AOP Conference News

Yes, I went to the AOP Conference yesterday.

No, I didn't blog it live.

Why not?

1. This conference for online publishers was very coy about the fact that there was a free WIFI access code available; the only visible options seemed quite expensive. I could have put it on my expenses but I was feeling churlish in return.
   
2. This conference for online publishers had a very slow WiFi.
   
3. This conference for online publishers did not have power sockets at the tables so I could only use my laptop until the batteries ran out. Then I stopped taking e-notes and scrawled.
4. This conference for online publishers didn't have an awful lot to blog about. And certainly nothing urgent.
   
5. Lots of other people were blogging it quite adequately without my input:

• Patrick Smith: Clay Shirky tells AOP conference: ‘don’t believe in the myth of quality’
• PaidContent: Links to coverage
• Dan Leahul at Brand Republic
• Adam, of course
• and my boss's boss.
  

I generally find conferences overwhelming so have a practice of making myself come away with a few take-home points of things I am going to actually do as a result:

1. Add Wikipedia to the list of subjects of our community outreach programme. Our experts should be contributing to Wikipedia and we should get to know the people who are the key Wikipedia contributors in our business areas.
2. Encourage more regular, scheduled video offerings in our markets (as opposed to ad-hoc ones)
3. Assess potential video offerings in terms of VideoJug's breakdown: Life skills, Immediate need, Special interest, Personal issues, Weird and Wonderful, Expert Advice.
4. Identifying Passion Points - we've been doing it wrong. Ask our research team to come up with a better way of doing it.

Passion Points

Oops. I coined a new piece of jargon yesterday. Didn't mean to. It just slipped out.

I was looking for a way of describing both the people who are excited and the things that are exciting in our markets.

And out it came: Passion Points.

Let's look at the second instance: things. The Passion Points are the things that excite our audience. This isn't generally the day to day stuff of their business lives (our sites are all b2b remember) - it's the stuff that generates real passion and excitement.

In agriculture we refer to it as "tractor p*rn"; in road transport, it's big lorries. Boys and their toys, I suppose.

When encouraging user contribution or engagement, these passion points are the way to go - best return for least effort.

Of course in some cases, people are passionate about their jobs - it's a vocation. Our CareSpace community for social workers has taken off really well because these people are passionate about what they do (I'm reasonably sure they don't do it for the money).

The other application of Passion Points is people. Who are the journalists in our organisation that are really passionate about what they're covering? This is important because the biggest "threat" to our business as publishers comes largely from bloggers who are often passionate non-professionals. It's their passion that's makes them exciting and makes it difficult for "career journalists" (those who are journalists by trade and move from market to market writing about different things) to compete with them.

Luckily we have many impassioned and dedicated journalists working for us but I confess that when I was an editor here some years ago I would have failed the passion test; in those days we were only competing with other trade magazines.

But what about the people we employ who - although diligent and skilled - are not passionate? How do we help them compete?

I'm reminded of the late Bob Monkhouse's observation about success in showbusiness: "The secret of success is sincerity. Fake that, and you've got it made."

If only it were true.