Ronn Levine

Talk, Don’t Run: First ‘Mobile Essentials’ webinar yields firm but guarded business case

August 28, 2013 By Ronn Levine

You would expect “communication” to be the buzzword for a panel on relationships, public policy or workplace harmony. But mobile optimization?

Yet, talking meaningfully to your subscribers/members was one of the keys that came out of Making the Business Case, the first webinar in SIIA’s new Mobile Essentials series titled The Guide to Creating a Mobile Business.

“Talk to readers to see how they’re using your content,” advised Greg Krehbiel, director of marketing operations for The Kiplinger Washington Editors, Inc. “Communicate with your customer service rep to see what he or she is hearing. How are your readers accessing your information?”

The webinar laid the groundwork for content providers to get started with mobile. Although the majority of B2B websites are not optimized for mobile, a growing percentage of your audience is connecting with you via a mobile device. In addition, an ABM study found that 75% of respondents would engage more with a mobile-optimized version of your website.

But Matt Kinsman, vice president of content and programming for ABM, and the webinar’s first speaker, cautioned publishers to take that extra step. “Before you spend all that money on mobile, understand what your customers want and how they want it,” he advised.

Kinsman pointed to Farm Journal Pulse, a magazine that has enjoyed great success with targeted mobile messaging. “They are doing a lot with iPad apps and advanced mobile strategies,” Kinsman said. “They have developed one of the aggressive mobile platforms in B2B by understanding what their customers want and how they want it. Because 97% of farmers take their cell phones with them every morning, the company recently launched text-driven mobile solutions, including text message updates and coupons delivered through text.

Both Kinsman and Andy Swindler, president of Astek Consulting, spoke of the importance of business plans and talking to your subscribers—instead of trusting generic statistics. “There is a pressure to go mobile, a fear of being left behind” that motivates some publishers, Swindler said. Instead, there should be a business plan that tells exactly what you are attempting to accomplish. “It’s really easy to go in the wrong direction,” Kinsman added.

Greg’s 10 Rules of Thumb

“What’s the purpose of your mobile product?” asked Krehbiel. “What’s mobile about it?” Here are 10 rules he believes you should abide by in weighing your decision to go mobile:

1. Be careful with generic stats. They show us there’s movement in a certain direction, he said. But it may not be your direction. “You want to look at what your customers are doing in the mobile space. The average mobile behavior probably doesn’t have and never will have much to do with your business.”

2. Pay close attention to what you do. What’s your behavior on mobile? Look at how you use different devices and what you use them for.

3. Data is not the plural form of anecdote. Do not confuse the two. Learn from your own experience and listen to other people.

4. Get your own stats. How many of your people are reading your emails on a mobile device? Look at time of day. Measure your traffic from mobile devices vs. paid subscription.

5. Going mobile doesn’t happen overnight. It happens in stages. Are your marketing emails or product delivey being opened on mobile?

6. How and when do your customers use your content? What’s particularly mobile about farmers? “That was genius what Farm Journal did,” Krehbiel said. That’s meeting your customers where they are.”

7. Distinguish mobile web vs. apps. Apps give readers a better experience, but you have to jump thru Apple’s hoops. And it’s not just about the experience; it has to fit in with your business model.

8. Tablet vs phone-sized screens. Know how they’re consuming your content. An iPad allows more engagement. Are you on an open-source platform that has mobile plug-ins?

9. Don’t listen to the geniuses. Remember the paperless office, the flying car.

10. Where are you earning your revenue? Don’t major in minors. Make sure you do a cost-benefit analysis. Increase that revenue to serve your customers better.

A case study

Swindler then presented a case study that Astek undertook for SIPA member EB Medicine. The goals were to get in touch with EB Medicine’s readers, understand what the true value proposition of mobile would be for them, and finally separate the mobile buzz from reader reality.

“Overall, they showed good growth in mobile traffic,” Swindler said. But he questioned if that was enough to justify a huge financial outlay. “Don’t let fear guide a critical decision. Anecdotes, buzz, a couple survey responses, is that enough to say this is a direction? They had done quantitative research.” But Swindler decided that they needed some qualitative research as well.

