Event Description

Spiders and Bugs: Web Writing and Management

Saturday, February 17, 2006

Today’s effective professional writers use the Internet as both a tool and a marketplace. Learn how at IWOSC’s January Saturday Seminar, when iMedia Editor in Chief Brad Berens discusses writing for the Internet, and Internet marketing expert Cliff Allen speaks about webmastering.

The workshop will cover the differences between writing online and off; site metrics and how they inform editorial decisions; how to design, implement and manage a website; tips on creating a good website; and personalization, e-mail marketing, and data mining. In addition, Berens will talk about iMedia’s current needs and its marketplace for freelancers, including his freelance budget.

Brad Berens is an editor, writer, critic, public speaker, and thinker — mostly about media (new and old), culture (high and low), marketing (traditional and interactive), and how what audiences do with the things they watch have a huge impact on who they are.

Berens is Editor in Chief and the primary content supervisor (and freelancers’ contact) at iMedia, an online trade publication and offline events producer whose business mission is “to advance how interactive media and marketing can — and must — work together.” The internet has changed and will continue to change how audiences behave, and tracking those changes is a big part of what Berens does at iMedia, in his Mediavorous Blog, and in talks he presents all over the country.

Previously, Berens was editor at Earthlink, overseeing the company’s main corporate website redesign and, later, the transitioning of Earthlink’s bLink magazine into eLink, an online newsletter and primary customer touchpoint with a circulation of roughly seven million readers. He has also worked at an innovative but failed dot-com, Lineup Technologies, and was a story analyst in Hollywood for such companies as DreamWorks, CAA, and New Regency. Berens is a bona fide Shakespearean scholar and stage historian with a Ph.D. in English from U.C. Berkeley. “From Shakespeare to the Internet can seem like a crazy transition,” observes Berens. “But when you learn that much of my academic work concerns how Shakespeare invented the modern audience — how he created the way we watch movies, TV and other forms of mass culture today — my career trajectory starts to make a bit more sense.”

Cliff Allen began his computer industry career in 1973 when he left the broadcast industry to start his own software company serving the advertising industry with statistical analysis software used to analyze audience rating data. After selling the company, Allen established a high-tech advertising/PR firm to provide marketing communications services to companies selling software, hardware, electronics, data communications, and telecommunications products. His firm’s high-tech clients included Microsoft and IBM. In 1989 his firm became one of the first marketing consulting companies to use the Internet. Eventually Allen introduced a line of web and e-mail personalization products.

Allen is also an author whose latest book is “One-to-One Web Marketing,” and whose first book was “Web Catalog Cookbook.” He has written a weekly column on “precision marketing” for ClickZ.com, as well as articles for other marketing magazines.