Vol. 34, No.

2
In This Issue February 23, 2010

2 Notes in the news Adding video to websites does not have to

3 SIPF awards entry mean a huge investment of time and money
deadline approaches
On Modern Distribution Management’s Website, a video shows a serious but casual
3 Ideas emerge from
Tom Gale, MDM’s publisher, explaining the benefits of the company newsletter.
SIPA roundtable
Bulleted lists pop up, testimonials blanket the screen. On EB Medicine’s site, you can
4 Legal ease: SIPA
members have place follow a link to video testimonials, including ones from Scott Weiner, an emergency
to turn for legal
answers physician and director of research at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, and Peter

6 Mark your calendar Kwan, an emergency physician from Lethbridge, Alberta.

8 Testimonial videos: all
you had to do was ask
On the Harvard Health Publications
Website, a question flashes: “What is
sleep apnea?” A video begins with
Lawrence Epstein, M.D., telling what sleep
apnea is and how it can be diagnosed
and treated. Then you can order their
book, Improving Sleep: A guide to a good
night’s rest—in electronic and/or print.
These SIPA members have hopped on
the video bandwagon that’s YouTubing
its way around the world. In talking with
the people behind these sites, Hotline
found that it does not have to be all that
difficult or expensive to start producing
video on your sites—and the increased
exposure can be beneficial and the
rewards profitable.
As with anything else, there are levels
of expertise. Rick Groleau, manager of
Web media and technology for Harvard
Health, studied video at highly regarded
Emerson College so “flash animation”
and “white balance” roll off his tongue.
But Gale acknowledges that his is not “a
super-slick production; but it works for
our audience. We pretty much have a
video camera and a tripod.”
Stephanie Ivy, president and pub-
lisher of EB Medicine, launched a
VIDEO... continued on Page 7

Truly international Munich conference to offer

wide-ranging solutions to problems old and new
It may not quite claim the scope of the Olympics, but SIPA Munich 2010, taking place
April 14-16, definitely has that same international feel to it—with the similar promise

8229 Boone Boulevard,
Suite 260
Vienna, Virginia 22182
703.992.9339 800.356.9302
fax 703.992.7512
www.sipaonline.com
Printed on Recycled Paper
Published monthly as a service
to members. ISSN: 0749-1255
© 2010 Specialized Information
Publishers Association.
Printed by OmniPrint
Content Management by Cranium Softworks
Fulfillment system from CWC Software, Inc.
of new launches, breakout performances and winning goals.
Despite the tough world economy, ing: Building Profit! Digital Strategies
SIPA Munich 2009 welcomed 81 attend- for Success in Today’s Informational
ees from 14 nations, 14 speakers from 6 Marketplace will put 18 speakers into
nations, and 30 publishing houses last the limelight from eight nations. It will
year. Attendees came from Greece, also feature an interactive program with
Slovenia, Slovakia, Czech Republic, roundtables, panels and networking
Poland, France, Bulgaria, United King- breaks, a traditional Bavarian dinner in
dom, Austria, Hungary and Italy. the heart of Munich, and, according to
Tough to top? Hardly. SIPA Munich those closest with the conference,
2010: Specialized Information Publish- MUNICH....continued on Page 2
S p e c i a l i z e d I n f o r m a t i o n
MUNICH CONFERENCE
continued from Page 1
almost 100 attendees. The conference will take place in
the well-known House of Literature with its beautiful
conference facilities.
Helmut Graf, chief executive officer of VNR Verlag für
die Deutsche Wirtschaft AG (VNR Publishing House for
the German Business World), and the first European
member of SIPA’s Hall of Fame, is the main organizer of
the conference. Andy McLaughlin, president of PaperClip
Communications in New Jersey, will serve as the chair.
“Last year’s conference represented a real victory for
SIPA,” says McLaughlin. “Other media groups were
folding their expansion tents while SIPA was firmly
planting their flag in mainland Europe. It shows strength
as an association that we can have a successful confer-
ence in Europe, especially during this period of time.”
Great Sessions Highlight Two Days
The conference begins with a cocktail reception on
Wednesday evening, April 14, followed by the start of
sessions in the morning. There will be a thought-provok-
ing mix of foreign and American presenters led by SIPA
President Ed Coburn of Harvard Health Publications,
who will offer his forecast for 2010.
