March 21: Taking Your Webcasts to the Next Level

Webcasts can boost readership and ad dollars and raise brand awareness, learn how B2B publications are gaining a competitive edge through webinars.

Find out what it takes to successfully produce compelling — and profitable — webinars for your trade magazine. Join the American Society of Business Publication Editors for a webinar on Friday, March 21, to get the inside scoop from top experts at Nielsen Business Media and InXpo.

Learn how to:

• pick a compelling topic and present it for maximum impact.
  
  
• involve print and online staff editors in content development and presentation of webinars.
  
  
• manage the "church-state" divide and address common ethical issues when conducting webinars.
  
  
• package and market online events for potential viewers and sponsors.
  
  
• leverage webinars for related editorial content, including virtual trade shows, podcasts and e-newsletters.

Meeting Details

When: Friday, March 22, from 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. EDT.

Where: Your computer. A web conference dial-in number and access code is required, and will be provided to registrants in a subsequent e-mail.

How to attend: To reserve your place, submit a completed reservation form (80K) by March 17th to b2beditor@gmail.com or 201-221-8655 (fax). Questions may be directed to Steve Roll at 703-341-5926.

Charge: This webinar is $10.00 for all ASBPE members and $35.00 for nonmembers.

About the Presenters

Kristin Beaulieu is the Vice President of Client Services at InXpo, a leading provider of virtual online communities and tradeshows. She works with leading publishers such as Nielsen, The Wall Street Journal, CMP, IDG, Ziff Davis Enterprise and others to strategize their event businesses.

Kristin was formerly the Vice President of Digital Events for the Consumer Small Business Division of Ziff Davis Media. She managed two online event divisions for Ziff Davis: eSeminars and PCMagCast. eSeminars was launched in 2000 and grew steadily to become a highly profitable division of Ziff Davis with year-over-year exponential growth in revenue and events. In January 2006, PCMagCast was launched as the dedicated online event division of PCMagazine.

PCMagCast received both Gold and Bronze 2006 Folio: Fame Awards for "Best Online Events of the Year" for its "Security and Mobility Virtual Tradeshow" and the webcast, "Selecting and Setting up an HDTV Set". Additionally eSeminars received the 2005 Folio Fame Gold Award for "Best Online Event" for its Security Solutions Tradeshow "Protect Yourself Against Attacks."

Elliot Markowitz is Editorial Director of Nielsen Business Media Webcasts and Virtual Events and is responsible for the content of all web seminars across Nielsen's publications and brands. He is also Editorial Director of Nielsen's Small Business Resource Center and Mediajobmarket.com.

Previously, Markowitz was Editorial Director of Ziff Davis Media eSeminars, where he helped build the company's eSeminar business and launched its award-winning Virtual Tradeshow concept. Markowitz is an 18-year publishing veteran and before Ziff Davis, he was Editor of Hotel Business magazine and HotelJournal. Before that he was Editor-in-Chief of CRM Magazine and the destinationCRM.com website and related live events. Before CRM Magazine, he was Business Editor at TechTV, responsible for helping to manage the TV station's website as well as conducting live on-air interviews with key industry executives.

Markowitz also spent 11 years with CMP Media's award-winning weekly newspaper Computer Reseller News (CRN), where he held many key editorial positions including News Editor, Business Editor, and Senior Executive Editor. In 1999 he was named Editor of CRN, responsible for the entire editorial operation of the newspaper and in charge of coordinating its redesign and re-launch in June 2000. While at CRN Markowitz initiated many key alliances including the Industry Hall of Fame event in Las Vegas and the annual CRN/Raymond James Conference. Early in his career Markowitz was a news reporter on Long Island for the Massapequa Post.

He holds a B.A. in Journalism from Hofstra University and is a graduate of the Stanford Professional Publishing Course.

Workshop Recap: Place content in various media platforms

The day of relying solely on print publications for revenue and readers is gone. Surveys show nearly half of the people who read newspapers online do not read the print editions, said Tom Eblen, a newspaper consultant and retired University of Kansas professor. Like the rest of the journalism industry, business-to-business publishing companies need to utilize various forms of media, not just print.

Eblen gave the presentation “The Straight Scoop: Radical Changes in Communications and How to Adapt to Continue to Serve our Readers” at the Spring Writing and Editing Workshop organized by the Kansas City chapter of the American Society of Business Publication Editors. The May 15 event was held at the Brookridge Country Club, Overland Park, Kan.

Eblen gave two examples outside of business-to-business publishing as ways to use media platforms successfully.

ESPN’s content lives on all media platforms, Eblen said. The company’s product can be found anywhere, from video games to mobile phones to websites. Walt Disney, ESPN’s parent company, now wants all of its companies to follow ESPN’s example, he said.

Closer to Kansas City, Eblen pointed to the success of The World Company in Lawrence, Kan. The company places stories in its print publications (the most well-known being the Lawrence Journal-World), online and on TV (the company owns Channel 6, a Lawrence TV station). The media outlets often cross promote each other.

Business-to-business publications may have an advantage over other media outlets, such as daily newspapers, Eblen said. A B-to-B publication wants to reach a segmented, specialized audience. Across all media platforms, a B-to-B publication may have a defined marketplace, as opposed to an undifferentiated marketplace.

