Q&A with Lou Celi of Llesiant
Jinfo Blog

By Robin Neidorf

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"Sometimes the trickiest bit is figuring out what to do with a tool this powerful. It can result in a kind of programmatic publishing.... Now with relevance technology, you can publish in ways that meet the needs of your end-users 95 percent of the time, just with the technology alone."

During April's Buying and Selling eContent conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, VIP Magazine had an opportunity to speak with publishers, intermediaries and content buyers. A series of brief interviews explore innovation in the content market and how publishers are working to meet the needs of today's enterprise content buyers.

Lou Celi is President and Chief Operating Officer of Llesiant, the publisher of Llesiant Relevance. Llesiant Relevance is a web-based information service that connects users with the highest-quality premium news, business and regulatory information from around the globe via an online portal that can be accessed from any Internet-connected computer.

Prior to joining Llesiant, Lou was Senior Vice President and Publisher of the Economist Intelligence Unit and a member of the EIU Management Committee, where he spearheaded the development of their successful web business and oversaw worldwide sales and marketing for the entire EIU product portfolio. View Lou Celi's full biog.

VIP: First of all, I wanted to ask you about the name ‘Llesiant.'

Lou Celi: Sure, it's a Welsh word, meaning ‘Advantage.' We had a marketing fellow who was Welsh, and he wanted a name that would be unique. It certainly is unique. But what's especially good about it in the Internet era is that when you search for it, you get our company first.

VIP: True enough. Even when I misspelled it, and I got you first. You know, a lot of companies that promote ‘relevance solutions' rely on powerful technology, which you clearly have. But you also have leadership with a strong background in journalism (Ed. note: Celi holds a master's degree in writing and journalism), which is the ‘human' relevance filter. How do you apply your journalism background to the business? How is it a strength for Llesiant?

LC: That's a really good question. We are a leader with technology, but we don't use just technology to get the job done. We have taxonomists who categorise information, which is fundamentally an editorial task. They keep the taxonomy up to date, and then that taxonomy is automatically programmed into our search tool, resulting in better ways to find information.

Our keyword search is intelligent. If you type in ‘alternative energy,' for example, Google or other search engines will give you back anything on alternative energy or with those words in the document. But our taxonomy knows that you might also be looking for ‘green energy' or ‘solar power' or any of a number of other related topics and will return those results, even if words ‘alternative energy' don't appear in the document. 

The second part where the human element comes into play is in presenting results. These services are being used by people, so it's not just about search, which is a technical function. It's also about providing those results in a meaningful way to the user. That takes a publishing mentality.

A lot of librarians and information specialists are being called upon to become publishers to an internal client base. To become a publisher, you need to know what your audience's concerns are, what information they need, and how they want to present it. What's going to make it simpler for them? 

VIP: Interesting. So take it down to the very tactical level, can your customers add to your taxonomy to make it even more relevant to them and their internal clients?

LC: That's the fun part. It's completely customisable. You know that there's never one truth in taxonomy. There's no one way to look at the world. So our ability to customise the taxonomy and vocabulary to our client and their business is crucial. When I was at EIU, we had a taxonomy to describe and organise economics. Global Insight has another way, and the World Bank has yet another way. Just agreeing on what countries are in Africa or the Middle East is difficult. 

VIP: Hours of discussion.

LC: Yes, and debate. We don't want to have that debate; we want our clients to make the decision. However you want to organise it or look at it, that's the way we'll get it to you. And that's much more powerful than having us tell you where things belong.

VIP: Tell me a bit more about relevance in action. When does it result in the ‘Aha!' moment?

LC: I've had the ‘Aha!' moment with clients, which is really cool. You go out to a law firm and run a few searches, saying, ‘Let's see what your clients are doing.' And the lawyers think they know what the clients are doing. 

But then I say, ‘OK, let's crisscross the taxonomy; let's look at all your clients and cross them with your competitors and see which ones your clients are working with.' They'll say, ‘None of our competitors are working with our clients.' But inevitably we find out they are, and the reaction is, ‘Oh, my God!'

Sometimes the trickiest bit is figuring out what to do with a tool this powerful. It can result in a kind of programmatic publishing, pulling together bits of related information in unexpected ways, which is fascinating to me because I used to do publishing the old-fashioned way. Now with relevance technology, you can publish in ways that meet the needs of your end-users 95 percent of the time, just with the technology alone. Finding new ways of doing that and using it is a lot of fun. 

We see custom publishing as a growth area, whereby consulting firms and professional services firms can use us to position themselves as thought-leaders through custom and semi-custom publishing to meet the needs of complex markets.       

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