Other Thursday highlights include:
- A Business Case Study on Building an Online
Research Tool From a Print Loose Leaf Product: Creating
User-Friendly Online Content from Static Data presented
by Dr. Ludger Kleyboldt, Neue Wirtschaftsbriefe of
Germany.
- A panel discussion on Building User Friendly
Content: Tools, Apps and Widgets.
- A CEO Chat.
- Interactive roundtables on six important topics:
1- Establishing SEO in a Multi-Divisional and
Geographically Spread Publishing Group
Presenter: Christian Rose, WEKA Business Information,
Germany
2- Editorial and Marketing: From Print to Online and
Back
Presenter: Florin Campeanu, Rentrop & Straton, Romania
3- Research/Consultancy: How to Turn a Newsletter
into a 20,000 Euro Membership Service
Presenter: Robin Crumby, Melcrum Publishing, UK
4- Paid Membership Websites – How to Generate Online
Profits
Presenter: Filip Nowicki, Wydawnictwo Wiedza i
Praktyka, Poland
5- 10 Top Tips for E-Mail-Marketing: Do You Really Need
Targeting?
Presenter: Dr. Harald Feldkamp, Verlag für die Deutsche
Wirtschaft AG, Germany
2 V O L U M E 3 4, N U M B E R 2
P u b l i s h e r s A s s o c i a t i o n
6- Twitter, Blogs and Video – Using Online Tools to
Draw Attention to Your Product and Your Brand
Presenter: Bob Coleman, Coleman Publishing, USA
- A session from a Netherlands company on Moving
Content Online: Practical Solutions to Common
Problems.
- A presentation by Dr. Michael Röchner, Addison
Software, Germany, on Combining Software with Content
as a Business Model: Making People More Productive.
(McLaughlin strongly recommends this session based on
a talk Dr. Röchner gave last year. “He has been integrating
content into new software, so he basically sees himself
as a software guy which could be exciting for us.”)
- A session called Monetizing Google: Strategizing for
Search, Your Content and Building Revenue presented by
an ex-Google staffer.
Friday highlights include:
- Denise Elliott, Kiplinger Washington Editors, present-
ing a session titled E-Sales Campaigns: What’s Working,
What’s Not and What We’ve Learned.
- More interactive roundtables (in case you do not get
a chance to sit for all of them on Thursday).
- A session titled Building Workflow Solutions from
Print Products presented by Louise White of Incisive
Media, UK.
- McLaughlin finishes with his highly anticipated
The Top Six Secrets Every Publisher Needs to Know.
McLaughlin says to expect a mostly European audi-
ence, but Munich is one of the great cities in the world,
so anyone from the United States flying over should get
an amazing experience.
“Registration is already excellent, so we’re expecting
another very successful event,” McLaughlin says. “We
have an exciting confluence of speakers offering a
variety of unique publishing ways.”
Notes In The News
HCPro, Inc. Appoints Bussey CEO
HCPro, Inc., the leading provider of educational and
information solutions for the healthcare regulatory
compliance and management markets, announced last
month the appointment of Brian K. Bussey as Chief
Executive Officer.
Bussey brings more than 20 years experience in the
information and education markets. Prior to joining
HCPro, he spent eight years at Elsevier, most recently as
president of the Mosby MCS business unit, where he
dramatically increased revenues and profits by launch-
ing innovative clinical information products designed to
improve healthcare quality. He was also instrumental in
leading the acquisitions of MC Strategies, Gold Standard,
and CPM Resource Center.
• FEBRUARY 23, 2 0 10
McMeekin Joins TCL Institute
Nancy McMeekin has become the new CEO for TCL
Institute, a medical education and communications
company in Cary, N.C., the heart of Research Triangle.
McMeekin served as president of SIPA in 2006-2007 and
chair of the International Publishers Conference in 2006.
She was president and CEO at Oakstone Publishing prior
to joining TCL Institute.
Founded in 2000, the company provides medical
education through activities offered via in-person
meetings, symposia and teleconferences, online interac-
tive tools, handheld devices and printed materials to
physicians, surgeons, nurses, physician assistants, nurse
anesthetists and other health professionals throughout
the U.S. and Canada.
