Does Co-Dominance Spur Disruption?

Outspoken Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff made headlines this week by using an industry event to publicly describe his arch-rival, Murdoch-owned Move Inc., as “a crappy company.”

There’s no love lost on the Move side either. Move, which operates the Realtor.com real estate listings site, has previously cut off listing fees to Trulia right after Trulia was acquired by Zillow, and now has Zillow in court over its merger with Trulia.

Certainly, the stakes in the real estate listings data business are huge, so bare-knuckle competition isn’t surprising. What is surprising is that both companies are finding success with radically different business models.

Realtor.com has what I view as a very conventional “just the facts ma’am” user interface. It offers basic parametric search, with listings displayed as summary listings, each offering fast access to listings detail. Real estate agents can pay to advertise themselves or highlight specific listings, and are provided with sales leads as well.

Zillow, as you may recall, burst onto the scene with its “Zestimates,” its estimate of the value of every home in the country. This got Zillow immediate interest and tons of traffic, and it quickly became a major player in the market. Zillow also distinguishes itself with a map-based user interface and somewhat different listing detail than Realtor.com. But the “Zestimates” that helped Zillow rocket to the big time are a two-edged sword. Sellers almost always feel they should be higher, and buyers tend to assume they are much more authoritative than they really are. Zillow also sells advertising to real estate agents with essentially the same suite of offerings as Realtor.com.

Does it make sense that both can thrive? Certainly, we see examples of “co-dominance” in many very large BTC markets simply because they are so large. But while more subtle, it appears that the biggest weakness of both sites – neither has 100% of all listings – may be a strength. That’s because lots of people use both products, leaving real estate agents uncertain about where to place their advertising dollars.

It’s the same situation we saw play out in the heyday of the yellow pages industry. Independent yellow pages directories sprung up everywhere as lower-cost competitors to big, established telephone company directories. But advertisers, rather than cheering and running to advertise in the new, cheaper upstarts, found themselves confused and fearful. Which directory did their customers use? Did they use both? Well, the safest course for many advertisers was to advertise in both directories, meaning their cost to reach the same market went up significantly. Not surprisingly, advertisers were not happy with this outcome.

There are rumblings of discontent in the real estate market as well. Indeed, a new initiative called National Broker Portal Project, meant to be run by and for real estate agents and brokers, is gaining steam. It wants to create a major site that will be both dues-funded and run according to rules developed by the brokers themselves. It’s a long shot to be sure, but it shows once again that being the dominant player in a market is tricky, and sharing that dominance is even trickier. We must all remember that disruption in any industry is not inherently a one-time event.

Getting Your Data Into the (Work)Flow

In a fascinating move this week, Salesforce announced a new plug-in offering tight integration with Microsoft Outlook. This new capability, still in beta release, is offered free to Salesforce customers with its Enterprise plan or higher.

Why is this fascinating? First of all, Salesforce compete head-to-head with Microsoft in the CRM space, so this is arguably a shot across Microsoft’s bow on that front. But more importantly, it’s showing the growing importance of both applications and tight integration to data publishers.

One of the great weak spots of most CRMs has long been email integration. Getting email from one’s email client to the CRM has tended to be clunky and far from automatic. Getting salespeople to send email from the CRM tended not to be practical, and nobody wanted email messages spread across two systems.

This new integration from Salesforce doesn’t magically solve all these issues, but it’s a big step forward to making the user’s preferred systems and processes more powerful. And that’s exactly the mantra we’ve been preaching to the data industry for many years now. Get into the user’s work environment and get in deep. This is a great example of this principle at work. And even better, the many data publishers already leveraging the Salesforce platform can leverage it immediately and for free.

This brings up a larger discussion about data publishers becoming dependent on third-party platforms. Sometimes it makes sense and sometimes it doesn’t. And part of that decision process involves an honest assessment about whether or not you can reasonably achieve deep embedment like this yourself.

Another useful point this new plug-in highlights: for all its issues and flaws, email isn’t going away anytime soon. And because it is arguably the most core workflow tool at most companies, it is arguably the most important place to seek to embed your data … provided your data makes sense in this context.

Is It App Time?

In a move that further signals the remarkable growth and increasing importance of mobile devices,
Google has announced changes to its search algorithms to prioritize apps.

Starting April 21, for all searches on mobile devices, Google will present search results that identify and prioritize mobile-friendly sites. That means those with mobile-friendly sites should rank higher in search results conducted from mobile devices. Further, if you wish, Google will also begin to index content on mobile apps that may not appear on your website. And to close the loop, Google will allow app developers to use mobile search results to guide users to either the website or the app (provided the app is installed on the mobile device, something Google will check), wherever you the content owner think they’ll have the best experience.

These are cool if not world-changing new features from Google, but they indicate clearly the rapid evolution of the mobile ecosystem, one where the quality of the displayed information is becoming nearly as important as the information itself. This means that mobile-friendly websites are important, but the future lies with apps that will become an increasingly seamless part of the search experience. Think about it. Google will now check (on Android devices) what apps you have installed, index the content of those apps, present this content in regular Google search results, and allow you to seamlessly view that content in the installed app.

If your website isn’t already mobile-friendly (and it should be just as a best practice), Google’s giving you a big incentive to do so by pushing you up in mobile search results.