Astek spoke in-depth with five emergency room physicians—the EB Medicine audience—to truly understand what they needed, “rather than just get answers to survey questions.” They wanted to know “how they think, how they are using this technology. How are they using their iPhones in the emergency room? Would a quick reference guide help them do their jobs better?”

The findings were critical in guiding EB Medicine’s next steps. It made them think about their content differently. It helped them understand that they had more than one kind of reader. “It’s not enough to just say this is our readers,” Swindler said. “We needed a deeper understanding of that core value of EB Medicine.” They found that the best way to spread the word about their app would be one doctor telling another—and, if possible, hooking the residents, even if they couldn’t pay yet.

Engagement gets better

The final presenter was Jeffrey S. Litvack, senior VP & chief digital officer for American Lawyer Media. He said that with sales of smartphones overtaking PCs in 2012, 2013 would be the “tipping point” for mobile.

‘How did we approach mobile? We looked at what our users are doing,” Litvack said. “How are they interacting with us? Is it through the mobile Web, e-newsletters, mobile apps, digital editions for mobile devices?” He spoke of the decision to go either with responsive design—a scaling down of your site—or native—an all new-for-mobile site. ALM chose native. They were able to launch from Day 1 with a positive ROI by selling the ad rights to a sponsor.

Litvack said that with more readers opening email on their smartphones, the importance of optimization increases. That view may determine if the reader saves or deletes. Since the launch of ALM’s mobile optimized websites, click thrus have increased 120%. “That’s hockey-stick growth,” he said. “Very rare. We’ve had 144% more traffic coming from mobile and 40% in average click-thru rates for advertisers.” The mobile breakdown has been 2/3 smartphone and 1/3 tablet.

Though valuable, Litvack said that apps can be very expensive to build and maintain. He warned of going the Apple route, where you have to abide by their timing for both launch and updates. Apps can be effective, he added, but with almost a million apps in the app store, “getting noticed is very hard.”

He believes that engagement and the number of times people come back will always be higher through an app than on the desktop. “The users will be more interactive with that content. People will look at more pages, because it will download the information [easier] and make [the process] more a seamless.”

Lastly, Litvack stressed the opportunities that mobile offers for attracting print advertisers. “Digital editions resonate with print advertisers. They allow interactivity. You can sell them at print rate. Smaller screen sizes mean less content,” but less can be more. He also spoke of the importance of taking a different approach with mobile—from headlines to delivery. “Organizational and process changes are needed,” Litvack said. “Mobile is not a standalone channel; it’s part of the entire customer experience. And it’s becoming the predominant way for accessing your sites.”

The next big thing, Litvack pondered. “How mobile will be connected to cars.”

The second webinar, The Guide to Creating a Mobile Business, will take place Sept. 19. Sign up here.

Ronn Levine began his career as a reporter for The Washington Post and has won numerous writing and publications awards since. Most recently, he spent 12 years at the Newspaper Association of America covering a variety of topics before joining SIPA in 2009 as managing editor. Follow Ronn on Twitter at @SIPAOnline

Share|

Filed Under: Content, SIPA, SIPA Events Tagged With: digital content, Mobility

SIPAlert Daily – Increase webinar revenue with these tips

August 27, 2013 By Ronn Levine

Here are some tips for expanding your webinar reach. The first five come from consultant Leslie Davidson (pictured here) of Davidson Direct.

1. Your speakers! Ask them to get the social media word out to their customers and prospects. Have them write a blog post for you. Ask for a brief video interview that you can post on your YouTube channel and then on your blog.

2. List exchanges. Do an exchange of lists with a competitor or other company that targets the same or similar audience.

3. Trade associations. Strike a deal with an association whose members you want to reach with your message.

4. Incentivize. Give your speakers an incentive to spread the word by providing an affiliate link for registrants they refer.

5. Social networking. Join LinkedIn groups whose members belong to your target audience and let them know each time you offer a new webinar.

6. Higher price points. One SIPA member increased their webinar prices from $190 to $290 about 18 months ago and never looked back. They’re actually getting more attendance now. They also offer an unlimited site license for about $400 which is also doing well. This way you can also show the true value but still offer lower early-bird pricing. And it also makes it much easier to charge more over time.

