Forget the idea that techies aren’t social. For 10 years, GlobalSpec has catered to IT professionals like electrical and mechanical engineers, first providing them with a search resource and later evolving into a peer-to-peer community. Today, the site has 3.6 mill registered users, with 80,000 new users signing on each month.
E-Centric recently talked with Angela Hribar, chief sales and marketing officer of Troy, NY-based GlobalSpec about building an industrial community online.
E-CENTRIC: What are the challenges in reaching this audience?
HRIBAR: I think the challenge is making sure you have the information they need, want and value, and that you have rich and robust content in a context that is intuitive and familiar. Then you need to make sure you become a trusted source for them and give them what they want when they visit your site. You need to make their needs so they see you as the place for what they’re looking for.
E-CENTRIC: Who produces the content for your site and newsletters?
ANGELA: We have partners who provide information related to patents, standards and material properties, but primarily our content is provided by manufacturers, service companies and distributors who promote their products and services with us. As far as the newsletters, GlobalSpec retains a staff of editors who search multiple sources on the Web to select content. Our editors write lead-in copy that links to the originating source. We have 59 product-centric newsletters, with over a circulation of over 6 mill subscriptions going out to 2.3 million subscribers. Specs & Techs is a weekly newsletter, while the others are monthly. And we have close to 765,000 subscribers to GlobalSpec Alerts, who signed up for information on-demand about specific topics or products.
E-CENTRIC: How do you judge the ROI of those newsletters?
ANGELA: From a user perspective, we look at open and clickthrough rates, to see what readers are looking at and how frequently they’re coming back to that information. For the manufacturers and service providers who promote their businesses, it’s a function of the leads and brand exposure that we can give them.
E-CENTRIC: Tell me about your new social networking forum, CR4 (“Conference Room 4”). Does it integrate with your other products?
ANGELA: It’s designed specifically for the tech professional who wants to communicate with other people within the space. There’s forums, there’s blogs, there’s an opportunity for Q&As on key topics for industrial professionals. Someone who is reading a newsletter might want to blog on a specific topic or might have questions they’d like answered, so we share information across platforms and cross link people based on their desires.
E-CENTRIC: Are your readers looking for information for mobile devices?
ANGELA: Our research shows our audience isn’t looking for information that way. If the demand is there, we’ll certainly provide it. But for now, they’re looking at the information in their work environment and not through mobile devices.
E-CENTRIC: How are you promoting the site itself?
ANGELA: From a user perspective, word of mouth is the best promotion. There’s a very viral spread that happens because of what we’re providing. But we also do search engine marketing and we present at trade shows. And to the user community we do a lot of direct marketing.
Network
