I attended the TechTarget Online ROI Summit ‘09 East yesterday in Boston. Thanks to the TechTarget organization for a complimentary invite.

Here are my takeaways from the event -

The shift to online media is showing up in the topline and bottomline of media publishers like TechTarget. In a year where more than 120 print magazines closed shop in 2008,  TechTarget CEO Greg Strakosch spoke of higher revenue and maintaining profitability in 2009. Tellingly, TechTarget also closed its two print publications in end 2008 and is dialing down its conference schedule by 20% in 2009.

Marilou Barsam’s (SVP Corporate and Client Marketing, TechTarget) presentation on “Connecting the Dots Between Lead Generation and Revenue” had many insights and excellent real world input from a panel of practitioners. It was clear from the deliberations in the panel that the innovation in marketing automation is benefiting small to mid size firms (represented by VersionOne and Tableau Software) more than the enterprise scale players (represented by HP). In fact HP’s Siebel -driven marketing process was peppered with “manual interventions” of having to coax sales people to work with marketing leads and “loss of visbility due to account reassignments” etc., while the other two companies really talked about practicing analytics-driven, “closed loop” marketing from lead to nuture to sale. In our experience very few companies are as sophisticated. No surprise that the increased marketing visbility contributes to leaner and more directed sales operations and both of the smaller firms claimed to be profitable. Something to learn from for the legions of small to mid size companies in the IT Management community.

Andy Briney, SVP of Publishing, TechTarget, made an eloquent pitch on the “Changing Priorities of IT..” and built the case around Consolidation, Compliance, Disaster Recovery and Business Intelligence as four primary domains that will be on the CIO’s radar in 2009 and beyond. More interesting was the call for marketers to change their game from selling into vertical disciplines and roles (e.g. Network management, Director / Manager) to a cross-functional, “project-based” approach for the new horizontal domains (e.g. a compliance project would need to be marketed to Security, Application, Business teams along with the CIO). 

Needless to say, the interest in Social media was high and a majority of the audience for the Social Media presentation indicated that they were on Twitter personally and in many cases as a company too. A comment from a participant from Intuit who talked about adding 300 more particpants to a webinar through Twitter based marketing - underscored the efficacy of Social media if harnessed the right way. It will be remiss not to mention other participants talking about their inability to get their senior management to sponsor social marketing efforts, and, the frustration for some - that social media takes considerable time and effort which they cannot expend given their current team size.

The Google-TechTarget research presentation wrapped up the day. Since we have covered this topic earlier, suffice to say that this is important for every technology marketer to read. All the presentations from the session are now available on the TechTarget website.

And of course, the lunch was great - especially the Cannelloni desserts. Overall a nice recipe from TechTarget!

- Ronnie

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