7. Panel discussions. SIPA member Bulldog Reporter uses a moderator and panels for many of their webinars. In an upcoming webinar on pitching business and financial media, they have panelists from the Los Angeles Times, Fortune Magazine, Barron’s and San Jose News plus a former Huffington Post reporter. For a half-day webinar on measuring PR ROI, they have “practitioners” from National Wildlife Foundation, Hill & Knowlton, Research Data Insight, University of Miami, Dlvr.it and PRIME Research, among others.

8. Discounts (10-20%) for premium subscribers. If your system can recognize them upon registration and give them the discount automatically, all the better. You will be showing them the value of paying for the publication subscriptions.

9. Bundling. Instead of selling just your webinar, sell an annual or monthly membership to your site that includes the webinar. It’s good road to renewal to be able to start off a membership with that benefit.

10. Know your audience! One audience may like short pauses to have group discussions, another may need more time for Q&As—especially if you have a lawyer speaking. Be sure to survey your registrants to know that you are giving them what they want.

11. Be prepared. Have a good system in place to handle those last-minute desperate calls from people who don’t look at any of your information until the last minute.

12. Recordings. Decide whether the recording is important to your business. A recording link the day after the webinar can often boost sales significantly because you catch all of the people who can’t make it live.

To subscribe to the SIPAlert Daily, create or update your SIIA User profile and select “SIPA interest.”

Share|

Filed Under: SIPA, SIPAlert Daily Tagged With: marketing, Webinars

SIPAlert Daily – Member Profile: Thomas Parmalee, Kates-Boylston Publications

August 26, 2013 By Ronn Levine

Thomas Parmalee, Executive Director, Kates-Boylston Publications (a division of UCG), Wall, N.J.

SIPA: First of all, congratulations on the SIPAwards that you and your team have won. Your audience is funeral and cemetery professionals. Did you know much about them when you joined the company?
THOMAS: I wasn’t an expert, although strangely enough, my first real job was on the obituary desk of The Times of Trenton and my boss there—a great journalist by the name of Peter Callas—would always jokingly call me “Dr. Death.” I did learn about funeral directors and death while on the obituary desk and later as a police reporter covering crime and the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. I sometimes think it’s a bit odd that I’m right back where I started—on the death beat, so to speak.

Does the subject bring specific challenges?
The biggest challenge for me personally is that it’s such a defined beat. After seven years, it can be challenging to find new angles, new stories—but that makes the job interesting. Once your work becomes too easy, there’s something wrong, and this position has managed to maintain my interest. I come to work every day looking forward to doing my best, knowing our readers need us to confront business challenges.

What is your role as executive director?
I mainly manage our editorial operations as well as on-site conferences. And of course, I contribute to the other aspects of our business however I can.

Are you presenting information differently now?
We’re doing more webinars, more social networking. We just launched an app for our Funerals of the Famous series; people can subscribe to the app for $2.99 per month and read about the lives and deaths of some of the world’s most important people. Our first issue features Steve Jobs, Whitney Houston and George Washington. We are very excited about the app because in addition to serving our audience of funeral professionals, we’re hoping to generate interest from the general public. This will be a new challenge for us, but we’re excited about the possibilities. We’re also redesigning our website to improve and add to the ways we deliver content. In the end, however, I’m a big believer that if you produce great content that can’t be found anywhere else, then a lot of things end up taking care of themselves.

Do you still use print?
We print both of our magazines, American Funeral Director and American Cemetery. We also have a weekly newsletter, Funeral Service Insider, which is delivered in print as well as by email as a PDF. Our new website, which we’re in the process of working on, will allow us to deliver our award-winning content online in addition to print.

Any particular reason print is still so heavy?
Much of our audience is pretty conservative and traditional. They’re gravitating online, but at a pace slower than a lot of industries. That’s a factor. We also believe print has a lot of benefits, and there’s nothing like holding a magazine in your hands, marking it up and passing it around. That’s also good for our advertisers, too, and our readers are really vested in our printed products. The challenge for us is to add to the ways we deliver our content—not eliminate print, which we believe in.

Did you consider a digital magazine?
We’ve done demos of those in the past, but I’m not sure that the flip-book format that many magazines use is the best option. However, we’re committed to delivering content to our readers in new and innovative ways while also providing our advertisers with real value.

