INBOX: How does Forbes promote the iConferences?
SCHIFRIN: Mostly, we do it all ourselves. We do it through lots of e-mail marketing to our constituent list. Whoever is a speaker or a partner or a sponsor will tend to promote it to their audiences. We also put display ads up on Forbes.com, and we had an advertisement in Forbes magazine for the last one. ...
INBOX: How does Forbes follow up with registrants and attendees?
SCHIFRIN: We do a survey almost immediately after it's over. ... We want to get that user feedback right away in terms of what we did right, what we could do better and what our audience would like to see in the next iConference. ... Obviously, if somebody's opted in for marketing, we will send them relevant promotions after the event. Lots of people who come to Forbes events are entitled to certain special subscriptions to some of our special investment advisories that we offer to anyone who attends. So we definitely keep our touchpoints on with our audience.
INBOX: How do the iConferences enable Forbes to promote and augment its content?
SCHIFRIN: Well, it's a nice, exclusive way to showcase our expertise and our innovation in presenting content. So what will typically happen is we'll have some people come to our show, they'll love the interaction and, by the way, we typically keep our shows up, on demand, for two months after the event. ... And then, oftentimes, we will excerpt some of our iConference content and showcase it on Forbes.com, which has a huge audience, much wider than any one iConference. So we'll do a video interview for an iConference that will last a half hour [to] 40 minutes, and we'll excerpt a few four-minute or five-minute segments and put them on Forbes.com as a video interview. ... These events are so well-liked by attendees; they're so sticky. ... And by sticky, I mean people spend hours at these things. And, if you know anything about the Web and Web content, if you can get somebody to stay on your page for five minutes, that's a huge thing. I mean, people spend hours at these conferences, online. And that is very attractive, not only to the content presenters, but to the sponsors ... This last one was two days. And while you don't have to spend every minute glued to the screen, people still spend hours and hours on our events. ... These are tough times and you can't send five people down to Atlanta for that conference anymore. ... And so this is great; you can have your booth at the Forbes virtual conference and everyone's still in the office. And, frankly, you can multi-task while you're at the conference, if you're a booth rep.
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