Welcome to this special edition of CNET Networks UK’s client newsletter, Dialogue, and the launch of the new version of ZDNet.co.uk! This isn’t any old upgrade. When you take a look at the site today we think you will see the most advanced media engagement platform in business-to-business publishing, built for the most advanced, most demanding and therefore most valuable consumers of IT media in the UK.

So much has changed on the site that it’s important to remember what hasn’t.

ZDNet.co.uk celebrated its tenth birthday earlier this year, and remains at its core what it has always been – the biggest voice in business technology. ZDNet UK enables its readers to make smart decisions.

Thing is, at CNET Networks we believe that that just isn’t enough anymore, which is why we have evolved a deep content and engagement model fuelled by the fundamental changes in the way that IT decision makers consume, interact with and share media and knowledge. We are excited by the opportunities that this gives us as publishers and you as marketers looking to connect with our audience.

You can read about our approach to User Generated Content, Professional Networking and Multimedia – all of which are central to this upgrade, in more depth below.

You will notice that ZDNet.co.uk is currently in Beta, and you can find out why here.

Finally, I’d like to say a quick public thank you to the CNET Networks team who has been working on this project for the last nine months.

So, take a look at the site, and please feel free to send feedback to me directly at suzie.daniels@cnet.com. You can also find me on the site – my username is Suzie Daniels. We will be building this kind of platform out across our other brands at CNET Networks UK, and want to hear from you.

Suzie Daniels,
Head of Business Media,
CNET Networks UK

The upgrade to ZDNet UK makes the site the most advanced, and most interactive of any tech site for IT Professionals in the UK. In fact you'd be hard pressed to find any site from a major publisher that matches the functionality of ZDNet UK. We have given the site a refreshing new look, together with cleaner navigation to make it easy for IT professionals to find their way around. We have also put a lot of thought into search and have signed up an innovative search company to help readers find exactly what they want among our tens of thousands of stories, reviews, white papers and downloads. In keeping with ZDNet.co.uk's mission to be a resource for IT decision makers looking to buy, use and learn about technology for their businesses, down the left-hand side of every page we have added our selection of Toolkits - areas where they can research specific areas of business technology in-depth. You will also see an increased focus on multimedia - not for its own sake, but using audio and video alongside text content when it makes sense. And the biggest change in the new ZDNet.co.uk is the community features that give our readers a platform to voice their opinions and network with and learn from their peers. Readers can create their own accounts which enable them to comment on stories and products, start their own forum threads and run their own blogs. Throughout the design and build of the new ZDNet UK, innovation has been a keyword, and we have aimed for technical excellence coupled with simplicity of use. We think you'll agree the result shows what the future of online publishing looks like. Check out the new site here.

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The biggest change in the ZDNet.co.uk upgrade is the addition of community tools, and not just third party community tools that have been tacked on, but community tools that we built ourselves into CNET Networks’ custom content management system and which let us provide features that no other business focused site in the UK can do today. When we looked at our readership of IT Professionals we found there was no online presence that kept them abreast of developments in enterprise IT and gave them a proper platform to discuss these developments, learn from each other and network. So integrated with the timely, accurate and credible content that our readers have come to expect of ZDNet UK is an environment that will allow them to do just that. As always, any reader of ZDNet UK will have immediate access to any editorial content, but those who sign up to become members will get a whole new experience. First, we will give them a voice; any member will be able to post comments on stories, products and forums or even write their own blogs on the site, and those who write particularly incisive, interesting, or perhaps just plain funny comments will find their names in lights. They will be able to do everything from enter competitions - and we shall be searching for great competition prizes to give away - to downloading white papers and clipping links from across the site to save in their own project folders. What really makes the new ZDNet UK stand out however are the professional social networking features. We've been doing a lot of work on how members can find other members according to factors such as shared interests or even just what they have been writing about. Beyond the discovery features, members can track conversations, contacts and stories. Once signed up, any ZDNet UK community member can track posts made by their contacts, and track companies and topics too - in fact with the new ZDNet UK there is little you cannot track. Take a tour of ZDNet.co.uk’s community features here.

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While much of the interest and excitement around the new version of ZDNet UK has been around the improved user functionality, introduction of user generated content and professional/social networking (and quite rightly so) we have been equally focused on serving the changing needs of our advertisers. From a commercial perspective we have been thinking a lot about the fundamental shift in media consumption, what it means for advertisers and the new set of rules for marketing organisations looking to influence their audience online. In short, business technology marketers are no longer satisfied with one-dimensional/print-think advertising and are looking to integrate their messages within a powerful marketing environment that creates a relationship with their brand and hopefully some engagement that leads to purchase. The change we have seen requires us to take a different approach. The new version of ZDNet UK does that. We have created an enhanced advertising platform where users interact more with the site, spend more time looking for the opinion of their peers, and are more aware of the value vendors bring to the decision making process when implementing technology solutions. Remember, our users want the choice to understand what our editors think, what their peers think and what the vendors think. This is why we've introduced company pages. A completely self-contained commercial environment for a company to showcase and position part or all of their product range. We think this provides the advertiser, and the user, enormous benefit. We've also re-tagged our entire ad inventory to provide more ad impressions to the high value areas in demand for our clients. We've elevated our toolkits to house all of the information on a particular topic in one place and built a whole new set of commercial "launch units" throughout the site that drive targeted audiences through to customised sponsorship opportunities like our power centres, resource centres and product showcases. There are over 29 toolkits that can be sponsored and targeted more precisely than ever before, we've got another 15 different sponsorship opportunities and if that's not enough there's always RSS advertising, video advertising, blog advertising, half page ads and ELUs. It's through these developments on the new ZDNet UK that we really believe we are delivering on our commercial mission to be leaders, to have impact, to be innovative and to deliver results. Speak to us to learn more - matt.hunt@cnet.com - 020 7903 6702

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