Digital Symposium
Practical online strategies and tactics specifically for the B2B editor

Friday, Nov. 6, 2009
Hyatt Regency San Francisco at the Airport
Includes Digital Azbee Awards of Excellence Luncheon

Conference brochure (1.1MB PDF)

See tweets from the symposium.
(376K PDF; created via TweetDoc)

Agenda

9:00 a.m.–9:15 a.m.
Welcome

9:15 a.m.–10:30 a.m.
Writing for search, navigation & the B2B reader
Speaker: Harry McCracken, founder and editor, Technologizer

This session will examine the following:

• How good online writing is similar to — but differs from — print content.
• Things “everybody knows” about Web writing that aren’t true.
• The right and wrong ways to make stories search engine-friendly.
• The effect of reader personas and scenarios on online writing.
• When to use and how-to write lists and subheads.
• How to write meaningful links.
• Useful and benefit-focused headlines, leads, and subheads.
• Ways to organize and format content for maximum readability.
• Online story-planning and how it differs from print.

See a blog post by McCracken on SEO myths.

10:30 a.m.–10:45 a.m. Break

10:45 a.m.–12:00 noon
Leveraging the power of B2B social communities
Speakers: Jim Sulecki, director of e-media, Meister Media Worldwide
Kellie Parker, community manager, SEGA
Hinda Chalew, vice president of marketing, Staffing Industry Analysts

What you’ll learn:

• Benefits of building a social community for your audience.
• Characteristics of a market necessary for a community to thrive.
• Components and functionality of a good social community.
• Staffing structure: Ways to moderate and administer the communities.
• Pros and cons of various community platforms, e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook, Ning, and proprietary.
• Best practices, pitfalls.
• How editors can use the reader-generated content and uncover market intelligence.
• How to synchronize content among your print, Web, and other Internet platforms with your community.

Noon–1:30 p.m.
Digital conference awards banquet

1:30 p.m.–2:15 p.m.
Web Site of the Year Case Study
Speaker: TBA

The top editor of the Web Site of the Year winner will discuss the following components:

• Reporting, writing, editing, depth of information.
• Information architecture, organization, design, and presentation.
• Navigation and “findability.”
• Service and solution-based content, usefulness to readers.
• The user experience, community, interactivity, user-generated content.
• Effective use of technology.
• Journalism ethics.

2:15 p.m.–2:30 p.m. Break

2:30 p.m.–3:30 p.m.
Working with a new content management system
Speakers:
Tyler Davidson, Editorial Director, Meetings Media
Jeff Freund, CEO and founder, Clickability
Fredric Paul, publisher and editor-in-chief, bMighty.com

What you’ll learn:

• How to walk the line between flexibility and control.
• Which new skills editors must learn to use a CMS effectively, and who on staff should be responsible for uploading content.
• How a CMS helps editors to repurpose print content into robust online content.
• Best practices, challenges and benefits in respect to CMS implementations.

3:30 p.m.–3:45 p.m. Break

3:45 p..m.– 4:45 p.m.
Organizing print & online B2B editorial teams
Speakers:
Mary Slepicka, group content director, Advanstar Communications’ Powersport Group
Eric Knorr, editor-in-chief, InfoWorld
Steve Towns, editor, Government Technology, and group editorial director at e.Republic Inc.

Discussion will include the following:

• The new job description.
• How to allocate staff to meet content requirements for print and online.
• Streamlining workflow: The new editorial process.
• How to maintain high editorial standards and quality with fewer resources.
• When should you outsource work?
• How can an editor do more with less?
• The very small staff.
  

Conference fee, including luncheon: $295, members; $395 nonmembers.

Hyatt Regency San Francisco at the Airport rooms: $149 (single/double); 650-347-1234. Ask for ASBPE rate.

About the Speakers

Hinda Chalew is a marketing executive with more than 15 years experience spanning corporate, strategic, product marketing and management for a wide variety of companies and industries. As vice president of marketing at Staffing Industry Analysts, a research and analysis firm covering the contingent workforce, she is responsible for managing all marketing activities including: database/direct marketing, conference/event management, product management, product marketing, PR and corporate marketing. She oversees a print magazine and several newsletters catering to providers and corporate buyers of contingent labor.

Tyler Davidson is the editorial director of Meetings Media, a division of Stamats Communications Inc. Meetings Media produces business-to-business publications serving the meeting planning industry. Its four primary print publications are Meetings West, Meetings South, Meetings East and Meetings MidAmerica. It also produces MeetingsFocus.com, which integrates the content from its print publications and e-media effort with site selection tools and resources meeting planners can use to become more efficient.
 
Before joining Meetings Media in 2000, Davidson worked as a destinations editor at Travel Weekly and TravelAge West magazines, where at various times he covered Africa, Asia, Canada, the Western United States, the Middle East and Switzerland.
 
He has also covered the real estate industry for a daily newspaper and reported on the San Francisco 49ers and Oakland Raiders for El Mensajero newspaper, besides working in various editorial capacities for The Nose, a San Francisco-based national satire magazine.