You mentioned social media?
Yes, we have Facebook fan pages for Kates-Boylston Publications and our flagship brands. We focus mainly on those, but we are also on Twitter, LinkedIn and will likely experiment on other sites such as Pinterest. Cemeteries have beautiful landscapes, and that’s where Pinterest would most likely come in.

Just curious—are there many women in the industry?
Yes, more and more. In fact, there are now more women in mortuary college than men, and there are many women who own funeral homes and hold leadership positions in the business. For instance, the CEO of the National Funeral Directors Association is Christine Pepper. The president of Batesville Casket Co. is Kim Ryan. The owner of Kelco Supply Co. is Alicia Carr. I could go on and on…women are a force to be reckoned with in funeral service.

Mortuary college?
Educational requirements to be in funeral service vary from state to state, but virtually all states require some type of mortuary education. In some states, you need to go through training as an embalmer. Other states have a split licensure where you can become a funeral director without knowing how to embalm. There’s a decreasing emphasis on embalming—for better or worse—because of the rising cremation rate.

Why the rise in cremation?
That’s based on a variety of factors. The Catholic Church and other religions have become more accepting of the practice. Some people just do not want to be buried in the ground. And there is also the perception that cremation costs less. That’s true to a certain extent in that it eliminates the need for a casket, but most of our customers would argue that cremating a loved one does not eliminate the need to hold some type of service to deal with the loss and pay tribute to their memory.

Unfortunately, I had to deal with a funeral home not too long ago. But they were very easy and fair to deal with.
Yes, 99% of the time funeral directors are trying to do the right thing and the best that they can to help families. Most consider it a calling and have a strong desire to serve others.

Good stuff. Thanks.

Share|

Filed Under: SIPA, SIPAlert Daily

SIPAlert Daily – Invitation Marketing may be next big thing

August 22, 2013 By Ronn Levine

Elizabeth McGovern plays Cora, Countess of Grantham, on the celebrated PBS show, Downton Abbey. It was recently announced that she will be the recipient of the 2013 William Shakespeare Award for Classical Theater given by Washington D.C.’s Shakespeare Theater Company. She has never performed at the Shakespeare Theatre.

“I thought it’s a nice thing to celebrate not only her successful career as an actress but the fact that she had classical roots to start with,” Michael Kahn, artistic director at STC,” told The Washington Post’s Jessica Goldstein. “And to encourage her to go back to that when Downton is over.”

Kahn also had something else in mind and was not shy to say. “Most of the time [after winning this award] they say, ‘Gee, wouldn’t it be wonderful to work here?’ And then I very often invite them.”

SIPA runs live events and puts on webinars as do many of our members. We try hard to feature our members as speakers—knowing how knowledgeable they are and giving them a platform to shine and become more known in the industry. It’s good for them and good for SIPA. But Kahn’s strategy—of giving an award and then an invitation—deserves a closer look.

Let’s call it Invitation Marketing. I googled this and came up with a post by Mike Shaffer on his blog called The Buzz from a couple years ago. He gave an example of waiting for a car to move in front of him when the light turns green. Shaffer gets upset, while his father used to “calmly ask the driver blocking the way if they are waiting for a ‘personal invitation.’

“As a kid, that always made me laugh. As a marketer, I use it to guide everything I do.

“Yes, it sounds silly, but who wouldn’t want a ‘personal invitation’ to a brand? If you communicate correctly, each in your target audience should feel like the brand is reaching out to them individually, inviting them to join the family. Then, it’s not a purchase you are making, but an investment.”

It’s a bit of a leap to go from inviting Elizabeth McGovern to star in a play to inviting people to purchase one of your bundles. Yet as more and more SIPA companies go the “member” route as a business model, maybe it’s not such a big leap after all. Your “members” are going to require a more personal touch than your subscribers did.

Taking this a bit further, how much personalized, invitation marketing can we afford to do? Maybe more than we think. When we think of personally reaching out to prospective members or speakers, we might immediately dismiss it. “Oh, I don’t have time to do that.” But what can be more important than getting new members and keeping the ones you have? Maybe we should leave time every day to make these types of calls.

Kahn doesn’t have to think that way. He can think in terms of, “Will this person make our theater money?” McGovern would. And there will be times when we think that way as well, when a speaker—say a high-ranking government official or well-known author—can make us money. We will not be worried about their member or subscriber status.

