Over the next few days, I plan to share some of the things I learned at SAS Global Forum in meetings or conversations. Feel free to comment.

Sponsorships On Sunday afternoon, the User Group Steering Committee (a committee of representatives from SAS Global Forum and the regional SAS user groups) invited a panel of representatives from companies who have purchased sponsorships at SAS Global Forum and/or regional user group meetings.

Organizations who are sponsors at an event pay money to be allowed to display their name at the event. Sponsorships can be in the form of a coffee break or mixer, or money to allow participation in a demo area.

The panel of sponsors covered a variety of industry areas: Jan Shineman, HP--Hardware William Lunz, CSC--Consulting Gary Wood, Smith Hanley--Recruiting Greg Nelson, Thotwave--Alliance Partners

Most of the attendees at the session where folks who were involved in the planning of user group meetings. We were interested in learning what made someone agree to spend this sponsorship money, reasons for not being a sponsor, and what sponsors expected to get out of the sponsorship.

Here are some of the comments made by one or more panel participants:

• Sponsorships were done to raise awareness; "if you aren't there, people think you are dead."
• Sponsors don't want to have to sit in a booth. They would rather have opportunities to mingle with attendees.
• Their goal is to be able to develop qualified leads.
• They don't like to be called vendors.
• Value cannot be measured from a single event. It's about a long-term relationship with SAS.
• They expect reciprocity with SAS. They expect SAS to be a sponsor at their events.
• They want to be seen as "socializing" thier name with the SAS community.
• HP says that all the various interests in the company must be met in order to get agreement to pay for a sponsor. For example, if the event is industry focused, agreement must come from the division handling that industry, as well as the marketing, sales and other organizations. The SAS representative at HP is the one making the request at HP to be a sponsor.
• Leads are tracked and an ROI calculation is done with the leads.
• All are looking to get their message out and they like to give at least one presentation at the event.
• Sponsors want to have one-on-one meetings with customers (attendees).
• At larger conferences, larger company sponsors are likely to attend and have a presence in several different aspects of the event including meetings with executives at SAS.
• Sponsors want to talk to people; they are not satisfied just to get their name on a coffee cup.
• Conference management should set parameters around presentations; sponsors understand that they cannot give a sales presentation.
• It's about filling the funnel with leads so that some sales come out of it.
• All sponsors want the event management to send out at least one email blast to attendees on the vendor's behalf.
• Sponsors would love to invite people to a hospitality suite. Conference management felt strongly that the invitation list not be selective, but all attendees should be invited. (Currently, SAS Global Forum does not allow hospitatility suites.)
• Sponsors would prefer to have a cafeteria-style list of all opportunities to sponsor SAS events and be able to select from the list in advance and pay one check. (Examples of items on the list would be SAS Global Forum, BML, Regionals, SAS Championship, Executive Conferences, etc. Problem with this is that various people "own" these events even though they are considered SAS events.)
• Physical presence at shows is harder to justify than, say, placing an ad in sas.com magazine.
• Consulting companies love the benefit of being able to meet people (resources) for potential hiring.
• One criteria for evaluating the event is the quality of the event.
• All would love access to the list of attendees (currently not given out unless attendees choose to enter there name in a fish bowl at their demo booth).

The panel discussion was very useful as SAS Global Forum relies heavily on sponsorship dollars for being able to keep its registration costs low.

Next up: SAS Global Users Group Executive Board invited International attendees to an event to find out how we could make the conference more applicable/appealing to internatinal attendees. Stay tuned.

At SAS Global Forum, SAS Publishing held a special session for SAS Press Series authors to give them an update on new technologies in the publishing industry and SAS' plans for marketing and distributing their books. Sean Gargan, Director of SAS Publishing Solutions, gave an excellent presentation to our authors called "Leveraging Technology: SAS Press Series."

With technology, there are many opportunities for books to be distributed other than as hard-copy books. This can be scary for those who rely on the royalties they receive from each book sale, as there is concern that a book will be downloaded then shared with anybody and everybody. There is also a fear among some of us that books are a thing of the past, that eventually no one will read content except in an online form.

