For those schooled in traditional ways of sales and marketing, releasing
data into the network for creative use and re-use also opens up lots of
new opportunities for valuable audience/market information. As long as
you ensure that the feedback loop is in place to get the intelligence
that you need. Why not build this in as the reciprocal part of the
'deal' for re-using the data in the first place.
The beauty of many web 2.0 style services are that they are event-based
and can generate lots of interesting usage/pattern data on the fly.
We've been trialling a system in the schools sector - integrated with
Google Docs so that the output is also readily shared - that generates
usage reports at a pretty granular level for teacher and student use of
freely-available collections data (and sub-sets of them).
For very 'asset' we can show for example:
- who used it
- for what key stage
- the specific curriculum point being addressed
- the usage scenario (in class, independent learning, on an interactive
whiteboard, etc)
- whether it was combined with other assets and from which collections
- if the created 'resource' was shared and re-used (and how many times)
and so on and so on
Surely info illustrating that type of 'reach' and engagement is evidence
enough of downstream secondary benefit ... and that may even be useful
reported to funders? And all it's doing is re-using investment that's
already been made (in digitisation, etc) so no extra investement
required to get the ball rolling.
Martyn
Ridge, Mia wrote:
> Nick wrote:
>
>> It has to be said that the fundamental argument - that releasing data
>> into the network leads to downstream secondary benefits which
>> outweigh the scope for upstream transactional value - is far from
>> made, even though it is becoming axiomatic in our community. It still
>> looks like an awfully big risk to most managers schooled in the
>> traditional ways of sales and marketing.
>
> Ok, since this is the one area where those of us without the resources or skills for advocacy at a higher level can contribute, how can we address this?
>
> Would case studies help? We already have a lot of digitised data online, could we re-purpose some of that (make it more re-usable, interoperable, discoverable) and compare use/engagement with the traditional web publication?
>
> Flickr Commons is another good place to start, and it provides lots of lovely stats, though we'd also need to be able to quantify existing use of similar resources and the impact on overall collections/revenue of releasing some photos on Flickr.
>
> Or we could look at the effect of OpenSearch implementations on existing collections.
>
> Obviously anything we did to change how we're publishing data would still require institutional agreement and care to make sure we didn't break copyright/use agreements, and that any usage information could be reported with other web stats to the DCMS/funders, so we can't just leap in there, and perhaps getting agreement to try case studies would require a certain amount of advocacy in parallel.
>
> I'm going to shut up now because there are hundreds of subscribers and some of you must have some genius ideas. Or are you all wondering why the same people keep banging on about this?
>
> cheers, Mia
>
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--
Dr. Martyn Farrows
Lexara
T 0845 4348371
M +353 (0)87 7917410
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http://www.magicstudio.com
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