Doing the Heavy Lifting: Where the Brands are Building at the SIIA IIS

The SIIA 2009 Information Industry Summit was a great event for MuseGlobal. Maybe it's our improved messaging or maybe it's just good timing, but people who we were speaking to at the IIS really seemed to "get" our positioning as a company that can connect content sources to software applications and platforms more efficiently than any other OEM supplier. To some in the publishing and content industries this may not seem to be the most glamorous side of the business, but it's what is really creating enormous value for our enterprise, government, and media-oriented clients.

Certainly the IIS provided a lot of the more glamorous side of publishing in its presentations and panels. From the opening keynote from Marjorie Scardino, Chief Executive of Pearson, to the ending keynote from Stephanie George, Executive Vice President of Time Inc., I heard a lot of good speakers - and some pretty flashy ones, too. Stephanie George's presentation was capped with a very dynamic slide deck with lots of multimedia showing how Time brands were being strengthened on the Web through their investment in technologies that made it easier for their editorial resources to appeal to their audiences. Fun to watch, of course, and I don't doubt that Time is getting good mileage out of these efforts. But in our experience, the brands of MuseGlobal customers that do best are the ones that focus on what a brand really does for its customers.

The presentation by Kristian J. Hammond of Northwestern University on "Frictionless Information" captured this "doing" brand concept pretty well for me. His "Make my Page" concept was nothing radically new, but it was a good example of how to pull together highly customized pages assembled automatically from numerous sources of content on the fly on a topic into an aggregated document. This "content is as content does" approach to publishing may lack the pizazz of many traditional brand publications, but it seems to be where the real action is with our clients. Yes, publications finished by an editorial team certainly still matter in a big way, and we supply content connectors to many of the publications that do this, but the more efficiently that you can do the heavy lifting to assemble and to integrate all of the content sources that are needed to satisfy them, the more that you'll be able to focus on delivering the exact content and features that can build your brand's unique value.

Enterprise publishers and technology companies certainly understand the importance of this "heavy lifting" for their brands, but it's easier said than done. Most I.T. teams are either way too busy to focus effectively on building enough connectors to the content sources that can really make a difference to their clients or will find that to do a robust job of connecting to content sources will turn out to be far more expensive and time-consuming than they can afford to do in a tight economy. Everyone's customers are pleading for more and more content from published sources and from their own sources that's well-organized, integrated, and all in once place, but it's just not that easy to pull it all together cost-effectively.

I guess that's another way of saying that MuseGlobal is going to be very busy this year, because our highly scalable Smart Connector OEM technology is the most cost-effective and reliable way to get the heavy lifting done for connecting content to brand-name content and technology services. Instead of having to say "no" to clients and senior executives, MuseGlobal gives our clients the ability to say "yes" more quickly to getting new and better content into their products. If a brand is all about saying "yes" to your clients - then it's clear to us at MuseGlobal that fewer things can help to build a brand better than the ability to connect to content rapidly through our Smart Connectors. Be it in online media, enterprise subscription services or content integration services, I think that it's worth us chatting with you about how your brand can benefit from the heavy lifting that MuseGlobal technology can put in place for you today. I hope that you enjoyed IIS. SIIA conferences are great value, and MuseGlobal will be at SIIA's NetGain in San Francisco in May.