BtoB Media Business - October 2010 - (Page 22)

Endnote By David Levin The UBM Wiki and our company T wo and a half years ago United Business Media’s top management from around the world gathered in San Jose, Calif. It was the third in a series of meetings designed to support the building of our business. The first meeting was in Bangalore, India; the next was in Oxford, England. We were in California to see how the tech world was changing and to understand how our business world would also change. We visited some of our biggest customers. We were lucky enough to have John Donahoe of eBay and John Chambers of Cisco spend time with us. We experimented at the meeting by adopting the principles and technology of social media. This effort was led by our UBM TechWeb unit, the team that produces our Interop and Web 2.0 events. Our experience at that meeting has led to a massive change in how things work and how we interact at our company. This change incorporates social media and the Web into daily work practices. It also allows the development of community and flat lines of communication across a business. Today UBM has embraced this new, digitally focused world with, among other things, an online platform we call the UBM Wiki. The wiki is more than a single tool: It’s a multipurpose tool kit that combines a standard intranet, an incompany social networking system, a project management tool and a knowledge repository. As of today, 5,158 of my colleagues are active in this dedicated UBM environment. We’ve had almost 6 million page views on this content that’s entirely employee-created. In all, our employees have created 38,000 documents, posted 6,000 blog entries, made 20,000 comments and posted 25,000 messages in 7,000 separate discussions. UBM people in various departments and across the globe use the wiki to deal directly with one another, supplementing more traditional channels. Of course, it has also become our water cooler, where people chat and interact about everything from gardening advice to engaging in the discussion “iPad—executive toy or business tool?” It’s just one more sign that management and traditional publisher lines of communication that run up and down the corporate structure have been overwhelmed by a new type of interac- This new communication is faster. It is more intuitive. And it will change our business profoundly. tion that is peer-to-peer. This new communication is faster. It is more intuitive. And it will change our business profoundly. Here’s an example. A recent post on the UBM Wiki asked “for information about UBM activities in Ryad/KSA” (Riyadh/Kingdom of Saudi Arabia). It was posted by a colleague in the medical publishing part of UBM at 9:49 a.m. on Aug. 26. Four days later, there were five replies with tips, contacts in the region, links to local UBM businesses and suggestions of how to go about the work. Not one so-called “manager” was involved: The teams found their way to interact and help one another. A virtual events group has also organized itself using the UBM Wiki. It’s one of dozens of such groups that have included how to green the company and discussing paid content. The virtual events group now has 227 people across the company who have chosen to join together and share ideas, experiences and best practices as we develop these programs across UBM. Within the group, documents are posted, results shared and analysed, hypotheses voiced and debated. A recent day’s postings included the report on our first virtual event in the travel sector, the registrant report from our psychiatric recruiting event and the marketing response to the email campaigns to attract attendees to a virtual event for diagnostic imaging. This kind of information gives those planning the next events—in any geography, in any market—a wealth of information, expertise and experience to draw on. When we complete the formalities of our recently announced acquisition of Canon Communications, we will welcome some 350 new colleagues into the UBM Wiki. I’m excited at the new possibilities that these new voices in the UBM Wiki will bring us and how sharing their experiences and expertise will enrich our business in the future. The nature of management is changing. Like the nature of journalism. This new world really is flat—and we all have a lot to learn on how to make the most of it. David Levin is CEO of United Business Media. He can be reached at david.levin@ubm.com. An expanded version of this essay is available at www.btobonline.com/david-levin. It includes a screen grab from the UBM Wiki. 22 | Media Business | October 2010 | mediabusinessonline.com http://www.btobonline.com/david-levin http://www.mediabusinessonline.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of BtoB Media Business - October 2010

BtoB Media Business - October 2010
Contents
Media M&A Activity Shows Signs of Life
What Marketers Want: 1-On-1 Attention
Webinars have Become a Hot Commodity
Sales & Marketing
Audience Development
M&A
People
Benchmarks
The Rise of Peer-to-Peer Communication

BtoB Media Business - October 2010