SIPA Marketing Conference Speaker
Becomes a New Fellow for SNCR
Doug Haslam, a supervisor at Voce Communications
and a speaker at SIPA’s November 2009 Annual Marketing
Conference, has been named a 2010 fellow by the Society
for New Communications Research, a global, nonprofit
research and education foundation and think tank
focused on the latest developments in media and com-
munications. SNCR Fellows collaborate on research
initiatives, educational offerings, and the establishment
of standards and best practices focused on the advanced
study of emerging trends and developments in media
and communications, and their effect on business,
professional communications, media, culture and
society.
Forecast for 2010: Evaluate Your Leads
Angela Hribar, chief sales and marketing officer of
GlobalSpec, Inc., writes about lead nurturing in her 2010
forecast:
“With marketing budgets still tight and competition
for new customers increasing, every lead you generate
must be carefully evaluated and nurtured through the
sales cycle. Sales and marketing teams will devote more
time and resources in 2010 to working together to better
manage existing leads, resulting in better conversion
rates and higher ROI on marketing programs. Successful
lead management begins with the quality of the leads
you generate and whether you gain contact information
and other valuable data such as your prospect’s interest
area. Seek out marketing programs that deliver this type
of information rather than just anonymous clicks to your
Website. And be sure to get your sales and marketing
teams working toward common and agreed upon goals
for lead management.”
Send in your promotions, awards, changes of venue
and other newsworthy tidbits to rlevine@sipaonline.com.
HOTLINE
SIPF awards entry deadline
approaches; recognition
helpful to 2009 winner
Brochures with entry forms are in the mail and posted
online for the 2010 SIPF Marketing and Editorial Awards!
The deadline for entering is April 2. Robert Michel,
editor-in-chief of The Dark Report, won last year for
Investigative Reporting. He emailed to tell about some
very nice reactions to that award.
“Everyone on staff here was quite excited at the news
of a first place award for ‘Best Investigative Reporting’
during SIPA Foundation’s 2009 Editorial Excellence
Awards last June. That is one of the best rewards from
this recognition. It is an affirmation by peers that the
story which took immense effort—and not a little risk—
to research, validate and bring to the public was judged
to be important and worthy of this recognition. It is also
an example of how a specialized publisher can serve the
public with information that had gone previously
unrecognized or ignored by traditional news outlets.
“The bigger surprise for us was the response of our
readers and subscribers. Following our announcement
that we had won, for several months we regularly got
emails and comments from readers congratulating us on
the story and the award, and encouraging us to ‘keep up
the good work.’
“This experience made the rather small bit of time
required to complete the entry and describe the process
of developing the story to be quite worthwhile. Around
our offices, everyone on the staff is motivated and
looking for similar stories that are important and would
go untold if not covered by [us]. Among our readership—
and including several prominent news outlets—The Dark
Report has a heightened respect.
“Collectively, the positive outcomes from our submis-
sion [should] encourage any other specialized publisher
to submit entries for their best work. It is also another
important way to support our profession.”
Clean lists, week in review and
display ads: ideas emerge from
SIPA roundtable
Editor’s Note: Greg Krehbiel, director of marketing
operations for Kiplinger Washington Editors, participated in
SIPA’s “small publishers’ roundtable” last month. The
following is his synopsis of the meeting:
It was a good event with lots of interesting discussion
about problems people have faced and hurdles they’ve
overcome. This list won’t do justice to everything that
was said because it’s gone through a “what Greg cares
about” filter, but ... for what it’s worth, here are my notes.
+ It’s important not to confuse your “best practices.”
3
S p e c i a l i z e d I n f o r m a t i o n
For example, best practices for the subject line of a
promotional email may be different from best practices
for the subject line on a daily, content-based email.
+ For free, content-based emails, one story per email
is more effective than a single email with multiple
stories—partly because you can link the subject line of
the email with the content if there’s only one story.
Note: Phil Ash, publisher, Capitol Information Group,
adds to this point:
“Numerous publishers, including our
www.BusinessManagementDaily.com, are having success
with a Week In Review e-letter. The format is typically five
headlines and teasers representing the single topic
stories that ran Monday through Friday. In our case, the
WIR goes out on Friday and covers the Monday through
Thursday stories while also running a Friday ‘story’ that’s
really a link to a sales letter landing page.
