BtoB Media Business - June 2007 - (Page 6)

Upfront douggoodman.com ABM meeting focuses on ‘hurricane of transformation’ BY MATTHEW SCHWARTZ Pump up your sales executives with financial incentives so they can accelerate digital sales. Convince your editors and reporters to stop thinking that they’re strictly “print” people. Develop a laserlike focus on the customer, as opposed to the media channel. And if you get blindsided by all of the upheaval in business media, you can’t say you weren’t warned. That was the essence of American Business Media’s Spring Meeting last month in Naples, Fla., which drew 350 business media executives, publishers, editors, media bankers and vendors. “We are in the midst of a hurricane that is changing our landscape. And this year’s annual meeting is all about that—the hurricane of transformation,” said Gordon T. Hughes II, president-CEO of ABM, during his opening remarks. Compared with recent ABM spring gatherings, there was a greater sense of urgency throughout this year’s proceedings. Many speakers during the three-day event stressed that the status quo will not suffice in such a volatile business environment and that business publishers have to start venturing outside their traditional boundaries. “We’re doing fine, but I’m not sure we’ll grow in the future if we stay in the same silos,” said Robert Merry, president-editor in chief of Congressional Quarterly, which publishes CQ Weekly and CQ Today. Congressional Quarterly recently created a new consumer publishing division and hired a general manager to run the unit. Its mission, Merry said, is to target markets outside the Beltway. The unit has created a Web site with the hope of attracting some of the estimated 60 million people who followed the 2006 U.S. elections online. The meeting hammered home that the biggest challenge for business publishers is building an online presence while simultaneously managing their print portfolios. Despite all the emphasis on the Internet, print still generally accounts for about 70% of business publishers’ overall revenue. But as Alex DeBarr, president-CEO of Naylor, pointed out, the challenge of grow- ing electronic products and managing print products is not a zero-sum game. “If we look a little deeper at our methodologies there are plenty of good ways to grow print without giving up the necessity of growing our online business,” he said. “You have to ask your audiences what they want.” Bob Carrigan, president of IDG Communications, added: “You have to invest in print in areas where it makes sense, and not ancillary but places where advertisers can get real leads.” President-CEO Gordon T. Hughes II opened the ABM Spring Meeting in Naples, Fla., by describing the “hurricane” that is changing the business media landscape. Lots of social networking buzz at ABM event A high-interest topic at last month’s ABM Spring Meeting was social networking, also called social media. Among the questions explored were: How can user-generated communities of interest coexist with the more neutral journalistic model of media? What is the place for social networking as content within b-to-b media Web sites? If a b-to-b media company wants to get into social networking, where does it start? How can social networking generate revenue for b-to-b media companies? During the Smaller Publishers Seminar on the opening day of the meeting, Paul Gerbino, publisher of ThomasNet Industrial Newsroom, said: “Social networking has helped us go deeper with the professional information we offer our audience. As a hypothetical example, someone who is an expert on nuclear physics and how it applies to submarines could be blogging from a submarine itself.” Eric Shanfelt, president and founder of eMedia Strategist and former senior VPe-media at Penton Media, said that social networking changes the role of the b-to-b publisher. “Our role is to host a dialogue amongst all of our various constituencies and to connect them together,” he said. “I believe [the b-to-b media companies] can make money doing that.” During a session on “The Digital Opportunity,” Aaron Kahlow, managing partner at Web site services company BusinessOnLine, said, “I am a big proponent of social media. “The Web was designed from the beginning as a two-way communication tool. Social media is the ultimate manifestation of that. Even though publishing started out with one-way communication, social media will change all of it—and we’re never going backward.” Kahlow advised his audience to test social media by participating in it as users as well as by launching social media capabilities on their sites. Monetizing social networking was the theme of a breakfast session. Moderator Malcolm Netburn, chairman-CEO of Communications Data Services, set the stage by saying, “Social networking is a revolution in the digital space. It allows us to create deep vertical communities of buyers and sellers, which is the manifestation of our long and successful history as b-to-b publishers of bringing buyers and sellers together.” “Old business models don’t work with this new way of creating content,” added panelist Jim Fowler, CEO of Jigsaw Data Corp., a start-up with 5.8 million electronic business cards in which all data are contributed by its users. “We have a ‘play or pay’ model,” he explained. “Members get points for adding or updating contact information, and they can use those points to get access to new people. But if they don’t want to play, they have to pay.” —Marie Griffin 6 | Media Business | June 2007 | mediabusinessonline.com http://douggoodman.com http://mediabusinessonline.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of BtoB Media Business - June 2007

Cover
Contents
ABM meeting reflects sense of urgency
Publishers consolidate Web site management
Five key technologies to watch
Sales & Marketing
M&A
Online
Events
Circulation
Production
People
Benchmarks
‘Wall Street Journal’ fosters younger audience

BtoB Media Business - June 2007