On the American Chemical Society homepage, there’s a heading for a big Virtual Meeting & Expo this week; then there’s a very cool member invitation: “Me Becomes We, Improve the world through the transforming power of chemistry” with a super-diverse, 16-square face box; and also a Personal Stories area with testimonials.   One more element on the page must get a lot of clicks to be so prominent: “Molecule of the Week: You'll get a bang out of making me. What molecule am I?” (There's always a clever question.) I click for the answer. “Azidoazide azide.” When I click on their archive, I see they’ve been doing this feature since 2005! (Bullvalene was the first. Superbowl was the fifth.)   People like quizzes, trivia—virtual nights still attract a big crowd—and puzzles. The Wall Street Journal studied how different reader habits affected subscriber churn. They looked into how various products and subscr ...

At our Business Information & Media Summit (BIMS) in Hollywood, Fla., in November—or as some now refer to it, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood— Amanda Yarnell and Jessica Morrison from American Chemical Society's Chemical & Engineering News, told their story and then had attendees collaborating and thinking.

One theme of last month's stimulating Business Information & Media Summit was the continued breaking down of silos at publisher and media companies—especially when it comes to the rise of product.

"We saw a statistic that 31% of health care professionals use social media for networking," Lyndsee Cordes, senior managing editor for the American College of Radiology, told an overflow audience yesterday at a session titled Stop Chasing Likes. How Social Media Can Transform Your Publication. "We saw that this applied to our audience, so we thought, 'How can we provide content to help their networking?' What works for our members? [The answer was] strong visuals and images."