Conference & Corporate Blogging - A Case Study
June 11th, 2005For those interested in setting up a conference blog for your organization, this case study may be helpful. A few quotes that I found interesting:
+ On sponsorships - “There were both advantages and drawbacks to having a sponsor. When the sponsorship team sought a backer for financing the Internet terminals that would be placed around the conference site to promote and give easy access to the blog, I requested a media patron, so that we could add a couple more writers to our roster. Having a sponsor expedited the process and gave the blog a bigger push at the conference. However, while the sponsors were wonderful to work with, writers had to be extra careful with content postings to make certain that our sponsors’ competitors didn’t get any airtime in the reporting process. As far as editorial goes, this is a good thing to note in the guidelines.”
+ On Blogs versus a daily printed conference newsletter - “Although we offset the cost of printing this newsletter by selling sponsorship, the production of the piece was internal-resource heavy and the end result’s effectiveness wasn’t measurable. When the subject of the daily printed newsletter came up in our planning meetings, I suggested using a conference blog to report online rather than continuing to print the daily news. Because blogs had been in the news a great deal, the conference organizers decided to give it a try.”
I’m going to be watching the Cognotes vs. Blog coverage at Annual this year. How will the content be different? Will it be different? Will one be preferred over the other for conference reporting and reading? Will there be a way to sync both media or do they both serve separate purposes? The experiences at Annual may not answer this question. I’m just thrilled to be a part of the experiment.