Enterprise Video, B2B Content, Medium, DNN & More

Content seemed to dominate the week, from an opposition to the ad-driven online media model, to how to glean a higher ROI from your video and B2B content. Even so, we still had time to cover DNN and two companies’ board changes, Yahoo and Dell EMC ECD.

Can Medium Transform Failing Ad-driven Online Media?

Early in January, Medium announced a lay-off of a third of their staff and the shutting down of two offices in New York and Washington, D.C, to utilize their resources toward building a new business model to reward writers and creators based on their value. 

It will not be easy however. The value of creative work is so incredibly subjective, and often those in creative fields spend just as much, if not more time, establishing and defending the value of their work than they do actually creating it. There are a few reasons why that is but the biggest would have to be showing the hard evidence the content yields a monetary return. It undoubtedly does, but the path from content creation to dollar signs can get fuzzy and it can be intercepted by others in the revenue cycle. 

It’s a bold move to do what Medium is doing, essentially throwing the brakes on, to right their ship back to their original premise as a business, when it slowly but surely has veered into the waters they specifically wanted to avoid. There are mixed opinions on it though and rightfully so.

I personally don’t think the model is entirely broken. Media, regardless of it's form, will generate profit for as long as it generates attention because businesses will continue to pay for a sliver of that attention to be spent on their product or service, in a hope to increase their revenue. 

But, we also live in a time of click-bait, link-bait, fake news and generally sub-par content that would be worthless if it didn’t, as Venus said, “stay open long enough to make money”. For a publication as large as Medium, with 60 million monthly readers, to stand their ground and allocate such time and energy to create a new value set for content creation is something this world needs, not to put too whimsical a point on it. 

Read the full article here. 

How Enterprise Video Content Yields a Dramatic ROI?

Ron Yekutiel, CEO of Kaltura points out “Video has reached a tipping point, with 59% of enterprises having integrated video into their intranets and 42% having integrated video capabilities into social business platforms.”  The shift is likely due to the evolution in technology that has allowed for video content to be far less cumbersome than in the past, due to its storage and bandwith. 

This is great news, as the use of video in enterprise organizations can yield a huge ROI. Venus goes into more detail on why that is but I see the biggest factors as the two Ts, travel and time. 

A stunning example of savings from use of collaboration tools as an alternative to travel is documented with Cisco, saving $250 million in travel costs per year by using video. These savings are seen not only in less travel costs but the lost productivity due to travel, no longer experienced in such high volumes.

This leads us into the time factor, with travel time being only one example. Others include exchanging extensive email exchanges for video calls, trading lengthy manuals and handbooks for video content when onboarding new employees and, creating video announcements for distribution among global offices in place of curt and dry formal memos. The added bonus of these use cases is better communication, increased engagement, and nurturing a sense of community no matter how large an enterprise may be.  

Thought this is only the tip of the ROI iceberg when it comes to video content in enterprise organizations, or businesses of any size for that matter. For more on this, read the full article here. 

Explained: Board Shakeup at Yahoo & Dell EMC ECD

The story of Yahoo is an interesting one, and another chapter unfolded when they announced CEO Marissa Mayer would be resigning from the company’s board of directors once the planned $4.8 billion merger with Verizon is complete. With news of data breaches slowing the process of the deal, Verizon is taking the time to investigate and what they find, could result in them asking for a discount or cancelling the deal all together. 

It’s an unfortunate set of circumstances for Mayer, who was previously a well-respected and successful product manager with Google. Even after acquisitions and investments to shift Yahoo to a news organization, and attempting to grow their products and apps, it didn’t do much past keeping its status of one of the most visited sites online. 

Once a pioneer in the space, I think many were hoping Mayer and Yahoo could once again shift the standard for sites like it, by having a wildly successful female CEO at the helm. Hopefully, other organizations see potential in Mayer, and give her the opportunity to lead elsewhere. 

Another interesting departure this week was with Dell EMC ECD, where Rohit Ghai is stepping down and joining Dell Technologies’ RSA subsidiary as president, once the acquisition of Dell EMC ECD by OpenText comes to a close. Rohit is joined on his departure by CTO Jeroen van Rotterdam, who left to join Citrix as Senior Vice President of Technology last September.

It would make sense for them to leave, as OpenText will not need two people in each role as they are bringing their own candidates to the merger. For that reason, the departure could have been more self-preservation for Ghai and van Rotterdam, but given their contributions to the highly touted new Dell EMC LEAP Platform and a new suite of cloud-native content apps, it will be interesting to see how the innovation chips fall in the time following the finalization of the deal. 

Read the full article here.

Why Has DNN CMS Been Downloaded By 7 Million Users?

This was a question we were curious to answer towards the end of the week, by looking at the strengths that make their offerings appealing and compelling for the customers. Extensibility, cloud delivery, unrivaled ease of use, multi-site management and pricing model are the details Venus dove into but most interesting to me, the absence of native marketing capabilities.

In its place, there are built in connectors enabling their customers to build their own “best of breed” solution by integrating the DNN technology into leading technology products that they already use. A pain-point for some but I see it as a nod to the stellar marketing solutions available in the market and a huge win for the customers that already have a solution they love but are looking for another technology to come in and play nice with it. 

DNN, even took to social media to share our article with their almost 18,000 followers: 

 
Read the full article here.

B2B Content Curation Costs & How to Maximize its ROI

The cost associated with content and content marketing is a very common struggle for many organizations and with good reason. How do you accurately pinpoint how many hours are spent on the process of content creation, and how do you directly relate it to a deal closing and revenue acquired, when there are as many ‘cooks in the kitchen’ as there are in the marketing and sales process? 

SiriusDecisions, is highlighted in the article with their recent study entitled “The Pulse: B-to-B Content Creation Costs and Outputs” that shows some interesting statistics about content in the B2B space, and Contently’s fairly simple method for calculating a business’ content cost is expanded in detail. 

Calculations and statistics aside, maximizing the ROI of content is always top-of-mind and Venus breaks it out into two categories, how to maximize content revenue and how to minimize the content cost. Targeting and repurposing can increase content effectiveness and in turn bring about a higher return, but the point of allocating resources to favor quality over quantity, brings to mind Medium’s thoughts on content we covered earlier in the week, and it doesn’t make its premise any less impactful. Quality, means higher value, and higher value would hopefully spark the desire for readers to share the content, and shared content means more eyes on it. Depending on the influence of the person sharing, the value goes up, the sharing snowballs and, before you know it that quality you worked a little harder for has your companies thought leadership out into the world and customers hopefully knocking at your door. 

Curation choice, IT and automation are points brought up for reducing cost, but a point many might not think of, is stripping away the platforms used to share content. It might be an odd thing for me to say, when I just went on about the sharing party you hope your content brings on, but spending time posting content on sites that are irrelevant to your verticals or just not followed as highly as others, is money and effort spent that doesn’t really bring a return at all.   

Our contributor Leah Kinthaert, added her thoughts on the Content ROI story as well:

Read the full article here.