September 2004
Best Practices: Gone LOOPy

MediaLive deploys Web log to hype technology featured at its events

By Cathy Chatfield-Taylor

While MediaLive International announced the postponement of COMDEX 2004 with an upbeat press release about reshaping the event’s future, Comdex Executive Programs Director Dave Rosenberg posted this honest appraisal on the company’s very public Web log:

“Some would say we’re screwed,” he wrote on June 28, 2004. “Truth is I don't really know. I do know that we did a lot to make things work for 2003 and for 2004 we basically ran out of time to get all of the big vendors into the Comdex party, which blows…big time.”

One week later, the post had been viewed without comment by 56 people.

Such is the landscape for LOOP, The Online Voice of the IT Community (loop.interop-comdex.com) — launched in September 2003 by the San Francisco-based producer of Comdex and Networld+Interop — ostensibly to promote technology as a solution to business problems, but actually to drive the IT community toward attendance at these signature events.

“As we see trade shows becoming all the same, you’re looking for an edge,” Rosenberg says. “This was an edge, a hip way to make a point about your show and your company, and to put perspective on the technology that’s out there.”

Web logs (a.k.a., blogs) originated as online journals where people wrote about their personal experiences and hobbies. Popular among political pundits and media commentators, they were soon commandeered by savvy marketers who wanted to generate buzz about products and services. Now b-blogs (business blogs) are a controversial medium for companies to communicate about everything from athletic shoes (www.gawker.com/artofspeed) to TV shows (jane.blogs.com).

Blog readers visit the Web for the latest updates. Or, they can subscribe to RSS (Rich Site Summary) feeds that push content to the reader’s desktop, where it can be read with an application called an RSS aggregator.

LOOP is less a blog than an interactive newsletter, where contributors post pointed commentary, and readers respond with everything from caustic jibes to obscure statistics. Content is contributed at least every other day by Rosenberg, two marketing and public relations staffers, Networld+Interop Conference Chair David Piscitello, and conference speakers who receive a nominal fee to contribute editorials as part of their contract.

Rosenberg’s frequent posts, as many as several times a day during the events, set the somewhat sarcastic tone. “I know how to type and I’m borderline obnoxious, so it’s a good medium for me,” he says.

Objectivity is out the window. He’s unafraid of poking fun at the shows and their participants. After Networld+Interop, held May 9–14 in Las Vegas, he inaugurated the “LOOPies” — random awards for, among other things, Best Carpet (a tatter), Best Giveaway (a devil-duck) and Best Booth Babe (a fuzzy dice character).

“The idea is to let people have fun, make them jealous if they weren’t there and, if they were there, make them feel as if they’re in the know,” he says.

To build readership, LOOP headlines feed to the Networld+ Interop home page, where visitors can access other show resources or click through to LOOP. On the LOOP site, page views multiply in the weeks leading up to the show, from four times the norm two weeks out to 10 times the norm during the show, peaking at more than 3,600 page views for a single story.

Vendors recognize the value in that visibility. They contribute content to get free exposure, provided their submissions adhere to LOOP’s editorial guidelines for a “cool” style and don’t hawk products. Or they can pay MediaLive to blog about them. That content, in turn, can be repurposed for e-newsletters that market their products.

Since it’s launch, LOOP has incurred less than $10,000 in expenses — including the $125 commercial licensing fee for pMachine’s online publishing software. One Cisco Systems sponsorship has repaid the expense two and half times over. There’s nothing loopy about that.