BtoB Media Business - January 2007 - (Page 4)

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After announcing in early December a deal Vitale formed Chatsworth, Calif.-based 1105 to buy Post Newsweek Tech Media from the Media last April to buy 101communications Washington Post Co., 1105 Media said Jan. 2 and Stevens Publishing. Rob Garrett, managing director of that it had agreed to acquire Fawmedia investment bank AdMedia cette Technical Publications. Partners, said Vitale has made the Fawcette publishes Enterprise Arright moves. “One of his key interchitect, JavaPro and Visual Studio, ests is increasing his tech basket,” he and produces several conferences, said. “Is it a risky strategy? It was including VS Live!, Web Builder 2.0 seven years ago, but he’s riding a and Web Design World. good wave now.” Vitale said he was eager to develThe Post Newsweek Tech Meop cross-marketing opportunities dia portfolio includes Defense Sysbetween Fawcette’s conferences and Neal Vitale tems, Government Computer News, the Contingency Planning and Management Group, which 1105 Media acquired Government Leader, Washington Technology, in November from MCG Capital Corp. Contin- several online products and the FOSE trade gency Planning owns CMP West and CMP show. 1105 Media’s government and security East, among other assets. Financial terms of the three deals were not portfolio already included the flagship Federal Computer Week, Occupational Health and disclosed. 1itale said a separate deal is pending in the Security and Security Products. V BY MATTHEW SCHWARTZ F RO M THE P U B LI S H E R Bob Felsenthal TH E BIG QUESTIONS Sid Holt Editorial Director VNU Business Media Q. What are some of the ways b-to-b media com- A. There is always more to the story. One of the tenets of b-to-b journalism is that our panies can harness the increasing clout of citi- reporters and editors have incomparable experience and insight, that they know the zen journalism? A. Many editors and publishers are still suspicious of the changes being wrought on newspapers and magazines by the Internet—especially so when the topic is citizen journalism. I still encounter some in our business who consider citizen journalism more a threat to the authority of traditional media than an opportunity to engage with passionate, knowledgeable and, yes, opinionated “civilians.” Reporting and writing has always relied on the exchange of information; unfortunately—or so it seems— that exchange is rowdier than it used to be. businesses they are covering better than anyone else. Citizen journalism suggests otherwise. Some people—editors, publishers, readers and, most frighteningly, advertisers—may think the value of b-to-b journalism in particular and traditional media in general is thereby lessened. But does anybody really expect reporters—or for that matter, bloggers—to be omniscient? The answer is accepting that more information is better than less, no matter who provided the information, and that the best journalists are those who make the most sense of the story. Q. What are some of the stumbling blocks to building relationships with citizen journalists? f 2006 taught us one thing, it’s that change is here. Guess what? There is more change coming in 2007, and it’s coming fast. The good news is that marketers’ budgets, according to our recent BtoB survey of 580 marketers, are going up. Sixty-seven percent of those polled plan to increase their budgets, and more than a third expect to boost them by more than 20%. I should mention that we also found that while 20% plan to decrease their print budgets, 34% plan to increase their print outlay. And most important: 76% are increasing online spending. The dollars are there; we have budgets to tap in b-to-b. We just need to make sure we are offering the complete integrated package to attract that spending. From e-mail to webcasts, banners to search, publishers need a large quiver filled with arrows for marketers to use to hunt down their prey. And they are hunting. A majority of marketers 67% said they are most focused on new customer acquisition— for the third year in a row. We all need to start developing additional lead generation programs; building online directories that can be searched MediaBrains Inc. has helped us do that on our site ; producing webinars we have done many over the past year, using ON24 Inc. ; and adding more white paper microsites, e-mail newsletters, videocasts and podcasts. If we do that and keep the content strong in our print and event products, publishers will see revenue leap. The most important thing may be to start charging more for online advertising and sponsorships, significantly more. Marketers’ budgets to grow in 2007 I M Bob Felsenthal can be reached at bfelsenthal@crain.com. 4 | Media Business | January 2007 | mediabusinessonline.com Warning : Unknown : The session id contains invalid characters, valid characters are only a-z, A-Z and 0-9 in Unknown on line 0 Warning : Unknown : Failed to write session data files . Please verify that the current setting of session.save_path is correct /var/lib/php/session in Unknown on line 0 http://mediabusinessonline.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of BtoB Media Business - January 2007

Contents
Upfront
Cover Story
Feature
Sales & Marketing
M&A
Events
Production
Online
Circulation
People
Benchmarks
Endnote

BtoB Media Business - January 2007