Nov

18

The Digital Event Revolution

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, data protection, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, online advertising, Search, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | 2 Comments

Nothing has higher value in the world of B2B than events. Markets and valuations all reflect this. In a world of digital transformation events have a comforting certainty along with high margins. Attendance at some shows may have fallen during the recession, as well as exhibitors, but this is an industry well used to the economic cycle and generally unconcerned by temporary shifts which always seem to right themselves. I was present this week in Seoul at the 80th Congress of the UFI, the Paris-based trade association which represents both conference and exhibition organizers, and venue owners and managers. I found it hard to work out what was strangest: re-visiting one of the largest cities in the world after an absence of over 30 years, or speaking of things digital to a wonderful audience (at an appropriately well managed conference) who either thought that what I feared would never happen, or that, since people would always want to meet face to face, it was mostly irrelevant.

Which is exactly where the interesting arguments begin. It appears that for many in this industry the challenges are elsewhere. How can the event be made more compelling? Do we do it IKEA-style and force everyone to march past every booth? Will China’s vast plans for another great conference and exhibition centre in Shanghai de-stabilize the world market and drive down floor prices in Hanover and Frankfurt, traditional heartlands of the Great Trade Shows? Will the US cease to be self-contained as a market and compete on the global stage? How can more value be added for the user (one speaker talked of concentrating on attendees after two decades of concentrating on exhibitors)? Yet in all this discussion it was hard to keep on reminding people that a Great Event – a CeBIT, a Frankfurt Book Fair, a CES, etc – is above all a mighty data engine. I came away thinking not how impregnable these market tenancies are, but how easy it would be to compete with them. And they reminded me strongly of the newspapers and magazines of yesteryear when they dwelt on the importance of their brands and the trust and authority vested in them by generations of visitors. Does no one recall anywhere that the Google brand was built in the network in five years without effective monetization – or a single page of display advertising?

My plea here was really to shift the underlying base of the business to a wholly digital operation. Instead of creating data around users and exhibitors as a part of the organizational workflow of the event, build that data out through web analysis to the point where data on both gives real indications of where the event lies in the entire workflow of these populations. Then one can begin to do analysis that supports ideas of what people would like to see, what input they need to have, and how their valuable time and scarce attention is best used. This data needs to have the depth and quality to suggest and create introductions and meetings, support those connections through the year to the next event, create localized satellite meetings or virtual conferences where necessary, and develop in sophistication alongside the needs of users. In other words, the event needs to re-characterize itself in two data-driven ways – both as an encapsulation of the community (or communities) present at the event, and as a vital part of the workflow of participants.

Well, my kindly friends said, with understanding expressions of sympathy tinged with pity on their faces, what if we do none of this? We have these good margins, these strong brands, no competitors, our valuations soar: what could be better. One delegate took me aside and told me that the key topic was trust: you needed to meet the people you traded with in order to know who to trust. When I responded that trust is created in networks by people recording their trading experiences of each other, and that events organizers might be working with credit rating agencies as data partners, he shook his head in disbelief that someone so innocent should be allowed out alone. This must be one of the last marketplaces on earth where it is necessary to say that around 1993, as far as I can now see, a door closed in History The birth of the internet marked changes, slight at first but now gathering force, which generation by generation change the way mankind communicates, and expects to be communicated with. The media industry in the last decade has been in the Tom and Jerry situation – over the cliff and pedaling pure air while realization dawns that the terrain beneath our feet has altered entirely.

In this world turned upside down the events businesses will draw the competition of – everyone. Its started already – just the other day the Huffington Post announced a conference. Meetings and exhibitions do not present high barriers to entry and can, in skills terms, be readily outsourced Big digital market brands – Alibaba around these parts, for example – would find these an easy option. They may not succeed entirely but they could ruin some existing brand positions. And they would be much better organized for digital marketing, using social media effectively and creating community that few real world events seem to have in depth.

But by embracing the data driven world that I tried to describe, the event brand could become a leader in advising the exhibitor on his market penetration and positioning; telling the visitor who wants to meet company X that other visitors with similar interests also met y amd z; enabling the visitor to plan 3 hours to do what formerly took 3 days, and positioning the exhibitor in four different places to catch visitors looking at clustered specialisms rather than relying on a super-stand where the sub-specializations were lost. So data gathering becomes a part of adding fresh value to the existing world, and then part of launching into things entirely new. I have never been more convinced that the virtual conference and exhibition will have their day than this week. Not at first, not to the exclusion of all other things, but importantly and commercially invaluably as one of the tools in the sector armory. We are in the foothills here, but the old lesson of the web is that you have to fail before we succeed.

The UFI organization distributed a splendid App for the event, detailing speakers, schedules and vital information. A perfect information gathering tool, I thought. And once serious data around participants in these shows is assembled, think of the data analytics, the visualization, the predictive analytics that will result. I enjoyed being with the events people and I look forward to meeting them again – in the world of data.

