EBN Wins 'Best of the Web' Award

EBN today bagged one of min's "Best of the Web Awards" in the business-to-business category for sites relaunched in the last year. We beat other sites resurrected over the course of the last 12 months by competing media organizations.

The award was given out Thursday, April 7, at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York by min online. The 2011 Best of the Web Award "winners and honorable mentions demonstrated how firmly publishers have learned not only to grasp but to lead digital innovation," min announced in a special issue of its publication.

Other finalists in the category won by EBN include Crain Communications' InvestmentNews, Farm Journal Media's AgWeb.com, and NRN.com from Penton Media. The winning citation for EBN reads thusly:

Most sites relaunch in order to refresh their look and feel or to add the latest Web innovations. But when Electronics Buyer's News emerged online as EBN.com last fall, its makeover was deeply informed by the evolving state of the industry it served.

The objective of the new site was to help executives and senior managers solve the new problems of the supply chain, to consult with one another on issues of supply and demand imbalance, lead-time issues, volatile pricing and manufacturing bottlenecks. The site effectively moved from content to real conversation and led rather than followed the market into a solution-driven approach to b2b publishing.

Another award winner at the event today was Robert Faletra, CEO of Everything Channel, a division of United Business Media (EBN's parent company). Faletra was inducted into min's Digital Hall of Fame along with Vivek Shah, CEO of Ziff Davis; Brandon Holley, editor in chief of Lucky magazine; Sean Nolan, VP and GM of Rodale Digital; and Rachel Fishman Feddersen, editor in chief of Parenting.com.

Faletra was nominated for guiding Everything Channel through a necessary evolution that has positioned the company "where b2b is headed: data and research, custom-marketing efforts and even consulting and field-sales support," according to min.

UBM Studios, another division of United Business Media, won in the Virtual Trade Show/Online Event for its "Everything Channel's COMDEXvirtual" event. The citation noted that "in reviving the event as a virtual show, UBM Studios and Everything Channel had a daunting legacy to fulfill. The final product demonstrated just how rich the virtual trade show experience had become."

The award given to EBN was personally satisfying for me because it publicly recognized the efforts that went into reviving the EBN brand. As I walked up to the podium to accept the award on behalf of the team, I was humbly gratified by the professionalism and dedication of the folks behind EBN, from UBM Electronics CEO Paul Miller to the content, marketing, sales, and technology teams.

Many of these people and the managers leading each group aren't known to EBN readers, but I can assure you they are crucial to whatever the community site has so far achieved and whatever is ahead for us. As an example, not a word is published on EBN without being vetted by a team dedicated to making sure we get our facts correct and our syntax straight.

The award is also a testament to the vision of our sponsors, many of which threw their support behind the concept of EBN as a community site serving the high-tech supply chain well before the early page designs were drawn up. They continue to support EBN because they understand that the supply chain is constantly in flux, and they believe that EBN's editorial content (as well as the tools we plan to launch in the near future) is critical to better understanding business challenges and resolving problematic situations.

Each min award recipient was asked today to comment on one of two questions -- the best or worst career advice they had received or the challenges ahead for their organization. I talked about the best career advice I received early in my profession as a journalist. It came from an editor who brusquely told me to dust myself off after being manhandled by soldiers during a reporting assignment.

I wanted to immediately tell that editor about the nasty experience, but after making sure I was fine, he politely told me to file my story first. "I'll take you to dinner, I'll be happy to commiserate with you, and I'll listen to whatever you have to say -- after the story has been filed, edited and published," he said. "But I need the story first. We don't publish excuses; we publish stories."

The lesson stuck. At EBN, we promise to not give excuses but to do our best to get our readers the information and the tools they need to be better at their jobs.