I believe that books won't go away during my lifetime. In 2006, more ISBN's were issued than in any previous year. ISBN is the tracking number on the back of every hardcopy book; it identifies the publisher and is a unique identifier that is tracked through a company called R. R. Bowker.

Yet, hardcopy books are certainly obtained through online channels. In fact, the #1 product purchased online is hardcopy books.

eBooks, books that are electronic and read using a reader, have not taken off like publishers originally thought. However, there is reason to believe, as technology, accessibility, and cost of these readers improve, that you'll see more and more eBooks.

SAS Publishing has partnered with Google Book search to allow customers to search through our books and even see portions of the book without purchasing it. It is our belief that this will not hurt the sales of those books but will, in fact, entice people; tease them. We believe that seeing a portion of the book will cause people to want to read the whole thing; a "Buy Me!" button is conveniently located close by.

From an author's perspective, technology can also create opportunities to develop a community of people interested in their subject of expertise. As word gets out, two things can occur: the author can become better known and considered a thought leader; and like-minded people can electronically discuss their areas of interest.

It is SAS Publishing's desire to help our authors amplify their individual voices and messages. We want to take advantage of new technology, but control and manage digital content for the purpose of driving hardcopy sales. We want to participate in new business ventures and channel strategies that expand the market for books and add value for readers. And we want to support multiple delivery formats to provide every reader with his or her preferred style of getting information.

At the same time we are helping those authors, we want to help other customers find and take advantage of information that can make their use of SAS software more valuable. We are working to get our books more widely distributed worldwide. We are exploring translation opportunites for those books that have been popular in the U.S. We are increasing our partnerships with Google, Amazon, Windows Live, and Safari. We are encouraging authors to make use of sasCommunity.org to talk about their books and engage other SAS users with similar interests in chat rooms and blogs. We continue to explore whether eBooks make sense for us as technology improves.

The authors who attended Sean's presentation seemed excited about what we told them. While initially being somewhat reluctant for SAS to offer their books electronically, we ended the session with a great idea. One of our authors, who will be using his book as a textbook to teach statistics, wanted us to offer books electronically, with a hook into SAS to run all the examples and produce output automatically! We would certainly have a corner on that market.

Anybody out there have ideas about how we could do that? Let me know.

Posted by Kathy Council at 10:25 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

The SAS Global Users Group Executive Board wants very much to make our annual meeting the premiere event for users worldwide. (The Executive Board is made up of past and future chairs of the event plus three SAS Institute executives). When we found out that 23% of attendees in Orlando came from countries other than the U.S., we invited any who were in Orlando on Sunday to a reception. We asked what we could do as conference officials to make the meeting more attractive to users from around the world.

The Number #1 reason these people attend SUGI and now SAS Global Forum, is that they want technical content! They feel that there is no technical content in conferences outside the U.S. (There was no mention of the local conferences held in individual countries that I understand contain technical content. Not sure if these attendees were not aware of those meetings or whether they were only talking about the big conferences, or whether they felt that even these conferences were not technical enough.) One user said "We want semi-colons; not success stories." (A t-shirt waiting to happen?)

Cost is an issue, but one lady from Sweden said that she was able to come to Orlando cheaper than she could have gone to the annual SAS Forum in Stockholm! European countries find it easier to come to the east coast of the U.S. or Canada; Asia-Pacific countries prefer the west coast. Not sure who will come to San Antonio in 2008.

At a later meeting of the Executive Board, the Global Marketing Council and some other representatives from SAS offices came and talked about the same issues. How can SAS Global Forum be truly global? We learned that some of the offices, particularly in Scandinavian countries, had made huge efforts to recruit their users to SAS Global Forum. Some were able to entice their users by setting up travel where all could travel together to the conference. This appealed to those who wanted a respite from speaking and listening to English voices.

We also agreed that it would be useful to invite some of the best paper award winners from the country meetings to present their papers at SAS Global Forum. This would incent users to win (and thus give good papers), but it would also be a way to draw interest to the meeting from other international visitors.

Ideas about other ways to make the SAS Global Forum appealing to users from around the world would be welcomed.

I am testing to see how this really works. I am very impressed with this early pilot and think our users will love it.