I attended yesterday's Future of Business Media conference in NYC and spoke on a panel about the internationalization of B2B publishing companies. Although Incisive has substantial presence around the world, I'm not convinced that we are truly a "global" business, in the sense that very few of our individual brands actually travel beyond a single country's borders.
There is much we can learn from others, like United Business Media, about cross-border business development and idea-sharing.

Meanwhile, most of the talk at the conference was about the impact of the economy on our various business models. Media companies like Incisive North America are clearly better positioned than many others out there--partially because so much of our business comes from the legal market, which is hurting but relatively more stable than other business segments (ie finance or IT). And partially because some 40% of our revenues come from subscriptions and product sales rather than advertising, again a relatively stable revenue stream.

Nonetheless, there are places where we are vulnerable and need to be careful. I have heard from several media executives about slowing registration sales for conferences and other kinds of events, and we have certainly seen evidence of that in our own Events groups. Online display advertising growth sounds like it is slowing dramatically across the industry, and we'll need to keep an eye on that as it impacts all of our websites. And traditional print display advertising throughout all B2B media has suffered during the last 45 days, as advertisers across the spectrum have cancelled campaigns or taken a wait-and-see attitude about the economy.

If you ask me what it means for us, I still believe as I have all year that we need to hunker down in the short-run, but keep investing in the products and services which we will need to be selling when the current storm ends. We need to develop more content to be sold and distributed in more ways, with a particular emphasis on must-have business information and data. And we need to carefully look at the things we now do--and the ways in which we do them--with an eye toward boosting efficiency and ensuring that no one is being what our colleagues in London call a "busy fool". It's all a balancing act, and it's what these times demand if we are to remain successful.