And if you’re wondering about the value of apps for your products, consider how quickly they are moving from handy appendages to the mobile experience to becoming central to that experience. If your data makes sense on a mobile device (and it doesn’t always), it’s probably time to stop thinking and start coding!

Buying Guides That Do Stuff

It’s been very interesting to watch the transition of buying guides from print to online. Print buying guides were a pretty good business, although in fact few of them were very good products. That’s because most buying guides were what I call shallow information products: they would typically list a product and the names and addresses of companies that (hopefully) made or sold the product. After that, users were on their own. This stripped-down format was in part practical, because even this limited information was hard to obtain. It was in part by design, because it encouraged companies to buy advertising next to their listings to provide additional information. There’s no room on the web for shallow information products anymore. Search engines have gotten good enough that you can find at least a few manufacturers or sellers of just about anything with very little effort. And company websites now typically contain a wealth of product information, in part because it is so cheap and efficient to do so. Overall, this leaves little room for buying guides to add value, at least in their traditional format.

So is the buying guide model dead? If you are talking about the traditional shallow information model, the answer is yes (something that the big yellow page publishers, incredibly, have still not figured out). But what is emerging in its place are a number of exciting new products that mix and match such features as:

• User ratings and reviews (and some now validate users and even confirm that they have purchased the product they are reviewing)
• Links to third-party professional reviews
• Downloadable CAD drawings
• Photo portfolios showing product applications and/or the product in use
• Strong parametric search
• Side-by-side comparison of selected products
• Guided search where instead of traditional searches, users answer a questionnaire instead
• Shared online areas where users can post products for review by co-workers
• Ability to request product samples from the manufacturer
• Integrated ordering capabilities
• Warehousing and shipping of product on behalf of manufacturers
• Product specification data, warranty data, installation instructions, manuals
• Real-time inventory information
• Real-time pricing information

In short, the list is long. And what results is a true destination purchasing research site and, increasingly, a central marketplace. Find exactly what you need and order it. That’s been the holy grail of buying guides for decades, and it’s finally becoming a reality.

The other piece of the puzzle is advertising. Because publishers are now building these true destination sites, they can also develop substantial traffic simply because they are offering utility and value. And advertisers respect these highly qualified or often quite large audiences because they are truly “in the market,” and what advertiser doesn’t want visibility when the buying decision is being made. It is, as we like to say, “data that does stuff.”

So while the approach is different, what we see with buying guides is exactly the same as what we see with other forms of data, and exemplifies infocommerce: creating a high value proposition with better, deeper data and tools to act on it.

Monetizing Your Unfair Advantage

In the news today was the announcement that BusinessWire, a press release distribution company owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, had decided to stop offering direct access to its press releases to high frequency traders. This follows on the heels of a decision by Thomson Reuters not to sell advance access to market-moving economic data that it publishes. I find myself concerned about these decisions. That’s in part because what these two companies were doing was actually quite different. And as you dive into the details, you start to see issues that a broader range of data publishers may ultimately have to confront.

The Thomson Reuters situation involves two indexes: Consumer Confidence and the ISM Manufacturing Index. These are both major indexes that can and do influence the stock market broadly. In both cases, Thomson Reuters had licensed the rights to publish them. Nobody argues that Thomson-Reuters should have the right to monetize these indexes. But it’s one particular aspect of this monetization that raised concerns. Thomson Reuters openly offered to sell access to these indexes either a few seconds or a few minutes before they were released to the public. That’s more than enough time for computerized trading systems to analyze the news and place buy or sell orders accordingly. And by the way, it’s all legal, and Thomson-Reuters wasn’t hiding any of these arrangements. But is it fair?

The BusinessWire case is even more innocuous. BusinessWire is in the business of pushing our press releases far and wide. To that end it offers direct electronic access to anyone who might benefit from it. Some smart traders figured out how to take that innocent feed, process it, and make buy and sell decisions on it very quickly. BusinessWire was just going about its business. Third parties figured out how to profit from their activities, with no help or encouragement from BusinessWire. And while press releases don’t sound that interesting, keep in mind it’s the way many public companies first announce big events such as acquisitions.

I’m not a lawyer, so there may be nuances to this I am missing, but I understand that public policy recognizes the value of a level playing field when it comes to the stock markets, in part to build confidence. And as an individual investor, providing advance peeks to savvy stock traders doesn’t feel right to me. But as an information professional, my view is why not? The entire B2B information industry largely exists to provide unfair advantage. In fact, I know data publishers who have seriously considered variants of “Your Unfair Advantage” as corporate tag lines.

Given the murkiness of the legal issues, I think it’s fair to conclude that both companies stopped these activities primarily for reputational reasons. And that’s important to think about. These two events are very different, but you’d never know that from a quick scan of the headlines they generate. Our products are complex, sophisticated and nuanced. Typically, they are used by a range of users in a range of ways. You can’t – and shouldn’t – police what users do with your data. But you should put some thought into how you position your data and its uses, especially if there is potential to use your data for stock trading. It’s too easy to get painted as the bad guy even if you’ve done nothing wrong.

The bottom line is that as data becomes more powerful and important, we’re all going to receive more scrutiny. And the complexity of our products works against us in the media. That’s why sensitivity to how we present our data products is going to become increasingly important. And if yours is one of the companies considering a tag line that includes the words “unfair advantage,” may I politely suggest a re-think?