B2B Presence

In Marketplace365, Performance-Based Marketing Meets Virtual Events

Bill Rutledge — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 22:02:30 +0000

It has been interesting to see the “virtual event” platforms forge closer and stronger ties with the gatekeepers of content, including media firms, consultants, and (in some cases) vendors. On24, Webex, and Unifair have all pushed further in this direction. Now, Onstream Media has launched new virtual event platform (Marketplace365) that is pushing the partnership paradigm further, allowing a producer to start virtual events for free and pay only as they generate revenue.
At B2BPresence we believe that the Google AdSense “pay-for-performance” approach will eventually clone and adapt itself to every marketing ecosystem. Marketplace365 has opened the door for performance-based marketing in virtual events, and competitors will have to take notice.
Virtual Edge carried an interesting overview of the platform, and an interview with Onstream Media’s CEO Randy Selman. Marketplace365 is a self-service environment for exhibitors, speakers and show producers, and the company claims that event producers can set up an entire event in a little as 9 days with no IT background and just basic computer skills. Selman touts the platform as a “true, 365 day a year marketplace where people can hold events, run expositions and drive traffic year round,”
Virtual events, as a one-off deal, necessarily lack the SEO leverage that comes from an enduring web presence. Marketplace365, as single platform that aggregates content, claims to have a leg up in the SEO game. That makes sense, but of course the proof will be in the search results.
At B2BPresence, our emphasis is on hybrid event models that enable real human interaction. We’ve produced and participated in “virtual events” and we’re still of the opinion that these are just informational web sites. However, these models will continue to thrive and will influence the development of live events. We look forward to further developments.

To Save Money, Don’t Overlook Craigslist

Bill Rutledge — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 19:34:19 +0000

This upcoming year, any time I have a basic easily outsourced task, I’m going to look to Craigslist first. What used to be a good second option resource for business services is now a brimming cornucopia of high-quality, low-cost resources. Case in point: I needed a photographer for a basic promotional job this week. A short post on Craigslist brought 30 (THIRTY!) responses within two hours, including some photographers with exceptional portfolios. Some of this may be a function of the economy. As with anything that seems to good to be true, there are caveats: You have to be explicit and unwavering in pricing. Anyone offering services should have at least a basic web site that doesn’t look “hinkey.” Talk to the provider by phone before committing to anything. For tasks that are more than a day in length, engage the provider for a brief period at first–if it works out you can usually extend the engagement.

A New Generation of Leads

Bill Rutledge — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 22:13:05 +0000

I’ve worked in a lot of different business media environments. Almost every organization that I’ve encountered is loathe to be associated with the “low class” function of lead generation. Traditionally, business media organizations, especially editors, want to be thought of as expert commentators on high-level issues of their day, and the iconic apex of their art form was the long form feature article–a linear, generalized, impersonal information experience that will eventually go the way of the radio play. The dirty mechanics of generating customers and sales always took place outside of the tent.
I’ve always been fascinated with the dirty mechanics, including lead gen, indexing functions (like directories or buyers guides), and community building (all building blocks for successful events, of course.) That’s why I was interested to read about RBI’s new focus, and apparent success in the area of lead gen, which they claim now accounts for one third of their online revenue.
We’re witnessing the ongoing disintermediation of business information (actually all information), and the collapse of traditional media. But we’re definitely not seeing the end of business marketing. If anything, we’re on the cusp of an explosion of new, personalized, targeted, real-time marketing tools and paradigms. The more I talk to media professionals, the more I’m convinced that great things are in the works.
I’m currently working on both online, live and hybrid media models with performance-based vendor participation. On one hand we sell networking opportunities; on the other hand we plan to sell lead-generation for vendors. So it’s important that we engage in a process of user-approved matchmaking, and avoid any perception that we reveal user data without permission. I’m interested in hearing about online approaches that turn lead-gen into high-quality networking. This issue could benefit from some serious academic investigation.

Twitter: A Series of Tubes

Bill Rutledge — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:09:57 +0000

As poor Senator Ted Stevens once told us, “the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes.” And then the laughter started.
I’m going to defend the Senator’s metaphor: The Internet is developing an underlying infrastructure (plumbing) that will support an impressive sprawl of new information communities. Chief among these is Twitter. Upon launch, Twitter in and of itself was easy to understand and caught on quickly but quickly earned the disdain of all of my busy colleagues, who saw it only as another place to try and avoid Kutcheresque gossipolemic. But with its open structure and immediacy, Twitter is emerging as an important piece of plumbing for enterprise messaging. I’ve seen more and more Tweetup references in conference coverage recently, and last month saw the first instance of an event trying to ban a tweetup taking place in conjunction with their event. I won’t mention the event, but you can search it out on Twitter.
I was also pleased to the closer integration of LinkedIn and Twitter. LinkedIn doesn’t get enough popular attention, which is fine with me. I’m hoping to be able to use LinkedIn for free forever. At some point, I know they’re going to reach into my pocket.
I’ve also seen a greater awareness of TweetDeck, and recently learned that TweetDeck is linking to LinkedIn. This will make my life a lot easier. TweetDeck allows you to manage your messaging across multiple platforms. Anyone who’s ever had to copy and paste a 140-character message 30 times before going home at night will love TweetDeck.
Twitter is tubes: Someday in the future, you’ll be messaging effectively, without ever thinking about Twitter–just like you flush the toilet without thinking about the massive infrastructure that makes that simple act possible.
At some point, I’ll post the Top 10 Networking Trends for Events in 2009.

