Howard Sholkin of IDG described how they have segmented their corporate site to make information about their operations as clear as possible to very segmented audiences for their wide range up publications. With over 750 product items to cover segmentation helps people to zone in by sector, geography and other key segments. The products are not done up with glossy graphics consciously because IDG is a holding company for multiple brands: the purpose of the site is to push the visitor to the individual sites of the products that are a part of their portfolio. IDG Chairman and Founder Pat McGovern wants to make sure that there's still a very well-designed print media kit. Took 200K for redesign, media kit printing and related cost, ongoing costs about $150K to do both print and online. Howard suggests to do online first, the print piece is secondary materials, most people are used to getting the information online. The question is what you do with the material after the media kit that's important, once you have their interest you need to move them down the cycle to be a customer. Don't get much feedback, they go off to the brands. Their metric is reduced emails, which means that people are finding what they want. The online PDF kit is going away, people are using the online resources. Steve Ennen did a great job of moderating and making this interesting.

Labels: ABM, Best Practices, Digital Velocity, events, IDG, media kits