I was delayed for two and a half hours on the flight back to DC last night, and had the opportunity to have a very nice chat with my seatmate in 2D. He works at a speakers bureau, repping famous folks, and had some great stories. Towards the end of the conversation, we were talking about their internal clipping service. That got me thinking, what suggestions would I have in that area?

Without publishing their website, I can say that it looks very well done. You can see the rationale for hiring a speaker, see the latest news on them, and even get sample video clips, which seems like a great way to show how dynamic a speaker someone is.

They seem do a pretty good job of putting up the latests news about their speakers. If they don't have one, an internal blog on an intranet might be great to
a) accumulate news about all speakers in one place,for internal reference, for a geographically dispersed company
b) Distribute information about the speaking industry in general...there probably is competitor news that could be tracked
c) have a blog for each speaker internally. Yahoo can keep each news search as an RSS feed, so you could create one giant feed of news showing up on the web about any speaker, and you could also have an internal separate page for each speaker. That would be great for monitoring as part of the clipping service. For example, you could track the latest news on Mike Singletary or schedule alerts to be sent to you . Of course, Mike Singletary may not be the best example, as many players get compared to him, as the prototype middle linebacker. How bout Michael Powell? Click there, and see that he has just been confirmed to speak at the Internet Telephony Conference coming up.

From an e-marketing standpoint?
Depending on how the company positions itself, there's an opportunity to draw in some potential clients who might be looking for speakers. If you do a Google Search on Michael Powell there's very little advertising that appears. Why not run an ad mentioning that "Michael Powell is repped by ABC Speakers Bureau"... You can start a text ad campaign in a couple of hours, and if someone is doing research, that might bring in clients who otherwise wouldn't be aware of the possibility.

Overall, it was a fun website to visit, and very well designed for the target market.