When deciding how much to invest in online content, publications should know the average age of their readers. People under 30 tend to turn to online content exclusively for news, he said. People in their 50s are more likely to read newspapers.

Websites should be simple to use. No task should require 10 clicks of a computer mouse. Magazine content from at least 10 years back should be on website archives. Every publication should have its own website and lead in its category.

ASBPE on hypertext ads

For an update on the debate about sponsored links in editorial content on the web, check out this article on the national ASBPE website: "What ASBPE, B2B bloggers said about paid links in articles."

Work the Web Better

Steve Roll, president of the ASBPE Washington, D.C., chapter has some great tips for improving your online work. Read it here: ASBPE Washington, D.C. Chapter: Online Productivity Tips for B2B Editors.

His top two are the same as mine. If you haven't tried using Firefox instead of Internet Explorer (which no longer supports its Mac version) or Gmail instead of, well, any other mail application (web-based or otherwise), you're missing out on two great resources.

Not only does Gmail allow you to tag messages with as many keywords as you choose (instead of placing each email in only one folder) it has even integrated GTalk, its instant messaging service, which means you can reply to an e-mail as a chat and it's saved in the subject string with the original e-mail.

Google my be taking over the Internet--and therefore the world--but at least its doing it in a friendly, useful way that's free for me. There are some other nice Google features that I've integrated into my workflow:

• Google Notebook to quickly save snippets from websites that I want to remember.
  
• Blogger for this blog. I know some publications are using it as well for their first blog trials. And it has recently undergone a facelift and is easier than ever to use.
  
• Docs & Spreadsheets, which allows you to collaborate on documents with others.

And for those of you who do a lot of instant messaging (IM) using a plethora of services (AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, Gtalk, ICQ, MSN Messenger, etc.) you can consolidate. I recommend Gaim (for PCs) and Adium (for Macs). These are two great--and free--programs that compile all of your IM profiles and buddy lists into one easy-to-use interface.

IntelliTXT trouble at Ziff Davis

Ziff Davis' eWeek is getting blasted by the B2B blogs for its use of contextual ads. Below are thoughts posted by Martha Spizziri, the vice president of the ASBPE Boston chapter. (See her original post: ASBPE Boston Blog: eWeek/IntelliTXT Flap.)

In case you missed it: Woburn-based Ziff Davis publication eWeek has been the subject of some Internet controversy for its use of IntelliTXT contextual ads, which are hotlinked from within the text of editorial content. The IntelliTXT service was developed by the company Vibrant Media.

Rather than repeat what's already been said, I'll direct you to some of what's been written about it:

• "eWeek crosses an ethical line" from Paul Conley's blog
• "eWeek doesn’t want me to visit eweek.com" from Matt McAlister's Inside Online Media blog

One thing I will repeat that's mentioned in Paul Conley's post: ASBPE's ethics guidelines state

The editorial department should control all editorial content on a publication’s digital publication, including Web site, blogs, e-newsletters, digital magazines, and others. Standards such as accuracy, attribution, fairness, and balance applying to a publication’s printed editorial material also apply to a publication’s Internet or digital presence.

Care should be used online, as with printed material, to avoid placement of advertisements in or near editorial content in a way that could compromise editorial integrity or confuse the reader.

And I do have a few comments about this 2004 post from John Battelle's Searchblog, which Matt McAlister's post above also links to: "IntelliTXT: Your Advertising Peanut Butter Is In My Editorial Chocolate..." Although the piece is almost three years old, Battelle makes an interesting devil's-advocate argument that contextual ads within articles might not be so bad after all. Battelle's reasoning, in brief:

... [M]agazines that are essentially catalog magazines ('magalogs'), or most of the Seven Sisters (Glamour, Vogue, etc) ... pretty much exist to move product, and they don't pretend otherwise. A system like this would work quite well for the online kin to these kind of publications. ...

Second, there are an entire classes of content-driven sites which claim absolutely no pretense of editorial objectivity. Whether they are fan sites, directories, blogs, corporate advertorials, for-profit domain-specific portals, you name it, the tradition of sites which carry their biases proudly or are baldly commercial in nature is rich and growing, and IntelliTXT may well give these kind of sites a new monetization model.

Leaving aside whether directories, blogs, and fan sites are, or ought to be, commercial in nature, I'd say that at best the IntelliTXT model is annoying--in the same way that even editorial links can be annoying when the text is vague. In both cases, you aren't really sure what kind of information you'll get if you click.

IntelliTXT links are distinguished from editorial links by a green double-underline format, and Stevenson tells Battelle that the links are a service, and that the reader won't see the ad unless she makes a conscious choice to click an IntelliTXT link. But the format is not enough to distinguish them as ads to the casual user, at least at this point in IntelliTXT's life. And -- in the 2007 iteration, at least--you don't have to click on the link for the ad to appear. Just rolling over it does the trick.

It's also interesting that, according to Battelle, Stevenson basically argues that the links don't inherently represent a conflict because the publisher decides what words to link, so that if the links aren't appropriate, it's the publisher's responsibility. Battelle doesn't quote Stevenson's exact words, but if Stevenson did in fact mention only the publisher, I wonder why he doesn't think the editor should be the decision maker when it comes to links.