“The open rates for the WIR edition are the same as
those for our single-topic editions. The click-throughs
are much higher since we don’t include the full article in
the WIR but do in the other dailies. And the Friday story
is our best sales driver. There are numerous other varia-
tions on this strategy that we have tested and will
continue to test. But this is working well for us now.”
About this, Krehbiel later noted:
“The exception is a scheduled email—where people
come to expect it on the same day every week. In that
case, it’s the newsletter itself that gets people to open it,
not the individual subject.”
Clean Up Your Email Lists
+ Failing to clean up your email list has hidden costs:
(1) more customer service complaints; (2) lower sender
score; (3) potential to mess up your tests; (4) the cost of
sending to emails that aren’t doing you any good any-
way. And the overall response rate to the clean list is just
as good as the response to the larger list.
+ Selling leads/results from a Website might be more
profitable than selling ad space.
+ To get a list of the attendees to your audio confer-
ences, try this. Put copyright notification on the hand-
out material. Then send a note to the registered users
that they have permission to distribute the handout
material to everyone who attends the conference, but in
order to protect your copyright, you need to know who
those people are. Provide a form that they can fax back
with that information.
+ Some people recommend ReadNotify to track
who’s viewing your content.
+ One possible way to profit from user-generated
content is to sell a subscription to a library of material
where users can upload their own content, provide
commentary on existing content, etc. An example might
be a subscription site with programming code, where
users can contribute their own code.
+ One participant converted “til forbid” subscribers
4 V O L U M E 3 4, N U M B E R 2
P u b l i s h e r s A s s o c i a t i o n
from annual to quarterly billing and saw an increase in
renewals from 70% to 80%. The price point was about
$180 a year.
+ If customers have had their subscription budget
cut, you might be able to keep them by billing them as
“consulting services.”
+ It’s hard to come up with a decent Adwords strat-
egy for a general interest publication like The Kiplinger
Letter. It covers tax, but it’s not a tax letter. It covers HR,
but it’s not an HR letter. So it doesn’t work to do tax- or
HR-related keywords. One participant suggested the
following solution: Create a landing page that highlights
a list of premiums in areas covered by the newsletter
(e.g., tax, HR) and structure the Adwords campaign
around terms associated with those words. (I’ll let you
know if it works.)
+ Do display ads really work? How can you know?
Clicks under-estimate them and “views” over-estimate
them. Here’s a test that might resolve the question. (1)
create a Google Optimizer experiment where variation A
drops a retargeting cookie, and variation B does not; (2)
set the “thank you” page in your store as the target page
in the experiment. Group A will go out into the wide
world and see your retargeting ads. Group B will not.
Compare the behavior of the two groups.
Legal ease: SIPA members have
place to turn for questions
by Tom Curley
In recent months, SIPA members have contacted the
association’s legal counseling program with questions
about a variety of issues. What follows are general
responses to five of the more frequently-asked legal
questions. Of course, legal questions arise in specific
factual circumstances and, accordingly, publishers with
their own questions concerning these or other subjects,
should always seek particularized advice from legal
counsel.
No. 1: Money-Back Guarantees
Q: Because of the economy, a few subscribers have
attempted to cancel their subscriptions by invoking our
“100 percent satisfaction or your money-back” guaran-
tee. But the subscriber isn’t actually dissatisfied with
the content of our publication; instead, the subscriber
is just trying to save money. Is that legal for a sub-
scriber to do?
A: Money-back guarantees are used by marketers of all
stripes, including publishers. Government regulators
tend to scrutinize these types of promises; the Federal
Trade Commission (FTC) instructs that broad promises of
this sort should only be used where the full purchase
price will be refunded.
• FEBRUARY 23, 2 0 10
 That doesn’t mean that a publisher cannot offer a pro-
rated refund or otherwise place limits on a guarantee,
such as by limiting the guarantee to dissatisfaction with
editorial content. But the law generally places the
burden on the publisher to explain any limitations
clearly—and prior to purchase.
In short, the broader the language of the guarantee, the
broader is the publisher’s obligation to refund. And if there
are no limitations placed upon the guarantee in the first
instance, the subscriber may be within his or her legal
rights to demand a refund for any reason—or for no
reason at all.
