Wolters Kluwer Health Fills Workflow Solution Prescription

Wolters Kluwer Health has launched Integrated Facts & Comparisons. It's a combination of data from the company's Drug Facts and Comparisons and Medi-Span integrated software that serves Wolters Kluwer's pharmacist customers by enabling them to access referential drug information within their workflow.

The new product essentially makes it easier for pharmacists to access drug information by bypassing their need to log in and out of the system and enabling the pharmacists to find the information they need through fewer clicks. Users can also customize the display of the information.

Integrated Facts & Comparisons is another example of a publisher successfully leveraging the products already in its stable to bolster the quality of the company's overall offerings. Customers who were already satisfied with Drug Facts and Comparisons and Medi-Span will benefit from the combined strength of these products. And with professionals consistently demanding tools that are integrated into their workflow, the timing of this particular product launch couldn’t be better. Don't be surprised to see Wolters Kluwer duplicate this model again in its Health division as well as the company's other operating units.

LexisNexis Debuts New Martindale.com

LexisNexis recently launched a new version of its martindale.com Web site. The site originally launched 10 years ago as a platform to connect buyers and sellers (the law firms) of legal services. The new version promises to deliver an even better experience for buyers by providing more information they can use to make a purchasing decision.

Among the enhancements are: activities data (which includes information about litigation and mergers and acquisitions activity for individual law firms), capabilities data (provides an understanding of a law firm's operational infrastructure, a snapshot report (an executive summary of a firm’s offerings and capabilities) and an enhanced side-by-side comparison (a comparison tool that aggregates all of the new data to present a single view of selected firms). All of these features are designed to give buyers a richer, more complete look at the capabilities of the law firms they are researching. The new site will also include a series of Top 10 lists, highlighting the top 10 law firms in a particular category.

These enhancements emphasize the fact that, regardless of the history of your products, you can’t rest on your laurels. Customers are always looking for more and publishers have to offer it, especially if they have it. In this case, LexisNexis is leveraging data from its atVantage product to power the activities data feature. It just proves that publishers really don’t have to reinvent the wheel to make their products relevant for customers; but ensuring that products evolve with their customers' ever-changing needs is crucial in today's extremely competitive marketplace. If your product doesn’t have or do what customers want, they will find another product that will.

Zagat's Feasts on Web 2.0 Success

Zagat's, known for its restaurant guides, has successfully integrated Web 2.0 capabilities into its Zagat.com site--boosting subscriber conversions by 14 percent. The company already had a somewhat successful Web presence, with customers paying to read the company's restaurant reviews (and other entertainment-related information) on the site. But Zagat's figured that offering site visitors some free content (that they could obtain from other sites anyway) would help draw them to the paid offerings. It worked.

Zagat's VP of marketing, John Boris, recently shared details of the initiative with MarketingSherpa (www.marketingsherpa.com). Through surveys with existing subscribers, Zagat's determined that it would offer four free features: individual member reviews, member discussions, photographs of establishments and copies of restaurant menus. While these features were developed, Zagat's launched a Web marketing campaign to tout new site features. Visitors had to provide basic contact and demographic information in exchange for a user name and password.

The new community-based features have yielded Zagats.com more free users and more new subscribers. There has been a 45 percent rise in unique users and user sessions and a 20 increase in page views.

If traditional publishers think that the Web 2.0 revolution isn’t for them, they need to think again. Zagat's has shown that even one of the most traditional brand names in publishing can utilize the latest Web technology and generate traffic and revenues in the process. Connecting with customers has always been a challenge for companies; the Internet has gradually reduced the gap.

Many publishers were slow to embrace the Web; they shouldn’t delay this latest technological offering. Web 2.0 has taken customer communication to a new level--this is the best platform of personalization we’ve seen. Publishers who embrace it will undoubtedly build a strong bond with their customers--and it goes beyond just selling more subscriptions at the moment. By continuously gaining insights from customers, publishers will more easily (and accurately) learn what products and services they need to launch in the future to ensure long-lasting customer relationships.

Taking It Up a Notch

This week Google announced the launch of a limited beta test of cost-per-action (CPA) advertising. CPA means that the advertiser only pays if the user takes a specific action pre-defined by the advertiser, such as signing up for a newsletter, downloading a white paper, etc. If CPA proves to be anywhere near as attractive to advertisers as cost-per-click (CPC) advertising has been, hold onto your hats, because this has the potential to re-shape the whole world of advertising yet again.

I have maintained for several years now that CPC advertising drove a huge shift in risk from advertiser to publisher. In survey after survey, we found advertisers using word like "fairness" to describe how they perceived CPC advertising. Advertisers said they were tired of what they saw as a "you pay your money and you take your chances" advertising model, and liked the fact that CPC advertising was both risk-free ... and fair.

Of course, as CPC evolved, advertisers quickly discovered that the only guarantee in CPC advertising was a click-through, and that's a far different thing from a lead or a sale. Throw click fraud into the mix, and CPC's reputation as a risk-free Nirvana for advertisers starting looking a little ragged on the edges.

Enter CPA. With measurement of performance under the advertiser's total control, it should be risk-free, fraud-free and produce a guaranteed and completely measurable ROI. What's not to like?

What's in it for Google? It appears that CPA advertising will be sold on a true auction basis, and since CPA produces guaranteed results, advertisers should be willing to pay more, a lot more. Also of interest, at least for now, CPA ads will only run on third- party sites in the Google network. Site owners will be able to pick and choose which ads to run. The ones that pay more are more likely to get selected, putting more pressure on advertisers to bid up their prices.

It's too early to predict if Google CPA will take off, especially with the structure of this beta launch, but the bigger issue is that CPA represents a further shift in risk from advertiser to publisher. What really concerns me is that we hear so many advertisers already talking about how they can't wait for CPS -- cost-per-sale -- also known as "I'll pay you if I sell something." CPS is a swamp for a lot of reasons, and it represents an unreasonable total shift of risk to the publisher ... and sorry Mr. Advertiser, that's not fair.

Labels: cost-per-action, CPA, google, online advertising

Booking Commerce Opportunities

Bowker and book and music retailer Borders Group last week announced that Borders has extended an agreement to license the Global Books in Print database. The database will become the backbone of information in the bibliographic systems at Borders corporate offices as well as customer computer information kiosks located in Borders stores.

Borders customers looking for specific titles will benefit from the ability to access bibliographic details on more than 14 million books organized according to 30 key search criteria. The agreement between the two companies also gives Borders access to Bowker’s "Publisher Authority" database, which includes company and contact information for more than 200,000 publishers around the globe, and other data modules (containing comprehensive descriptions of books, audiobooks and videos.)

Database publishers can learn a lot from this alliance: it's the perfect example of the powerful combination of information and commerce. Publishers that have good quality databases in their stable really do have endless opportunities to generate revenue. They just need to continue looking past the image of the traditional customer and seriously consider these larger corporate partnerships. Retail organizations such as Borders are always seeking ways in which to improve the entire customer experience and increase sales. (Obviously, this latest alliance is designed, in part, to help Borders sell more books.) Publishers need to understand they could be sitting on a real goldmine; that their databases could be a strong revenue generator for organizations in their segment. They need to seek out partnerships similar to this Bowker-Borders one and stake a claim in that revenue too.