A Plug and Play Publishing Platform?
Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corporation, an independent company with such an extensive relationship with Dun & Bradstreet that it was even granted use of the vaunted D&B name, has been targeting smaller businesses with not only traditional D&B credit products, but a beta offering of what might be called a “next generation credit rating,” a so-called credibility score that examines the company from a number of different non-financial perspectives, yielding a letter grade and presumably an online trust mark that companies can use to build confidence with both suppliers and customers. It’s a clever and ambitious concept. And there are some serious resources behind this venture: Boston-based private equity firm Great Hill Partners is backing the venture with in excess of $100 million.
In an apparently related development, D&B Credibility recently announced the launch of the “Credibility Review Business Marketplace,” an innovative move to partner with publishers to extend the reach of its credibility ratings, by turning B2B data publishers into a sales channel. D&B Credibility indicates a number of publishers have already signed onto this program.
I’m still waiting to get full details on this program from the company, leaving me free to speculate wildly, a favorite pastime. Here’s what I picture:
D&B Credibility has licensed access to the full D&B business database, and this provides a content backbone to the initiative. When it emerges from beta, D&B Credibility will presumably move to aggressively sell credibility scores to smaller businesses. Each sale yields a richly detailed business profile (part of the score involves “transparency,” so participating companies are obliged to supply all sorts of useful information – smart!) that the participating company is highly motivated to keep current (yielding high leverage user-generated content). These enhanced listings are added to the basic listings in the content backbone.
To accelerate adoption of the credibility scores, D&B Credibility will partner with publishers on an intriguing offer: a self-maintaining database offering a growing number of credibility scores, that the publisher can access for free in exchange for selling credibility scores (and anything else it wants) to companies in its vertical market.
As I envision it, publishers would simply flag the companies they want to appear in their vertical market buying guides, getting in effect a customized view of the larger database. The publisher codes each company against its own vertical market taxonomy, and presto-whammo, it’s got a high quality database that costs almost nothing to build or maintain. All it has to do is sell the credibility scores and other advertising to companies that it has flagged. For trade magazine publishers in particular, selling ads is a true core competency, where database development and maintenance is not.
What’s in this for D&B Credibility? It gets a revenue cut from every credibility score a publisher sells. It gets all the company information being collected (everything goes into its backbone database), and it gets valuable help in building momentum and acceptance for its scores.
Is this a good deal for publishers? When it comes to vertical market buying guides, the majority of publishers have unevenly maintained databases with limited company information. This approach not only goes a long way to solving the twin issues of data quality and data depth, it also provides the ability to sell a new and useful offering – a B2B trust mark.
Fascinating stuff, and well worth watching as the product rolls out from beta.
LinkedIn: The B2B iTunes Store?
Regular readers know that I am a big fan of LinkedIn. My interest, of course, has been in its database, which may be the most important biographical database ever created. But LinkedIn can’t rest on its laurels. That’s because it depends on user generated content, and the biggest threat to LinkedIn is if users start questioning its value. LinkedIn is already jokingly referred to by many as “the boring social network.” And while LinkedIn now benefits from lots of buzz and momentum, it needs to remain fresh in the eyes of users and give them a reason to interact with LinkedIn as frequently as possible, and to continue to deliver back some tangible value as well. LinkedIn thinks it can address all three of these requirements with content. As Deep Nishar, the company’s SVP of Products and User Experience puts it:
“We believe LinkedIn can be the definitive professional publishing platform – where all professionals come to consume content and where publishers come to share their content.”
So is LinkedIn positioning itself to become sort of an iTunes for professional content?
As of now, it’s hard to see how LinkedIn as a publishing platform will evolve – and the company itself may well not have a full vision. But I have already seen conference companies with their entire businesses based on LinkedIn groups. It’s entirely possible we will see new trade publications where the entire audience is composed of LinkedIn members, delivered via LinkedIn, with LinkedIn potentially supplying those members by somehow matching them to relevant publications.
But with this intriguing vision comes lots of equally intriguing – and potentially worrisome - questions. Will publishers be able to distribute advertising via the LinkedIn platform? Who will own the audience? Will LinkedIn seek transactional revenue of some sort from publishers? The more you look at it, the more you see the potential for a B2B ITunes Store, with all the attendant issues.
We may be at the early stages of a truly transformational shift in business and professional publishing as LinkedIn begins leveraging its massive audience of business people to move into content distribution. Exactly how it chooses to do so could have profound implications for B2B publishers.
Education Data: Lessons Learned
A recent Reuters story described a new national database of student information. Reportedly built at a cost of $100 million, and backed by prestigious non-profits such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation, the aim of the project is to build a standardized database of information on all students in the country, grades K-12. No, this is not aggregate data. This is detailed, specific information on every student that can include such information as grades, learning disabilities, hobbies and interests. Surely this database doesn’t include student names and other identifiers you say. But in fact it does. And that’s the point. It’s also why this database is so exciting to so many companies in the education market. The goal is to jump-start technology-driven individualized learning for students.
