Joe Angel is president of PMMI Media Group and was a founding partner of Summit Media Group (now PMMI Media Group, a division of PMMI). He will be speaking with three other CEOs on an all-star Power Panel at our Business Information & Media Summit Dec. 2-4 titled Operating in the New Normal.

(Editor’s Note: Join us at the virtual BIMs 2020 in December for a discussion on Operating in the New Normal, as industry leaders such as Industry Dive’s Meg Hargreaves, arizent’s Gemma Postlethwaite, Brief Media’s Elizabeth Green, SmartWork Media’s Matthijs Braakman and PMMI Medias’ Joe Angel share how they are leading through the crisis, including the future of work, morale and productivity and revenue growth. Register here). 

“[Taking that leadership role] really was the most important moment in my career because I was able to prove to other people, to myself and to other women that you don’t have to know everything or have grown up in a certain function to take a new job. If you surround yourself with experts and establish yourself as credible professional, you can move forward and lead.”   That quote comes from Joyl Silva of Pfizer—she is a 2020 honoree in Putman Media’s wonderful Influential Women in Manufacturing (IWIM) program, now in its third year of honorees—in a blog post on the IWIM site.   IWIM is run by Erin Hallstrom, digital and content strategy director for Putman Media. She will be speaking about this successful program and all of the other roles she takes on at Putman—including their Food for Thought podcast that she created and did the whole s ...

In a conversation I had with Putman Media’s Erin Hallstrom a couple weeks ago, she talked about the Influential Women in Manufacturing program she runs, a business podcast she puts together and hosts (Food for Thought), a personal podcast, a book she’s writing, plus all her daily SEO and digital duties, etc.   How can you do all these things, I asked?   “I’m training to be a lockdown Olympian, doing all these things,” she said, both proudly and with a bit of incredulousness. When her sister got married in July, she was maid of honor, and for the two days she was taking off, her boss made her promise not to check in. “I wrote a blogpost about how anxious I was for being off for two days,” she said.   Erin, you’re not alone. A new Harvard Business School study says that we are working longer hours with more emails and meetings than ever before. Not surprised, I take it. Okay, let’s de ...

With publishers and media organizations still wary of charging too much for their virtual events—and some like this week’s Atlantic Festival charging nothing at all—sponsorships become that much more important to financial success. But should we be approaching sponsorships in the same way that we have for in-person events?   Two groups, Ricochet Advice and Bruce Rosenthal Associates, have partnered on a white paper to say no. Titled The New Sponsorship Model for Virtual Events, the report offers a new blueprint for recruiting your virtual event sponsors.   “During the pandemic, the traditional benefits offerings repurposed for virtual events are not likely to be of interest. The old way of courting sponsors has likely come to an end for most events and [organizations],” states the report. “An enhanced sponsorship approach that takes advantage of the unique characteristics of digital events to create better engagement between [ ...

There was a famous play in 1924 titled What Price Glory by Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings (made into a 1952 film). Almost 100 years later, the title of a popular play in the publishing world might be What Price Virtual Events.   Up until now, pricing for these pivoted affairs has varied from free to $25 to $75 to half to full price and tiers. ASAE—after starting with a fee to attend—and The Atlantic both made their major annual events free, but with several sponsors. I saw a big 25% off sale for one publisher’s annual event last week. (It started at around $495.)   Here are some of the variations I’ve seen.    Charge low, hope registrations are high. Christine Weiser, content/brand director, Tech & Learning, a Future plc division, said they charged just $25 for a big virtual event they put on, but more than 1,300 people signed on, a number they were very pleased with. “We had no ...

“There are no ‘enemies’ of innovation, but it is a question of complacency and inertia, of innovation perhaps not being top of mind. I hear often ‘we’ve never done it that way’ or ‘we’ve always done it that way’.”   That quote comes from Kerstin Fröhlich, head of innovation management at German media company Spiegel Verlag in an article on FIPP’s World Media Congress on the What’s New in Publishing site. Fröhlich spoke about how the German media power is “baking innovation into its organizational culture. Despite everyone agreeing that innovation is something they want to prioritize, its value must be consistently reiterated.”   An initial response to publishing life in the pandemic might have been to play down innovation and go with what you know, but what we know has been upended. The more I read, it’s the companies that are being bold and innovat ...

In a recent podcast for Putman Media's International Women in Manufacturing series, Christine LaFave Grace spoke with Nandita Gupta, process controls engineer at Georgia-Pacific and a 2019 IWIM honoree. They talk about Gupta's experience entering the workforce with a mentor, and “how she hopes to provide new engineers with a similar or better experience through a formal mentoring program at Georgia Pacific.”   An article on the Media Voices Podcast site last week gave eight ways publishers are bringing in revenue from podcasts. Number eight was promoting other revenue streams. “Whether it’s mentioning an upcoming event or referring to other products across a portfolio, a bit of self-promotion can help make podcast audiences—who are often a little different to online or print ones—aware of what else you offer. A podcast audience is a particularly strongly engaged user base, and is likely to be extra responsive to m ...

“Respondents are using more than two dozen event technology platforms—a large portion are using Zoom as one of the components. Some reported deliberately keeping it simple by using a familiar webinar platform, while others reported using as many as five platforms.” That’s from the business event planners group PCMA’s recently issued COVID-19 Recovery Dashboard Survey. It shows how there’s still no one solution for virtual events yet. So while 61% of the event planner respondents have been satisfied with the platforms they’ve used, most also said that there’s lots of room for improvement.  Finding one platform with the ability to perform all of the functions that planners are looking for was one of the most common reasons given by the 39% who said they were not satisfied with event technology. “There needs to be a virtual event platform that integrates—not links out—to other platforms besides Zoom,” ...

Editor's note: The following is an announcement from Jeff Joseph, President of Connectiv parent SIIA; Meg Hargreaves, SIIA Board Chair; and Kevin Novak, Connectiv Board Chair.