The Post article joked about who else from Downton Abbey Kahn could invite. “How about the hot Turkish guy, Pamuk?” writes Goldstein. “Let’s get Pamuk! Better yet: What are the odds of [the great English actress] Maggie Smith making an appearance in [Washington, D.C.]?”

“Maggie doesn’t even want to do a play anymore,” said Kahn, who obviously had already thought of that possibility (and who knows what type of award). “She said to me, ‘Michael, I’ve done them all. There’s none that I want to do anymore.’” You can just hear her saying that in her best Downton, I-told-you-so accent.

Invitation marketing? Stay tuned.

To subscribe to the SIPAlert Daily, create or update your SIIA User profile and select “SIPA interest.”

Share|

Filed Under: SIPA, SIPAlert Daily Tagged With: marketing, members

SIPAlert Daily – Not always best to focus on just one thing

August 21, 2013 By Ronn Levine

Last night I was sure that I lost my card to get into our building. I was bemoaning the red tape I would encounter today to get a new one when it turned up at the bottom of my briefcase. (It’s usually in my pocket.) So this morning all I could think about was that card and the firm grip I had on it. Alas, I emerged from the D.C. Metro and realized I had left my phone home.

The moral: Focusing on just one thing may cause you to lose sight of some others. Here are five tips in five areas of your business. Email me if one rings true; might not be best to call or text me today.

1. Build trust with an audience. Ben Heald, CEO of Sift Digital—who will be speaking at SIIA’s Digital Content & Media Summit next month in London—wants you to be more open when you speak to colleagues and audiences. He recounts a talk he gave to local start-up entrepreneurs where he spoke about the issues and mistakes that his company had dealt with. “I could easily have given them a glossier version of events, in which we smoothly got to 130 staff and £8m revenue, but the learning experience wouldn’t have been nearly so strong,” he wrote in his blog. “The audience seemed to be interested—loads of questions and comments, good chats afterwards, LinkedIn requests, personal emails and even an invitation to repeat the talk in Manchester. …once again it was a reminder that if you want to build trust with an audience you need to put your real self out there.”

2. Think global. From Elana Fine, managing director of the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business: “Understand every business is a global business. I repeat. Understand every business is a global business and every entrepreneur is a global entrepreneur. For those of you who use the business model canvas as a planning tool—think of your canvas and look at which box represents a global opportunity. Is it a customer segment, a manufacturing partner or a distribution channel?”

3. Market to inspire participation. Ariana Huffington on what Jeff Bezos should do with The Washington Post (from an article in the Washington City Paper): “The first thing…is start to bring the incredible level of consumer engagement that he created at Amazon to the paper. I’ve always said the future of journalism is going to be a hybrid future—one that combines the best tools of traditional media…with the best tools of the digital world, like speed and engagement. Journalism is moving from a mode of presentation to participation.”

4. Improve meetings. Speaking of Bezos, Daniel Pink writes in his book, To Sell Is Human, that the Amazon founder often includes an empty chair at the table in important planning meetings. It represents the customer: “Seeing it encourages meeting attendees to take the perspective of the invisible but essential person. What’s going through her mind? What desires and concerns? What would she think of the ideas we are putting forward?” While you’re looking at that empty chair,” writes Jill Geisler of Poynter, “remember to make sure you think of every possible customer that could occupy it—not just those who look and sound like the colleagues in the room with you.

5. Truly commit to digital first. Writing on the Poynter site, Cory Bergman, GM of NBC’s Breaking News, chronicled Facebook’s mobile turnaround. ”Even at a thriving Silicon Valley startup full of employees in their twenties and thirties, [CEO Mark] Zuckerberg battled a desktop-centric culture. He backed up his ‘mobile first’ declaration with his own behavior. He removed his desktop monitor from his desk. Whenever someone pitched him an idea, he would ask, ‘What does that look like on mobile?’ He urged staff to ditch their iPhones for Android phones to more closely mirror the population of Facebook mobile users.” Note: 85% of Breaking News’ visits now originate from a mobile device.

To subscribe to the SIPAlert Daily, create or update your SIIA User profile and select “SIPA interest.”

