Three New Products to Watch

LinkedIn Launches ProFinder

It’s a smart if probably inevitable move: LinkedIn is leveraging its deep base of professional users and resumes to roll out a new marketplace for freelance and contract professionals. The way it works is simple: you post your freelancer need, LinkedIn forwards it to freelancers who have signed up as “LinkedIn Pros.” Postings are apparently forwarded based on categories selected in advance by the LinkedIn Pro, not some more sophisticated algorithm.

ProFinder is very much in the awkward and dangerous early stage all marketplaces contend with: not enough buyers or sellers right now. My posting for a content strategist (with admittedly random criteria) yielded no matches, something LinkedIn will need to overcome fairly quickly. That said, this is an excellent example of how to generate multiple revenue streams from distinct markets off a single platform. Keep an eye on how LinkedIn evolves this new service: they’ve shown themselves to be pretty sure-footed this far in the professional connections space.

pinGo Introduces Display Advertising

You may recall our 2014 Model of Excellence winner SpinGo. In a nutshell, SpinGo is a master database of events that it distributed through thousands of media outlets that want local events listings, but don’t want to do the work of checking and maintaining the listings. Basic listings are free, but SpinGo also offers paid listing enhancements that give these listings more prominence.

Now, SpinGo goes a step farther, allowing event organizers to create an online ad (in a totally self-serve environment) that lets them advertise their events on the news pages of many of its media partners. SpinGo shares revenue with its media partners of course, and reinforces its position as the one-stop shop for event organizers to list and promote their events online.

Quorum Analytics Closes the Loop

One of our 2015 Model of Excellence picks, Quorum Analytics, caught our eye because it is bringing powerful analytics to the world of lobbying and advocacy, starting with the world’s largest database of legislative information, both federal and state level.

But identifying legislators to target is only part of the job. Real legislative influence depends on grass-level support. That’s why Quorum has just released the Quorum Action Center. The Action Center enables supporters – think members of a trade association, for example --  to quickly take action on issues of importance by writing, calling, or tweeting their legislators, signing a petition, and even sharing content on social media—all from a single customizable web page. By making it easier to harness interested constituencies to make their opinions known to legislators on topics of interest, Quorum becomes a true plug-and-play tool for those in the business of influencing the legislative process.

Supercharge Your Audience Database

Time, Inc. recently announced a brilliantly simple and smart deal with a company called Audience Partners just in time for the 2016 election season. Simply stated, it is overlaying its massive consumer database with voting data from Audience Partners that has created a National Online Voter File database.

Yes, just in time for the elections, Time can now offer political campaigns access to its audience, but now with the ability to target not only by Time’s demographic data, but also by political party affiliation. And lest I leave you with the impression that Audience Partners only offers simple party registration data, let me be clear: there’s much more. The National Online Voter File allows targeting by voting frequency, donor history, types of elections the voter typically participates in and more.

Hopefully, your head is already spinning with the possibilities for your own audience database. In the B2B world, a voter overlay wouldn’t be my first choice because that’s a volume game: you need a huge audience to be attractive. But let your mind wander to other possibilities a bit closer to home. Is there public domain or even licensed data that you could overlay on your own audience database to create new high-value marketing opportunities? All this added intelligence about your audience is also something you can leverage internally as well, getting smarter about who you are talking to and what content they engage with.

None of this is a new concept. I remember back to the good old days of pressure sensitive labels and postal mail. Even back then, mailing list compilers were slamming together lists of mail order buyers to identify coveted “multi-buyers.” And “master files” of names, sometimes with hundreds of possible demographic and behavioral selections were readily available.

As a B2B example, I often offer up the example of Randall-Reilly, which has publications serving the trucking industry. It overlaid its basic audience data with a rich public domain database that allowed to it append truck ownership data. Suddenly, it went from offering modestly value truck driver contact information to hugely valuable market intelligence and targeting capabilities as it now knows the exact make, model and year of the trucks its subscribers operate.

This is perhaps the simplest and fastest way to supercharge your audience database. Think of what data you and your advertisers would kill for, then rather than trying to acquire it yourself, see how you might acquire it through one or more overlays. This has been a good business for 30 years; it’s even better today.     

Is Your Data "Datanyzed"?

A new product by a cool young company called Datanyze is capitalizing on some well-established infocommerce best practices. Here’s how they did it.

The core business of Datanyze is identifying what SaaS software companies are using (sometimes called a company’s “technology stack”). To do this, Datanyze interrogates millions of company websites on a daily basis, looking for telltale clues as to the specific software they are employing online, and apparently a lot of categories of software can be divined this way. Datanyze aggregates and normalizes these data, then overlays company firmographic data (Alexa website rank, contact information, revenue estimates) to create a complete company profile.

Datanyze links directly to the Salesforce accounts of its customers, so it can add and update prospects on a real-time basis. At a basic level, the use case for this product is straightforward: a marketing automation platform like Eloqua could use it to find companies using a competitor or no marketing automation at all. But wait, there’s more!