No. 2: Guest Speakers
Q: We regularly use guest speakers for our
Webinars. If these speakers are not being paid, is it still
necessary to have a contract with each one of them?
A: As publishers know, if you hire a freelancer—in
other words, a non-employee—to write an article for
your newsletter, the freelancer is the “author” of that
article under copyright law and thus the freelancer owns
the copyright in it.
This same principle applies in dealing with guest
speakers—or any other non-employee who creates
content that the publisher desires to distribute. In the
absence of an agreement to the contrary, it is generally
the creator of the presentation, i.e., the guest speaker,
who retains the copyright in the presentation materials.
To be sure, disputes between publishers and guest
speakers are rare because the parties have a shared
understanding of the services that the speaker will
provide and how the publisher will make use of them.
And there is no legal requirement that this understand-
ing must always be reduced to writing.
The fact that many Webinar speakers are
unpaid does not necessarily diminish the
value of a written contract.
But, as publishers have learned in the context of using
freelance authors, a written contract can help eliminate
the potential for disputes (whether real or imagined)
about the current and future uses by the publisher that
will be made of the speaker’s presentation.
The fact that many Webinar speakers are unpaid does
not necessarily diminish the value of a written contract.
On the contrary, it may be particularly beneficial for the
publisher to emphasize the absence of payment in a
contract, in addition to communicating that information
to the speaker during the recruitment process.
Finally, to ease the administrative burden, a publisher
can create one standard agreement that he or she can
use in significant part for most speakers. In addition, a
standard contract can be designed to cover multiple
speaking engagements so that the publisher is not
HOTLINE
continually asking the same speaker to sign a new
agreement.
No. 3: Copyright and Directories
Q: We put a lot of hard work into creating our
directories. What can we do to protect them from
copyright piracy?
A: Many SIPA members publish directories, and the
creation of them can be labor intensive. Unfortunately,
particularly in the digital age, directories can be easily
pirated.
There is an open question about the extent of copy-
right protection for directories because of a Supreme
Court decision, Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone
Service Co. In that case, the Court held that compilations
of data alone are entitled to copyright protection only to
the extent that there is some originality in the selection,
coordination and arrangement of the data. The Court
found that a typical white-pages telephone directory
alphabetically listing names, addresses and phone
numbers lacked sufficient originality and thus could not
be copyrighted.
The Court’s decision dealt specifically with an alpha-
betical telephone book, and other compilations—with
greater original expression—should qualify for copyright
protection, as many lower courts emphasized after the
Supreme Court’s ruling. Indeed, courts have held that
“yellow page” type telephone books, with information
grouped by subjects selected by the publisher, are
entitled to some copyright protection—at least for the
selection and arrangement of the non-copyrighted facts.
Nevertheless, the uncertainty created by Feist under-
mined the ability of publishers to combat piracy in the
directory context because publishers cannot automati-
cally assume that copyright law protects their directo-
ries. Thus, it is important when publishing directories
to use written agreements that carefully limit the direc-
tory recipient’s right to use the work. Even contract law
may not be fully enforceable in this context, but a
contract may provide better protection than copyright
law, depending upon the content of the directory. In
addition, publishers should carefully restrict Internet
access to their directories (even on the publisher’s
Website) because of the prevalence of Web piracy.
No. 4: Emails to Current Subscribers
Q: I know Can-Spam places limits on email advertis-
ing. But do we have to include an “opt out” even in
emails to our current subscribers?
A: The concept of an “established business relation-
ship” is an important one in the telemarketing context,
but it is not determinative in the email context. That’s
because the Can-Spam Act applies based on the content
of the email message rather than the relationship
between email sender and recipient.
5
S p e c i a l i z e d I n f o r m a t i o n
In short, it is easy to confuse laws governing e-mail
marketing with laws relating to other types of market-
ing—some of which do indeed emphasize the presence
(or absence) of an established business relationship in
determining whether a given promotional message is
legally permissible.
But, in the email context, the Can-Spam Act does not
have an exception for existing relationships (other than
employer-employee relationships). So, even your own
subscribers should be able to opt out of receiving your
commercial messages.
That doesn’t mean that every email you send to every
subscriber is covered by Can-Spam. But the first question
that the publisher needs to consider is whether the email
constitutes commercial advertising as defined by the
Act, and not whether the email recipient is a current
subscriber.