Share|

Filed Under: SIPA, SIPAlert Daily, Uncategorized Tagged With: audience, global, participation, publishing

SIPAlert Daily – The importance of talking meaningfully with your customers

August 20, 2013 By Ronn Levine

To create new norms, you have to understand people’s existing norms and barriers to change. You have to understand what’s getting in their way.

—Atul Gawande in his July 29 New Yorker magazine article on innovation

Last week I spoke with Joe May, the marketing director for SIPA member Pro Farmer. They are currently in the middle of their biggest week of the year: Crop Tour. The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and Reuters all cover it. He told me that more and more farmers are using mobile devices, and that tablets are “exploding” for his audience. “The commercials you see probably don’t show that,” he said. iPads on a tractor? Who knew?

Pro Farmer does. They are helping to create new norms for farmers by talking to them, meeting with them and understanding their situations. Out of that understanding comes:

• Pro Farmer Text Quotes sent three times daily to cell phones;

• voice alerts with market advice and breaking news;

• Pro Farmer Today, seven profit-building reports, easy to read on any device; and

• an audio Monday Morning wake up call.

In the first webinar of SIIA’s new Mobile Essentials series held last week, Andy Swindler, president of Astek Consulting, presented a case study they did for SIPA member EB Medicine. (If you are a member and missed this, let us know and we will send you the link. It was an amazing session.) The goals were to get in touch with EB Medicine’s readers, understand what the true value proposition of mobile would be for them, and finally separate the mobile buzz from reader reality.

Astek spoke in-depth with five emergency room physicians—the EB Medicine audience—to truly understand what they needed, “rather than just get answers to survey questions.” They wanted to know “how they think, how they are using this technology. How are they using their iPhone in the emergency room? Would they look up some medical fact? Would a quick reference guide help them do their jobs better?”

In the article that Gawande wrote for The New Yorker, he tried to figure out why certain worthwhile innovations don’t spread, and how they can be spread. He quotes the scholar Everett Rogers: “Diffusion is essentially a social process through which people talking to people spread an innovation.” And his “talking” does not mean through social media.

The Pro Farmer Crop Tour is basically about touching the people with information. More than 100 volunteer crop scouts are going out every day this week to take corn and soybean measurements with reports given each night in meetings across the Midwest. Can you imagine how much Pro Farmer gains from a week like this? They are gathering key information and meeting many of their members—their word, not mine. “This is followed closely by the farmers we serve,” May said. “…There’s a video crew embedded in the tour and it blew up on Twitter.” (Pro Farmer actually has a video studio in their Cedar Falls, Iowa, offices.)

Gawande tells a story that he says “salespeople understand well.” He asked a pharmaceutical rep how he persuaded typically stubborn doctors to “adopt a new medicine. Evidence is not remotely enough, [the rep] said, however strong a case you may have. You must also apply ‘the seven rules of touches.’ Personally ‘touch’ the doctors seven times, and they will come to know you; if they know you, they might trust you; and, if they trust you, they will change.”

It’s hard for publishers to touch all of their customers in the way that this pharmaceutical rep started stocking doctors’ closets with free samples and then asking how their daughter’s soccer game went. But you can duplicate that human interaction in other meaningful ways, either through live events, in-depth interviews or maybe some kind of Twitter Chat or webinar Q&A.

Regardless, publishers, like any other business, need to reach out to their own markets in a meaningful way before making the big decisions that affect the bottom line.

To subscribe to the SIPAlert Daily, create or update your SIIA User profile and select “SIPA interest.”

Share|

Filed Under: SIPA, SIPAlert Daily Tagged With: all about mobile, customers, innovation, Mobility

SIPAlert Daily – Member Profile

August 19, 2013 By Ronn Levine

Adam Goldstein, Publisher, Business Management Daily, Falls Church, Va.

SIPA: Describe Business Management Daily.

ADAM: We are becoming less and less a publisher and more a training company. We still have a dozen newsletters, but we now do more than 200 webinars, have CD and video sales, and publish books and special reports. We have four verticals: HR, leadership, office administration and office technology—technology was a direct offshoot of office administration and has grown wildly.

Many SIPA members seem to be becoming other things.

