September 2005
Best Practices: My Networkers
Cisco builds conference community with free access to on-demand content for one year
By Cathy Chatfield-Taylor

It’s no surprise that Cisco Systems, a leader in networking solutions for the Internet, has been marketing online events for more than six years. What is surprising is that Cisco’s user conference, Networkers (www.cisco.com/networkers/nw05/), didn’t go online until last year. Now in its second generation, Networkers Online (www.networkersonline.net) not only enjoys a 99 percent adoption rate, but also has a waiting list of subscribers willing to pay for access.

“This gives us the opportunity to have a live, interactive community relationship with attendees, even the ones who don’t attend every year,” says Pat Reardon, Senior Manager, Online Event Marketing. “And it gives us an opportunity to touch the online community and let them know what’s going on. In the future, we plan to have discussion groups, advisory boards and polling to get new ideas.”

As a complement to the conference promotion Web site, which offers the usual features for registration, attendance planning and appointment making, Networkers Online makes conference sessions available for on-demand viewing as slides synchronized with speaker audio, and the slides can be downloaded. Users can browse listings of general sessions, technology breakout sessions and “techtorials,” or search by multiple criteria such as topic and level.

When Reardon hatched the idea for Networkers Online as a way to boost flagging attendance in the wake of the tech-sector downturn, the plan was to capture as much content as they could and make it available for free to paid registrants within three weeks after the event, enabling attendees to pick up sessions they didn’t have time to attend.

Because Networkers Online 2004 was new and incomplete with only 145 sessions, just 68 percent of attendees took advantage of the benefit. But loyal customers who didn’t attend Networkers could subscribe for $295 per year, and Cisco sold more than 400 subscriptions.

“It doesn’t help us break even, but it does offset the costs,” Reardon says. She estimates the cost to build and maintain Networkers Online is less than 5 percent of her conference budget.

To encourage more attendees to use the site, Cisco plugged it as a major benefit of attendance in 2005 conference promotions. At the conference, a demonstration booth gave guided tours of the Web site.

The 2004 site went offline on June 1, 2005. A more robust Networkers Online 2005 went live on May 1, with 10 introductory-level sessions to help attendees prepare for intensive learning at Networkers 2005, June 19–24 in Las Vegas. By July 19, Cisco had uploaded 230 sessions for viewing. About 99 percent of attendees eventually logged on, and “several hundred” customers subscribed for $199 per year.

Networkers Online 2005 incorporates new features requested by users. When users select sessions they want to view, their choices are saved in a personalized page similar to Amazon.com’s “The Page You Made.” Selections also come with recommendations for related sessions and resources on Cisco.com such as white papers, case studies and discussion forums.

“People are only interested in diving deeply into the information that pertains to their jobs,” Reardon says. “They can go through the catalog once and build ‘My Networkers Online’ with the sessions they’re interested in.”

Because most sessions last at least two hours, most users don’t view them in one sitting. Now the site remembers where a user stopped viewing and starts the next viewing where they left off. Beginning in August 2005, Cisco also began offering exclusive twice-monthly Webcasts.

“Our goal is to provide the best technical education possible,” Reardon says. “Attendees [and subscribers] have unlimited access to content. They’re not just limited to four or five days, eight hours a day. They can access that content any time.”

Though Networkers Online can’t be credited as the sole reason, Networkers 2005 gained 52 percent more attendees than in 2004.