No. 5: Digesting Other Publications
Q: Some of our publications are digests of content
published by someone else. If we credit the original
source, are we covered under copyright law?
Digests take many forms, with certain forms posing a
greater degree of legal risk than others. For example,
there are the genuine “rewrites,” where a digester ex-
tracts unprotected facts from another work and reas-
sembles them into new works using the digester’s own
language. At the other end of the spectrum is verbatim
copying, where a portion of the original piece is repro-
duced virtually word-for-word.
Not surprisingly, verbatim copying typically presents
the greatest potential for legal trouble. But there is also
the potential for copyright or other legal problems even
where a digest falls short of this extreme. To minimize
legal risk, the focus of a digest should be on facts,
opinions or ideas, which are not in and of themselves
subject to copyright protection (although the arrange-
ment of facts, opinions and ideas may be entitled to such
protection, as may be the particular manner in which
they are expressed in any given work). To the greatest
extent possible, the digester should avoid copying
verbatim or even engaging in extensive paraphrasing of
the original work.
This isn’t to say that a digester can never quote
directly from an underlying work, but generally the law
permits the digester to take only as much as is needed
for the legitimate purposes of the digest. But it can be
difficult in some circumstances to determine the essen-
tial legal question: How much is too much under copy-
right law?
Accordingly, if the digest is published electronically,
the safer course legally is to link to the underlying work
to direct the reader there, rather than recapitulate
significant portions of the work in the digest or on the
digester’s own Website.
6 V O L U M E 3 4, N U M B E R 2
P u b l i s h e r s A s s o c i a t i o n
Finally, crediting the original source for material
published in your digest may be appropriate from a
journalistic perspective and may in fact please the
publisher of the original work. But, should the original
publisher object nevertheless, giving credit is not a legal
defense to a claim of copyright infringement.
SIPA members are entitled to up to two hours of legal
counseling annually at no charge through SIPA counsel
Levine Sullivan Koch & Schulz. SIPA’s legal counseling
program offers advice to publishers regarding copyright
law, as well as libel, marketing, trademark and freedom of
information law.
Contact Tom Curley (tcurley@lskslaw.com) or Chad
Bowman (cbowman@lskslaw.com) at 202.508.1100.
Tom Curley is a partner with Levine Sullivan Koch &
Schulz in Washington, D.C.
Mark your calendar for these
upcoming SIPA events!
Capital Content Network 2010 Breakfast
Tuesday, March 16, 8–10 a.m.
Kiplinger Exhibit Hall
1729 H Street NW
Washington, D.C.
The Capital Content Network will feature an interview
with Bruce Levenson, founding partner of United Com-
munications Group (UCG), a multi-media business
information company headquartered in Gaithersburg,
Maryland. He will be interviewed by Tom Curley, a
Washington, D.C.-based attorney with Levine Sullivan
Koch & Schulz.
Register through www.sipaonline.com.
SIPA/Mequoda Webinar
Twitter for Publishers
Tuesday, March 16, 12:30 pm Eastern
Take 90 minutes to learn the secrets that smart publish-
ers are using to attract, engage and retain followers!
To register, go to: www.mequoda.com/webinars.
SIPA Munich 2010
Specialized Information Publishing: Building Profit!
Digital Strategies for Success in Today’s Specialized
Information Marketplace
Wednesday, April 14 – Friday, April 16
Munich, Germany
Sponsored by SIPA, VNR Verlag für die Deutsche
Wirtschaft AG (Bonn) and Akademie des Deutschen
Buchhandels (Munich)
(See article on page 1 for more information.)
• FEBRUARY 23, 2 0 10
 SIPA’s 34th Annual International Conference:
Profit Abilities: Tools, Tactics &
Techniques for Building the Bottom Line
June 6-8
Mayflower Hotel, Washington, D.C.
VIDEO
continued from Page 1
campaign to solicit video testimonials from subscrib-
ers (and also from their authors/reviewers). “We sent
subscribers an email offering a free one-year extension
on their subscription in exchange for the video,” Ivy
says. “We’ve received 14 videos so far and are pleased
with the content in all of them.” For more on this
campaign, see Ivy’s sidebar on page 8.