Datanyze’s new product essentially flips this service. Now, Datanyze clients can have Datanyze analyze their existing best customers, and Datanyze will build a profile of these customers that can be used to predictively rank all their prospects, current and future. Here are the best practices to note:

• The transition of Datanyze from a data provider to an analytics provider, something that’s happening industry-wide
• The shift from passive (we supply the data, you figure out what to do with it), to active (here are top-rated prospects we’ve identified for you), and the associated increase in value being delivered by the data provider
• The tight integration with Salesforce means that Datanyze customers just need to say “yes” and Datanyze can get to work – no IT involvement, no data manipulation, no delays
• Datanyze is pouring leads into critical, core systems of its customers, a strong example of workflow integration
• The use of inferential data. Boil down a lot of the analytical nuance, and Datanyze has discovered that companies that buy expensive SaaS software are better prospects for other kinds of expensive SaaS software. Datanyze doesn’t know these companies have big budgets; but it does know that these companies use software that implies they have big budgets

Datanyze offers a concrete example of how data companies are evolving from generating mountains of moderate value data to much more precise, filtered and valuable answers. Are you still selling data dumps or analytics and answers?

Transforming Data the Humin Way

Imagine launching a start-up that is touted as a pioneering “social operating system” a key player in the burgeoning area of “contextual computing” and even a “digital butler.” Let’s go even further, and imagine the burden of having to live up to the goal of “organizing the world” and most intriguing of all, building “a master contacts database for pretty much the entire world?” Well, if you can in fact imagine living up to expectations like this, you’ll probably want to apply for a job at a company called Humin.

On a more practical level, Humin (at least for now) is an app that grabs your contact list, calendar entries and social networks to build a master list. It then automatically contacts everyone on the list and asks them to confirm their details and provide additional information. Once all these data are confirmed and unduplicated, you get a contact list that can be searched by location, by connections (who knows who) and a lot of other ways that go far beyond the typical address book.

To live up to its contextual computing hype, Humin wants to move into push mode. Fly into Cincinnati, for example, and it will present you with a list of your contacts there. Humin will of course get smarter as it begins to find deeper meaning in both the data itself and how you use it. Privacy concerns? Not to worry. Humin hangs onto only the minimum amount of data needed to do its magic – all the most valuable data stays right on your phone.

Those of you who are students of data may see shocking similarities between to an earlier service called Plaxo. In its original incarnation, Plaxo grabbed your address book and would periodically query everyone in it via automated emails to confirm that their details were current. Even more cool, if you updated your own information, Plaxo pushed it out to all your contacts automatically. It was the original globally synchronized contact list. Ultimately, Plaxo went astray, jumping on the social media bandwagon in a failed attempt to challenge Facebook.

The lesson of Humin (beyond possible confirmation that all great data publishing ideas are derivative), is that while Humin may be loosely based on the Plaxo concept, it is moving aggressively to surround data with tools. Humin isn’t just organizing and tidying a giant pile of data and then asking the user to find value in it – it is innovating in multiple ways to do that thinking for the user, and to deliver the right data in the right format at the right time to offer maximum value. We at InfoCommerce Group call it “data that does stuff.” Surround good data with good tools, and you, too, can become master of the data publishing universe.

People Power

There was news this week about the formation of Bloomberg Beta, a new venture capital fund sponsored by data company Bloomberg LP. One of Bloomberg Beta’s early investments is a company called Newsle, that will alert you whenever someone you specify – a friend or colleague – is in the news. This is a tough nut to crack. Searching thousands of news sources and trying to determine if the John Smith mentioned in an article is the same John Smith of interest to you is a complex undertaking. But what really intrigued me is that those who have written about Newsle see another major problem that the company faces: lack of activity. Think about it. If you import your list of Facebook friends (something Newsle encourages you to do), the chances of any of them appearing in news stories is pretty low. That means most people will sign up for Newsle and nothing will happen, not because Newsle isn’t working, but because there is no news to report. It’s hard to establish the value of your service if you’re not delivering at least a little something every now and then.

That’s why in addition to your Facebook friends, Newsle also encourages you to import your LinkedIn contacts, and while you are at it, your address book as well. Somewhat incongruously, Newsle also encourages you to follow politicians and celebrities. The hope is the more people you track, the more likely you’ll get hits.

But what if Newsle flipped its model? Instead of serving individuals who for the most part have small lists of mostly boring contacts, why not hook up with commercial data publishers, many of whom have tens and even hundreds of thousands of contacts in their databases? Publishers could then send real-time alerts out to their subscribers who are interested in specific people or any activity relating to executives at a given company. In addition to sales intelligence, these news alerts could also provide a basis for making contact with a prospect. Plus, publishers could database these news events to build deep profiles on company executives that would have evergreen value.

This could be a great opportunity for Newsle to crack its volume problem, and for data publishers to add in high-value alerting services and historical data all in one fell swoop.

That’s powerful, people!