One year later, Threatpost continues to succeed for Kaspersky

Last year when Kaspersky Lab launched Threatpost, an independent news site that mixes original content with aggregated content from existing online entities, it was done in an almost experimental way. Would the industry embrace and support such a large social media effort from, in some cases, one of its competitors? The answer turned out to be yes.

According to Kaspersky chief marketing officer Randy Drawas, the only way this would've worked was it for it to be "open and trusted." Open and trusted it was, and the site now boasts an impressive 200K page views per month, and has even expanded its presence with versions of Threatpost in the Latin America market. The associated Threatpost newsletter now also has 10K subscribers.

"We had very low expectations," Drawas said. "We absolutely did not expect this. We said that if we got to the end of December (2009) and got ourselves to about 80K page view per month, that would be great to report. With the newsletter we expected maybe a couple thousand. Everything that has happened is completely beyond our expectations, and it proves that our thinking was valid."

For a little background, Threatpost has its own brand and position mostly independent of Kaspersky and is run as a standalone editorial site. Editors Ryan Naraine and Dennis Fisher manage or create all of the content, including articles, videos, podcasts and webcasts. Naraine and Fisher are best known in the security industry as leading IT publication journalists, and while now employed full-time with Kaspersky they still strive to maintain an editorial balance. When Threatpost first launched, some questioned if that could be managed this way on a vendor-operated site.

"We're very upfront about being owned by Kaspersky. Aside from the original questions we got at the front of the launch regarding balancing our independence, we haven't really gotten any static at all," Fisher said. "If anything, people are seeing this as a positive. The independence has really shown through."

When I wrote about Threatpost last year, I held it up as an example of creative social media efforts that companies with a strong business to business (B2B) focus should consider in order to help support their overarching brands. Kaspersky is reporting that the success of Threatpost has had a very positive impact on the parent brand, with partners especially embracing the outlet.

"I can say that it has had a very positive effect on the quality of our brand. From a numbers point of view, we repurpose a lot of the content that we generate to help us get into a conversation with prospects in the marketplace," Drawas said. "We also allow our partners to use it in a rebranded way for their own marketing efforts. By providing this objective content, we also create closer relationships with our partners -- even those who sell competitive products."

Drawas said that while the Threatpost content is helping Kaspersky start conversations with prospects, there's still a separation of church and state. People can safely subscribe to the newsletter or comment on blog posts (comments have increased 300% in the last quarter) without having their contact details pulled into a lead generation database.

"This is all about trust, and we don't contact any reader about Kaspersky unless they expressly ask us to," he said.  "This is not a way to get more leads for Kaspersky. That would sacrifice the independent nature of what we're doing and we're hypersensitive about not crossing the line. We have these thousands of people subscribed, if all of a sudden they are barraged by Kaspersky direct marketing we will lose their trust."

Drawas says that Threatpost is at a nascent stage, so the company will continue to put its energy behind growing the site traffic and engagement, and might consider a paid advertising model with vendor partners later on. In terms of expansion, what's next?

"In 2010, we will expand into Europe," Drawas said.

As Threatpost continues to grow, getting exposure to both more readers and bloggers is critical. For that reason, for the second year Kaspersky will sponsor the Threatpost Bloghaus (Booth #1045) at RSA Conference. It is open to all bloggers and will provide Internet connections, refreshments and networking. As for why they are doing this for a second year, Naraine says that it gives a feeling of permanence to Threatpost.

"It helps add real legitimacy to what we're doing," he said. "We made a splash last year and we're back; we're not a fly-by-night thing. We're growing and Threatpost is here to stay."