Yes, the title of publisher is becoming more and more a misnomer. We have evolved from two webinars a month when I started to now doing four a week. It’s almost as big a revenue stream as the publishing side.

Do you bundle those with the newsletters?

No, usually it’s with access to the membership website. Sign up for a webinar and get 30 days free of our HR website. And on the 31st day we have their credit card and it’s payment time. It has been extraordinarily successful, tripling the size of the websites—especially the office technology website. We do sell a season pass for everything that we bundle with membership.

Have you had to make changes staff-wise?

Not really. We do our webinars by committee; myself and the editors get together on content issues. I’ll write marketing copy. We all get speakers. We do have one live event in Las Vegas every year—where I pretty much live. But more of my job is devoted to webinars, building partnerships and creative marketing. Phil [Ash, the company CEO] has his side and I have mine. Then there’s a centralized marketing, production and monitoring.

You mentioned Las Vegas. You are the Conference Co-Chair for the SIPA Marketing Conference, Dec. 11-13. That’s exciting.

Yes, it is. The reason we were able to get the Cosmopolitan [for the hotel] is because I looked at it for my own conference and there were deals to be had. Turns out they were eager to work with us. It may cost a little more to fly out there [than to Miami, site of the past couple Marketing Conferences], but the hotel rooms are vastly lower priced.

And it’s a buzz-worthy place, I’ve heard.

It’s a hot place—but a little more subtle than most Vegas hotels. It has a sleek design. Most conference sleeping rooms in Las Vegas tend to involve a 10-mile walk to the exhibit space and session rooms, of course through the casino. But the Cosmopolitan has two towers, one for vacationers and gamblers and one for business clients. So our elevators go right into our exhibit space.

And you also secured the keynote speaker, I believe, Joel Rothstein.

Yes, I’ve known Joel on a personal level for a while, and now he is vice president, technology strategy and innovation, Global Information Resources at Marriott . He was with Reuters and then Netscape in the early days. After a job as a journalist, he got into e-commerce with Marriott and helped to develop a new gaming app that they developed to attract brand loyalty of Millennials.

You have some other great speakers lined up as well.

We tried to pair up some of the lions of the industry with up-and-coming folks. David Foster has agreed to speak so that’s a big coup for us. Jenny Fukumoto of Ragan will be on that panel. This association has been a best-kept secret for 25 years. It took me that long to become an overnight sensation. I think the key was I left the room when they chose the Conference chairs.

I think you’re being pretty modest. What is your background?

Marketing. I first worked with KCI in 1985. That was my first real job in publishing. I have owned my own business, did consulting, and then Phil asked me to come here full-time. I still have that entrepreneurial bent. But there are few people better to work for than Phil and Allie Ash.

Back to the webinars for a second. Can you tell when they’re good?

Definitely. We can tell if someone has done well or poorly simply if people “leave the room,” or stay for the whole 75 minutes. Or ask for their money back. On the whole, we have very good speakers though. The worst thing is when it’s a 75-minute commercial about themselves. There’s always a Q&A after. Sometimes, if it’s an evergreen topic—say dealing with difficult people at work—we’ll play the recording of the individual webinar. Then have 20 minutes of Q&A with the speaker joining us. Usually we’ll tell people 45-50 minutes of presentation and 20 minutes of questions. When we have lawyers, we do the opposite; people have a lot of questions.

What keeps you up at night?

The continual transition to digital. We still have a healthy print business that I’m tired of being defensive about. ‘Ignore the future at your peril.’ There is a concern that online customers are less loyal than print—the economy of digital vs. the loyalty of print. We’ll see.

To subscribe to the SIPAlert Daily, create or update your SIIA User profile and select “SIPA interest.”

Share|

Filed Under: SIPA, SIPAlert Daily Tagged With: Profile, Webinars

Talk, Don’t Run: First ‘Mobile Essentials’ webinar yields firm but guarded business case

SIPAlert Daily – Increase webinar revenue with these tips

SIPAlert Daily – Member Profile: Thomas Parmalee, Kates-Boylston Publications

SIPAlert Daily – Invitation Marketing may be next big thing

SIPAlert Daily – Not always best to focus on just one thing

SIPAlert Daily – The importance of talking meaningfully with your customers

SIPAlert Daily – Member Profile

About SIIA