B2B Presence

Recently Gartner announced that they would cancel their Spring ITExpo. This follows last year’s divestment of their highly successful Gartner Vision Events. I can’t find any mention of Vision Events on the TechWeb site. Does anyone know what happened here?

Anyway, it’s been interesting to watch Gartner slowly retreat from the event business. While they still maintain an extensive slate of customer-focused “summits” and “seminars,” they have shed or shut down big events with the most potential for generating vendor revenue. I’m sure that this has mostly to with the current macroeconomic winter. But I’ve heard enough from within Gartner to guess that a bigger issue might “editorial hypersensitivity.” Here’s the story:

Before Gartner had an extensive events business, I was marketing Miller Freeman’s Software Development conferences and working closely with Gartner on speakers and cooperative promotion. They were a great source for expert speakers on almost any technology issue, and were eager to get their analysts in front of an audience. I remember thinking that they were potentially a huge, sleeping competitor. They had everything that was necessary to drive huge business in events: A rock-solid reputation, the industry expertise necessary to produce great content, dedicated clients, eager vendors, and few competitive issues. Gartner finally figured this out and their events business really took off under the leadership of Phil McKay, late of Penton.

This expanding business is outside of Gartner’s core production of high-priced reports and consulting services, produced by an army of analyst “super editors.” While B2B editors may jealously guard their editorial integrity, Gartner analysts cultivate a religious devotion to integrity. As a reward, they are often regarded as industry oracles by deferential followers.

Here’s where the hypersensitivity comes in: I was trying to recruit a speaker from Gartner recently and was told that they may no longer participate in competing events. This potential speaker was not happy with the policy, and was especially unhappy with the idea that Gartner had become such a high-profile trade show producer.

Speaking at industry events is a great way for a super editor to raise his or her profile, enjoy the presence of a worshipful audience, and enjoy a free trip. Now they were blocked from doing so at Gartner’s many competitors. At the same time they are tied by Gartner corporate branding to these big vendor-driven events. Even the slightest whiff of “pay for play” can shrivel a great industry oracle. I’m sure this discontent is voiced loudly, and echoes in the executive offices at Gartner.

A couple of events-related Apple announcements came out this week regarding their participation at events. Apple’s dropping out of Macworld. Also, previously, Apple Expo Paris was canceled. The speculation about this is funny. The issue is alignment. Here’s why they dropped:
* IDG makes a lot of money off Macworld. Apple doesn’t.
* Apple can’t control the user experience at Macworld. IDG does.
* Apple has over 250 stores now. They probably interface with more clients in a day than Macworld get once a year.
* IDG is a business publisher. Attendance at Macworld is prosumer/consumer/enthusiast.
* IDG is where events go to die. (Ask me for a list.)
* There’s no Macworld without Apple, and Apple knows it.
Look for Apple to be the lead keynote/product announcement at CES next year, or look for the launch of the coolest new event to hit the business world in a long time, produced by Apple.

It’s always nice to hear about event media that works. My wife does marketing for PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Like most major accounting firms they have an extremely tight relationship with their clients. When there are major issues of concern for their clients, they organize and execute informational webcasts. My wife recently managed a webcast on some esoteric issue in international tax law. She told me that they had over 300 registrants. I asked her what the attrition was. She asked me what I meant. “How many people actually logged in?” “300,” she said. They have 0% attrition.

I’ve done webcast events for B2B media companies where attrition was as high as 80%. PWC has 0% attrition because they’re so closely integrated with their clients. If you’re producing webcasts, it’s worth asking how you can achieve a similar level of integration with your target audience.

Meetup is a great web service that allows average folks like you me to schedule a meeting, invite friends, and share comments. It’s essentially an enhanced e-vite, but the company has put some effort into develop communities of like-minded enthusiasts. They’ve got thousands of groups listed.

I belong to, and attend, the New York High Tech Meetup. This group was organized by the founder of Meetup, Scott Heiferman. It’s one of the larger, more dynamic groups on Meetup. I went to their monthly meeting which was held last night at the new IAC Building, a fantastic building designed by Frank Gehry. Each meeting includes 6-8 entrepreneurs making presentations about their startups. There are 6000 people in the New York High Tech Meetup group and about 400 were there last night. More would have been there if there was more space. This meetup always fills up quickly (online registration limits attendance). Used to be free, now they charge $10 to cut down on no-shows.

Anyway, Meetup has been successful in creating a tight business community that any B2B media company would be happy to have, but because they are a web services company they apparently don’t know how to leverage or monetize it. I don’t know how they make money, other than traffic on their site. The people I talk to at these meeting always discuss potential value added options for these events–things they would be willing to pay for. These ideas go nowhere because the event is essentially a voluntary effort. Business marketers should take a look at Meetup and see how this model can be adapted to a serious B2B effort.

Relationship marketing plays an important and under-appreciated role in the B2B marketing mix. It is the job of the B2B marketer to move the potential buyer from brand/product awareness, to investigation, to purchase, and ultimately to an interactive, long-term relationship. The relationship aspect of this continuum is key in B2B. Consumer marketers make a lot of noise about creating communities of customers. B2B marketers, in a smaller universe, must quietly live and die by these relationships.

Conferences and events have traditionally served as the place where relationship are cultivated and harvested. As an event producer, I’ve seen a lot of neglect paid to this important tradition, by both event producers and business marketers. The strategy for event producers has been a big tent approach—create the largest gathering possible, and leave interaction to the participants. Too many event producers treat their business like a transient mall. They rent space and collect fees for a limited range of services. They recruit speakers, print badges. That’s not enough any more. Event producers must develop new tools that help business marketers create or leverage their customer communities.

Relationship marketing is fragmenting and fluxuating. Once limited to meetings and sales calls, business relationships are now cultivated through webcasting, user groups, social media, blogs, chat boards, traditional trade shows and conferences, inside and outside sales calls, informal meetups, custom/corporate events, product announcements, virtual events, and hybrid events.

This weblog will look at people, organizations, technologies and trends that will move event media forward and create new industry memes. Traditional marketing is built on the four “p’s: Product, Price, Promotion, Placement. Web marketers have proposed a lot of new “p’s”: Personalization, Participation, Peer networking. I’m going to roll them all up under the rubric of market “Presence.”