Unconference: Room for Open Space

Bill Rutledge — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:06:32 +0000

Conference and trade show organizers tend to be conservative in terms of content issues. I rarely see any major events breaking from the traditional model of pre-set agenda, presentations, 5 minutes q&a, maybe with an occasional “birds of a feather” session, or hospitality event. But I’ve tried to keep tabs on the Open Space Technology movement, commonly referred to as “unconference.” A couple of great sites are available to give you an overview on this meeting structure: Open Space World includes a great collection overview information and links about the Open Space community. Unconference.net is more of a first-person take on creating and facilitating unconference events. There’s must-read information here for anyone in the events business.

I have never organized nor participated in an event that was structured like this. I’ve spoken to people who have and they uniformly rave. However, these events are more closely associated with groups that have a specific purpose–like companies or tech standards groups. It would be hard to market an event that had no agenda, I think. We’re looking to incorporate an unconference approach into our hybrid event technology. If you’ve had experience with this format, I’d love to hear about it.

A Project That’s Going Well and Does Some Good

Bill Rutledge — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 03:04:50 +0000

I’m working on an awards program for a specific sector of the security market and it’s going very well. I’ve done awards programs before, but never one this extensive or ambitious–they’re presenting over 30 different awards. The client knows the market well, saw and opening and leapt in, in spite of the recession. They’ve created a great buzz and hundreds of companies have submitted paid nominations. When I talk to people outside of the industry, I always get a funny look about awards programs–people assume that these are cynical productions. The thing is, the people who receive these awards really appreciate them. I’ve seen men cry at these things. Many people work very hard with very little recognition. Getting a group of colleagues together to salute good work isn’t such a bad thing.

Professional Standards for Virtual Events

Bill Rutledge — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 01:47:07 +0000

I was interested to see that VirtualEdge announced the creation of a new Virtual Edge Institute education program, dedicated to “advancing the development and adoption of virtual event and meeting technology and best practices for collaboration and marketing.” Michael Doyle at VirtualEdge has a lot of great experience in this area. A great certification program could be created, which would allow us to add an acronym on a business card–maybe CVMP (Certified Virtual Meeting Professional)? It would be nice to see, eventually, established standards and best practices for a wide range of virtual and hybrid events. It would be nice just to see everyone using the same vocabulary.

The Big $ocial: Forrester Media Projections

Bill Rutledge — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:01:15 +0000

This great post from Brian Solis gives a good breakdown of Forrester’s five year forecast on interactive advertising spending. While the bulk of this revenue comes from search, the highest compound annual growth rate is in social media, at 34% and increasing to over $3 billion by 2014. As we’ve argued frequently in these posts, event media is (or must become) social media. Thus we take a bit of warmth in this cold winter of our recession.
In terms of scale and innovation, B2C marketers are way out on the cutting edge of creating a social media marketing experience, and this Mashable post about the same Forrester study includes a useful list of marketing case studies. Try to look beyond the ridiculous memes of contests, point-earning, twitter clues, and self-made videos. How do these marketing efforts really drive user involvement? How does that deliver value to the marketer? I’m just asking.

A Universe of Free Social Media Tools

Bill Rutledge — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 17:57:51 +0000

I’m endless fascinated by opportunities to integrate free social media tools into events. Junta42 features an excellent slide presentation on the 10 Best Kept Secrets of Social Media by Scott Abel, which was part of his presentation at Web Content 2009. Without any audio, some pages are a little opaque, but a quick scan should give you a handful of new ideas (blow it up to full screen size to read the small copy):

10 Web 2.0 Tools Marketers Can Use Today

View more Microsoft Word documents from Scott Abel.

When Does Event Co-Location Work?

Bill Rutledge — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 17:09:53 +0000

This is a story about two trade shows, and the slippery subject of industry alignment. I spent Wednesday this week at Medical Design & Manufacturing East, a Canon Communications production at the Javits Center. At least I think I did. The trade show floor is a Balkanized map of several events including East Pack, Atlantic Design & Manufacturing, Automation Technology Expo, and Green Manufacturing Expo. As you move about the floor, you pass from show to show, sometimes without knowing it. The exhibitors I spoke with were not concerned about, and some were not even aware of, the patchwork configuration of this event. In this case the event is big enough to mitigate any confusion. Automation technology professionals might wander into the Medical Design event, but not to the point that a Medical Design exhibitor would say that he was seeing the wrong kinds of people. And if a medical device designer was also interested in automation technology, so much the better. Also, Canon is an extremely professional event production group, and that dedication shows up in details like documentation and signage. So a reasonable degree of industry alignment is maintained, and exhibitors get access to several large audiences.

But bad co-location can be like a cancer on an event. I worked for several years on the largest smart card industry event in the US. This event was essentially a co-location of two industry events: one for security/ID and one for financial services. One group uses smart cards for identity purposes and the other for payment services. Simple, right? Everybody uses the same card technology, so why not put the whole thing together? Except these groups are like night and day. Imagine an event that tried to attract both farmers and airline pilots. How would you create a marketing message that appeals to both groups? The obvious answer was to split and try to grow two smaller shows. Except every financial scenario showed an immediate drop in net profits, with no guarantee of future success. The company opted for the “safe” status quo, which was essentially a guarantee of future failure: the event eroded steadily and consistently, year after year. Industry alignment got worse, and the exhibitors got a smaller and smaller audience.

One last word about the very relative perception of success: The Medical Design show was packed. There were hundreds of attendees in every aisle, and it was difficult to speak with some exhibitors because they were busy with potential clients. I know a dozen shows that would kill to have that kind of traffic. But when I spoke to exhibitors, several were disappointed. Their perception was that the event was down from the previous year.