffered a similar fate. Someone put an On Demand shell over a publishing conference. What’s the message here? When they talk about business transformation and industry restructuring on the On Demand home page, do they mean all of us in Direct Marketing and Critical Customer Communications should throw in the towel and try Publishing? Is it “invasion of the conference snatchers?” Or maybe it’s a Borg plot and “resistance is futile.”

Have aliens taken over ON DEMAND? Should I be afraid?