Jeff Freund is founder and CEO of Clickability. Freund designed and deployed the first and only pure-play SaaS platform for the entire web content lifecycle, from content creation to optimization. His work to launch the flagship Clickability platform in 2003 has advanced and his team's solutions were serving over 200 million pages per month by end of 2007. In addition to the platform's core content management and publishing capabilities, Freund has overseen the launch of Clickability's comprehensive suite of publishing modules, which include an ad server, newsletter services, reports, polls and surveys, and search capabilities. With over 10 years of software and Internet experience, Freund’s earlier posts include Western U.S. head of technology for Network Software Associates, a provider of legacy-to-web host connectivity products for enterprise customers. He collaborated on Linux cluster supercomputer projects at UCLA. Freund received his BS and MS in Environmental Engineering from Stanford University.

Eric Knorr is editor in chief at InfoWorld. He brings 20 years of technology journalism experience to the planning, development, and execution of content that serves the needs of enterprise IT managers. Knorr is the former editor of PC World magazine, the creator of the best-selling The PC Bible, a founding editor of CNET, and a veteran of several dot-com follies. A winner of the Neal and Computer Press Awards for journalistic excellence, he has written hundreds of articles on desktop and enterprise technology. He has a bachelor of arts from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Harry McCracken is editor of Technologizer, a site about personal technology which he founded in June, 2008. The site reaches 400,000 unique visitors a month and was named as one of PCMag.com's favorite blogs; McCracken was also named by TechRepublic as the #1 techie to follow on Twitter, and cofounded the TWTRCON conference on Twitter for business in 2009.

Prior to starting Technologizer, McCracken spent more than thirteen years as an editor at PC World, the last four as vice president and editor in chief; he headed the team that was responsible for all content both in print and onlone. In 2008, he received American Business Media's Jesse H. Neal award for his PC World editorials, as well as the ABM's Timothy White Award for editorial integrity. MIN named him one of its most intriguing people in 2007, and he made Folio magazine's Folio:40 list of media movers and shakers in 2008.

McCracken has written for Slate, Popular Science, Family Circle, and many other publications, and has appeared as a technology expert on ABC, the BBC, CBS, CNN, the History Channel, NPR, and other television and radio outlets. He also collaborated with Dateline: NBC on a multistate investigation into PC repair.

A graduate of Boston University, McCracken currently lives in the Bay Area.

Kellie Parker leads a four-person community team for SEGA of America. Her team is responsible for creating and executing community and social media strategies to support SEGA’s games, including console titles, virtual arcade titles, and online role playing games. Her team manages forums, blogs, podcasts, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, YouTube pages, Flickr feeds, outreach to fansites, contests, and more.

In her previous role, Parker was the online community manager for PCWorld.com and Macworld.com, where she was responsible for setting the community-building strategies, managing the relationships with community software vendors, and interacting with the community members on both sites. She also managed all member created content on both sites, including blogs and blog comments, product reviews, and wiki knowledge base. She was responsible for all interactive features of both sites, including polls and user contests. In addition, she wrote a community-focused column on PC World and an IDG-internal blog focused on community and social networking. She contributed to the Today @ PC World blog on social networking and user-generated content news. Prior to joining PC World and Macworld, Parker was a senior producer and online community manager with LiveWorld Inc. for seven years. At LiveWorld, she built and managed some of the web’s largest branded communities, including HBO, A&E, History Channel, QVC and Discovery Channel. Parker holds an MBA in Marketing (with Graduate Honors) from Regis University. She blogs at kellieparker.com.

Fredric Paul is publisher and editor-in-chief of bMighty.com, based in San Francisco. He's spent the last 25 years in technology publishing --  in print and online -- including more than 10 years in a variety of positions at TechWeb, including editor-in-chief of TechWeb.com.

Before rejoining TechWeb, Paul was vice president of content programming for AllBusiness.com, founding editor of CNET's Builder.com and executive editor of CNET.com. He was editor in chief of Electronic Entertainment magazine and has held senior editorial positions at PC/Computing, PC World and High Technology Business. Paul was a contributing editor for the MIT Sloan Management Review, and he has also served as a Web and e-business consultant for several start-up companies.

Paul’s Web work has won several awards, and his opinions have been quoted everywhere from USA Today to US News & World Report. He's moderated discussions at a wide variety of international events, including Comdex, Seybold, MILIA, and the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). He holds a BA degree from Pitzer College, and attended the New York University Publishing Institute.

Mary Slepicka is group content director for Advanstar Communications Inc.’s Powersports Group. She developed and now leads a unified editorial and design team supporting two monthly magazines, four websites and six e-newsletter programs. Slepicka is a 23-year veteran of Advanstar, where she also led editorial teams in the telecommunications, environmental and call center magazine groups in Chicago and Southern California. She’s been with the Powersports Group since 2001. Slepicka has been a working newspaper and/or magazine journalist since 1979.

Jim Sulecki is director of eMedia, Meister Media Worldwide, where he manages the company’s 20 brand and custom websites, 12 branded e-newsletters, webinars, and online video/audio. He was recently named “Innovator in Business Media: Online Executives” by BtoB Media Business magazine. He’s a member of American Business Media’s Digital Media Council.

Previously, he served as managing director of Meister Media’s Cotton and CropLife Division. He also led the launch team for Meister’s first magazine Web sites in 1998. He is a graduate of Stanford’s Publishing on the Web program.

Steve Towns has 15 years of experience in covering government and technology issues for regional and national publications, and currently holds the position of editor for Government Technology magazine. Towns joined Government Technology in 1996 as editor of Government Technology Reseller, a monthly publication covering government IT procurement for technology manufacturers, systems integrators and value added resellers. In his editor role, Towns also oversees the editorial for several of the magazine’s special supplements and its website at www.govtech.com.

Main Conference page