Oct

28

Are You Joking, Minister?

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, data protection, Industry Analysis, internet, privacy, Publishing, Search, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment

Are we sitting comfortably? Then lets begin on a story of determination matched by delay, obstinacy about the exercise of rights matched by obfuscation in public office. Here, in my view you see the dandruff of bureaucracy, the manipulation of regulatory documentation, used to demonstrate the passive aggression of civil servants forced to maintain and defend their jobs by doing the opposite of what government and society have asked them to do. And in this instance, it affects the very ground beneath you feet – and the very foundations of your home.

The Coal Authority (TCA) is a very English institution. While it is designated as a part of the Department of Energy, it is in tortured fact a “non-departmental” body, subject to the Treasury, but not covered by regulations that affect departments of state. Its function is to license mining operations in the UK. Its residual power comes from its data – it holds records on every mine in the UK and can tell you where and when shafts were drilled. It sells this data to a licensed distributor who resells them to lawyers doing property searches. Tidy little earner, nice little data monopoly.

But then the world changed. We now know about the value of data. Memorably Gordon Brown had dinner with Tim Berners Lee and the beginnings of a release government information for commercial re-use turned from a dribble to a flood to a European regulation. A new regulator (sans teeth) was created from the ashes of HMSO (Her Majesty’s Stationery Office) and thus the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) was born. I served on its Advisory Panel (APPSI) for the first five years of its existence, so I was not too surprized when I interviewed a private sector data player having difficulty with TCA this week. If his evidence is typical though we need an urgent review of OPSI whose limited powers are clearly insufficient, and someone needs to call TCA to account.

But back to the story. What my interviewee wanted to do was to license TCA data and put it with other data to create a value-added service. Not content with finding out whether there was a mine shaft under the house you were about to buy, he wanted to be able to tell you whether the soil around your foundations made a flooded shaft and tunnels a risk. In other words he wanted to link the TCA data to third party data and increase its value and get a return on that effort. A man then in the spirit of the age, who should get a medal from the ODI (Open Data Institute). And how has he done? Well, less than impressively. First there was a great hassle about getting a licence to use TCA content. But TCA subscribe to the OPSI Fair Trader scheme (IFTS) so he was eventually able to do this, and his intended service was duly written into his licence agreement. Then at the end of last year 80% of the data arrived. So far so good, and work began on building the new service. But then Data delivery stopped and a letter arrived saying that TCA had reviewed its position and had now decided that further supply contravened its public task. But its public task is to license mining, not sell data at a profit. I smell budget cuts, job uncertainty and an agency seeking to augment what it gets from the taxpayer via government with what it can squeeze from a data monopoly. But am I right?

My patient interviewee was less suspicious. He went to OPSI and asked for his agreement to be fulfilled. Nine months have passed and no satisfactory action has taken place to regulate the matter. Rather than a regulatory enquiry on the breach of the agreement they have insisted that a formal complaint to TCA be made before any review can take place. A formal complaint that could take years to process and, in my own view, effectively allows the regulator to avoid regulating. Rather than asking for the TCA’s CEO to account for their actions, they seem to have passively accepted the fact that a “non-departmental” agency is a rogue elephant who can ignore them with impunity. There the matter rests.

But my informant is a man of determination, as I have said. So what does he do next to implement license agreements he has already with a data supplier who fears a fall in revenues if a better service which enhances the usability of the data for public use is allowed to intrude on the monopoly? Well, he can complain to his MP, or invoke the European Parliament and the Commission, whose original directive bringing public sector data rights of access for private sector re-use is at the base of all of this. But I was there on the Advisory Panel when the Directive became UK law, and saw how the intentions of the European legislators were softened and undermined by a statutory instrument which allowed government to load the dice in its own favour (“We have not included a right of appeal,” said the Civil Servant driving the legislation “since it is hardly likely tour own government will act against your interests!”).

So who knows what will happen next? In the US , where rights of access are much clearer, this sorry tale would be in the courts already. In the UK, with Sir Humphrey at work, we move through a fog of legal uncertainty in which the amounts that need to be deposited with the court before action can take place effectively deter SMEs from complaining, even if they could afford the legal fees. As we talked I went to the TCA website. Goodness me, it has a policy for relationships with data re-users: http://coal.decc.gov.uk/en/coal/cms/publications/data/data.aspx
Lets click it: I have tried several times today: “We’re Sorry – this page is not available!”. If you have read this far, have a go yourself. My hunch is that Sir Humphrey has fixed it for his own side, and as a result we have a case study of how the public will for better value data services for all of us is being frustrated. We will never build the information society this way!

PS. I have removed my informant’s name to avoid other data relationships that he has with government departments from being affected – though of course your own Government would never act prejudicially against you! But OPSI will know – and must act if the interests of SMEs are to be protected.

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