According to the article, school administrators have long (and legally) maintained all sorts of data on students for educational purposes. And, as you would suspect, every school did things a little differently. They collected different data elements and held them in different formats in different locations. So if you were marketing educational technology to schools that tried to personalize the learning experience, you faced a painful data interface challenge for every new school you sold. Seeing a real impediment to growth for cutting-edge educational technology, several big foundations jumped. And rather than just developing a data standard which would take decades to gain widespread adoption, they invested to actually build a single database. Participation by schools is voluntarily and (currently) free, but lots of incentives have been created to spur participation.
We can draw a few fascinating lessons and trends from this initiative.
First, we see a wonderful acknowledgement of what I modestly call Perkins’ Law: no organization will voluntarily build and maintain a database if it is outside their core competencies and there is a viable alternative to doing so. The commercial data publishing business is really built around this law: data publishers succeed because people want the data, but don’t want to collect or maintain it themselves.
Second, we see another great example of a “data pipe,” where one organization provides data that developers can tap into via APIs to build applications driven by that data. The data provider seeks to become an information utility, while dozens or even hundreds of different developers can identify and mine niche opportunities faster and better than any single data publisher. This is a relatively young model, but it’s quickly gaining a following.
Third, valuable data is more often than not sensitive data as well. As this database hits the radar of parents and civil liberties advocates, the inevitable questions around privacy and security are being asked. And the answers to date, according to the article, do not seem particularly robust or reassuring. The non-profit managing the database makes all the appropriate noises about protecting the data, while at the same time the database exists in large part to benefit commercial entities. While the goal of the database is laudable, we have a classic example of a database that will likely succeed only with strong governance and privacy policies. This is something that commercial data publishers will need to become attentive to in years to come.
It’s a fascinating initiative, and one where we can all learn by example.
Unlocking the Value of LinkedIn
TechCrunch posted a long and thoughtful analysis of LinkedIn this week. In short, it suggests that LinkedIn is at risk from a growing number of vertical market professional networking sites, and faces a "death by a thousand cuts." The risk of being "sliced and diced" is real. Any horizontal provider of information stands at perpetual risk of a competitor targeting an attractive vertical segment and doing a better job. The same holds true for professional networks. It might be nice that you could theoretically interact with any other professional anywhere, but in reality, most of your interaction is with others in your specific industry.
But is LinkedIn really at risk? I don't think so, primarily because I don't think of LinkedIn as a professional network.
Blasphemy? It may sound like it, since LinkedIn has routinely been classified as a social media play almost since its inception. Indeed, If you think back to the early days of LinkedIn, it was explicitly designed as a novel attempt to codify the concept of "six degrees of separation" among business professionals. If you continue to think back, you will also remember how quickly that concept fell on its face. Nobody used LinkedIn as originally intended, but it was in the right time and place to become the largest and richest biographical database in the history of the world, and that's where its money does and should come from.
LinkedIn has reached a stage where your failure to have a LinkedIn profile raises questions about you in many circles. It has quietly grown its company profiles (all cross-linked to individual profiles) to the point where a number of business information providers are taking worried notice. Many individuals base their job hunting on well-burnished LinkedIn profiles. In some professions, having the largest number of connections is a sign of success. Increasing number of data publishers are tapping the LinkedIn API to gather, augment and maintain their own databases. I could go on, but in its own weird, wacky and wonderful way, LinkedIn has become part of the fabric of business.
Right now, LinkedIn profits handsomely selling access to its structured database to recruiters and others. But this is just the beginning. LinkedIn is poised to become a critical backbone database with numerous uses. In one obvious application, CRM software companies are all rushing to integrate LinkedIn into their applications. But think beyond the obvious. For example, LinkedIn could be a hugely powerful trust and identity tool. After all, it's hard to fake more than a handful of connections, and are you likely to blatantly misrepresent your career in front of all your friends and colleagues who you invited to link to you? There is very valuable confirmation and verification locked up in all this linking that remains to be fully exploited.
The LinkedIn database could be used in a number of ways to tune up spam filters. You might even use it to prioritize incoming messages from your connections. LinkedIn is ever-eager to suck in your contact list from your computer, but what if it maintained that list for you (remember Plaxo)? Suddenly, LinkedIn would become the central database of business. And let's get inferential for a moment. I am certain that someone somewhere is trying to correlate the number and quality of LinkedIn connections with creditworthiness. And what about evaluating the quality and prospects of a company based on the extent and quality of the LinkedIn connections of its management team?
Crazy ideas? Maybe. But all I am trying to do is illustrate that while the social elements of LinkedIn are nice and necessary, don't lose sight of the fact that it has only just begun to mine one of the most remarkable databases ever created. There's gold in them thar hills!