Publishers planning live events

Early results from the survey of around 200 specialist publishers carried out by the Specialist Media Show in partnership with InPublishing, PPA, University of Leicester and Wessenden Marketing shows that publishers are active in live events.

64% of respondents already run live events, with B2B conferences and exhibitions the most popular.  Interestingly, 31% already run face to face networking events for their communities.  See our media pioneer story on Stylist Network as a great example of this.

Consumer events, paid-for reader events, awards and face to face training are also popular.

Many publishers are considering running live events in the next 2 years:

• 70% face to face networking events
• 60% paid-for reader events
• 56% B2B exhibitions
• 53% consumer events
• 49% face to face training
• 48% B2B conferences

Experimentation with online events, networking, services

More surprisingly, there's already lots of experimentation with online events and services: 20% are running online networking, 18% webinars, 8% virtual events and 7% distance learning.

We've covered the launch of Virtual Event World and Chromacademy as Media Pioneers.

Whilst 31% of publishers are already testing out these online events and services, a much higher proportion are considering them for the next 2 years:

• 70% online networking
• 63% webinars
• 53% virtual events
• 39% distance learning

Full insights from this research, including how this splits by consumer and B2B, larger and smaller publishers, were presented by Jim Bilton of Wessenden Marketing and Professor Barrie Gunter of University of Leicester at the Conference.

Sign up for free for the Specialist Media Network and you can download full copies of the 2011 research free on our members pages here: 

Read more about the 2012 Specialist Media Insights research

Take part in this confidential survey now and get a free copy of the results

Results will be presented at the Specialist Media Conference on 24 May 2012

See the 2012 Conference programme

Book Conference tickets

See further results from the survey