Copywriter Bob Bly says that there’s more to the
video world than YouTube. He recommends Viddler for
posting “because people won’t fiddle around so much.
Better they stay on your landing page.
“We’ve seen a 10% lift in conversion rates since
we’ve started posting videos [on our site],” says Bly,
whose videos average 1-2 minutes in length. “It’s hard
to know [if this is a direct result], but we think people
are watching them. We put them on our product
landing pages—one per page. But more important is
the content of the video. We find—and we’ve tried a
lot—that what works best…is not to hint at something
but to give tips in full. They’re like free samples. Or else
use the video to recommend something on the landing
page. ‘Read my letter here to solve that problem.’ So it’s
like a mini-commercial.
“Samples work,” he says. “It’s like that chicken they
give you on a toothpick at the food court.” Bly also has
written a book on the subject: How to Profit from the
New Online Video Craze.
The First and Last Details
Groleau was hired a few months before Harvard
Health bought all the equipment—so they benefited
from having him on board. He had done similar work at
Children’s Hospital in Boston and then worked at a
public television station as a science writer.
Here’s the equipment that Harvard Health purchased:
Video
Camera: Canon XH-A1 ($3,000)
Lights: Lowel Omni Pro light kit ($1,000)
Camera case: PortaBrace Mini DV case ($160)
Tripod: Bogen 190XDB aluminum tripod ($90)
Tripod head: Bogen 128 micro fluid head ($70)
Microphone: Audio-Technica Lavalier ATR35s ($50)
Teleprompter: Prompter People Flex Freestand 15 ($1,200)
Editing software: Final Cut Studio
Still
Camera: Nikon DSLR (D40) ($500)
Flash: Nikon SB-600 Speedlight ($190)
HOTLINE
“The focus will be heavy on takeaway tools that
people can implement right away to make their business
more profitable,” says Andy McLaughlin, president of
PaperClip Communications and 2010 Conference
Chairperson.
Flash cable: Nikon SC-28 TTL Cord ($50)
Camera bag: Lowel Pro ($50)
Editing software: Adobe Creative Suite
Groleau offers tips for those getting started. “Lighting
makes a huge difference—key light, full light and back
light and adding light to background. You can go on the
Web and learn the basics. We also use a teleprompter, so
that our experts can read off a prepared script. For
instance, we had the director of our department, Dr.
[Anthony] Komaroff, speak about heart disease. We can
do a few takes if necessary; it’s important to get an error-
free presentation.”
You might start out slow, Groleau warns, but there’s a
fairly steep learning curve—with the editing as well. For
editing software, he uses Final Cut. He has a strong
preference for Mac but adds that you can edit with
Windows as well. He says that Harvard Health hopes to
build a library of videos.
To build his library, Bly—when he has a speaking gig
and knows it is being taped—“puts a condition in the
contract that I get a master video copy of my speech
and then I use excerpts for the landing pages.”
Gale is not as concerned with a library as he is about
the videos having the right feel for MDM customers.
“Video is reassuring for us,” Gale says. “It reinforces the
image we have created—trustful, not slick. It’s our
brand. It also fits with the rest of the site.”
Time is certainly a concern in video endeavors. Steve
Monroe, managing editor and a partner at Irving Levin
Associates, Inc., says that his one-on-one video inter-
views “do take some time [but] we get mostly positive
feedback. We use it a lot for marketing.”
AT EB Medicine, Ivy’s soliciting strategy has allowed
them to get into video without devoting all the time and
money. “It hasn’t taken a ton of time to implement
(which is important because we only have five full-time
employees) or a lot of technical expertise,” Ivy says.
“And our employees really enjoy watching the new
[videos] each week in our Team Planning Session.
Groleau probably has the best advice. “Don’t be
afraid to try this out,” he advises. “Start small, work on a
project and if it doesn’t turn out right, it’s okay. It’s all
learnable.”
Websites with videos to peruse:
www.mdm.com/subscribe/
www.ebmedicine.net/
www.bly.com/newsite/Pages/seminars.php
www.health.harvard.edu/
www.levinassociates.com/
7
S p e c i a l i z e d I n f o r m a t i o n
sidebar
Testimonial videos:
all you had to do was ask
by Stephanie Ivy
We launched our campaign to solicit video testimoni-
als from subscribers (and also videos from our authors/
reviewers) a few weeks ago. We sent subscribers an email
offering a free one-year extension on their subscription
in exchange for the video.
We used a Website called www.uploadthingy.com to
create the form on that page so they could upload the
video; uploadthingy then emails us a link to the file and
we download it; the cost is just $9/month. We’ve received
14 videos so far and are pleased with the content in all of
them.
We were a little worried about giving away a bunch of
one-year subscriptions for bad videos and thus consid-
ered including the statement, “If we use your video, you
will get an extension,” on the landing page to prevent
this. But we thought this might discourage people from
taking the time to record and submit a video, so we
didn’t include the statement and hoped for the best—
which we were fortunate to get!
We haven’t finished uploading all the videos yet, but
you can view the uploaded ones at www.youtube.com/
user/EBMedicine.
Our goals with our video program are to:
1. Increase conversions on direct mail and email
campaigns to prospects.
2. Increase conversions on direct mail and email
campaigns to expires.
3. Increase traffic to our Website. (Google ranks
videos very highly; with the transcribed text next to the
videos, we expect the pages with the videos to receive
high rankings).
4. Engage and build a better relationship with cur-
rent subscribers/customers.
Before beginning the campaign, a colleague and I took
about two half days to outline the plan. We identified 12
sets of videos that we wanted (one set for our EMP
publication, one for our PEMP publication, one from
author/reviewers discussing individual articles, etc.,
etc.), and then asked the following questions for each of
the 12 sets:
- Who is the prospect (current subscribers, prospec-
tive new subscribers, expires, etc.)?
- How/where will we market them?
- How will we measure the revenue increase/decrease?
- How do we get people to submit them?
- What is our target number for videos (which we
arbitrarily determined for all campaigns was five), and
how long does each need to be (which we determined for
all campaigns was 30 seconds to 2 minutes)?
8 V O L U M E 3 4, N U M B E R 2
P u b l i s h e r s A s s o c i a t i o n
Because the campaign spans several months, we then
created a spreadsheet (which our marketing coordinator
reviews every Monday) that lists each step in the process
with the date the step needs to be completed, who is
responsible (which is mostly just our marketing coordi-
nator, with a little help from our editor), etc. We also set
up a spreadsheet to track costs and revenue for each
campaign.
For the “How/where will we market them” question,
we decided to use the videos:
1. On a dedicated page for each of our newsletters/
products that just has video testimonials; because we’ve
just started the campaign, we’ve only created the page
for one of our newsletters so far.
2. On landing pages for direct mail and email promo-
tions to prospects.
3. On landing pages for direct mail and email promo-
tions to expires.
4. On a YouTube Channel (www.youtube.com/user/
EBMedicine), which we created after we received the
videos (the channel was created by our marketing
coordinator who happens to like playing around on
YouTube).
5. On our Facebook page, which a colleague and I
created in-house after spending about three hours
reading articles on Google about how to create a fan
page on Facebook.
For the “How will we measure the revenue increase/
decrease?” question, we mostly plan to monitor the
success of the program by split-testing our direct mail
and email campaigns to prospects and expires to see if
the pages with video or without perform better. We
haven’t launched these campaigns yet.
Our answers varied per campaign for the other two
questions: “How do we get people to submit them?” and
“Who is the prospect (current subscribers, prospective
new subscribers, expires, etc.)?”
One minor problem is that we run SSL on our site, so if
you use Internet Explorer, a security warning is triggered
every time you visit a page with a video on it. I haven’t
found freeware yet to get around this, so I’m talking with
our Web developer about creating our own software to
use to embed video on our site; I expect this will cost
less than $500 to develop. (The SSL thing is a real prob-
lem for us in general; the page with the uploadthingy
form also triggers a security warning in IE, as do several
other Web applications we use for other things such as
Poll Daddy and Wufoo.)
Overall, we are very pleased. It hasn’t taken a ton of
time to implement (which is important because we only
have five full-time employees) or a lot of technical
expertise, and our employees really enjoy watching the
new ones each week in our Team Planning Session.
Stephanie Ivy is president and publisher of EB Medicine,
in Norcross, Ga. She can be reached at 800.249.5770 or
SI@ebmedicine.net.
• FEBRUARY 23, 2 0 10