Fortresses of Solitude
According to American Business Media, there is a powerful coalition of environmental and consumer interests coming together to introduce "do not mail" legislation in the next session of Congress. Could it happen? Nobody knows for sure, but if it does, "do not mail" will come together with "do not call" and the murky set of rules that effectively create a "do not fax" environment. Add into the mix technology like voicemail and aggressive spam filters and as a society we'll be well on our way to seeing the elimination of all unsolicited outside contact. It is arguably desirable for consumers to be able to choose to make their homes into their own fortresses of solitude, but the implications for business-to-business marketing are much more profound.
As businesses, this legislative trend, coupled with our own aggressive adoption of technology to filter email, is severely limiting what we see and hear and in many cases we are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Case in point: we get a number of opt-in sign-ups to this newsletters every week. We add these folks to our list and like clockwork half of them come back with the message "this message was blocked by our spam filter." We used to try to contact these people to alert them to the problem, but it's a big effort and expense for us, and in many cases these people tell us there is nothing they can do because they don't control what gets filtered out. It's a perfect lose-lose outcome, and it's getting worse every day.
Even more importantly, as this trend towards rigorous screening accelerates, we hurt ourselves in another way because as a side-effect of all this, we are creating a more complex, if not downright hostile marketing and sales environment that makes it harder and more expensive for all of us to do business.
So where are things headed? In the short-term, it's a boon for trade show producers, and publishers with magazines and websites that carry advertising that generates inbound inquiries (provided these prospects can get past your defenses). It also partially explains the boom in any and all forms of lead generation. But longer term, things have to significantly change.
Just as we tell our advertisers that "just one sale can pay for your entire advertising program," we as organizations need to appreciate that just one good unsolicited contact can make up for an awful lot of unwanted contacts, and we need to be mindful that corporate fortresses of solitude are a luxury none of us can afford.
Picks, Pans and Passes
Since there were so many interesting developments this week, we thought we'd
summarize some of them and grade them as either a "pick" (thumbs up), "pan" (thumbs down) and "pass" (it is what it is):
Someone at the Associated Press is one step closer to sainthood for signing an agreement with Google whereby Google will not only pay for AP content, but limit the way it uses it as well. Admittedly, there is precedent for Google licensing some limited amounts of content it couldn't easily spider, but this AP deal goes to the heart of Google's core business practices, and should help create some much-needed space between the terms "fair use" and "free use." This deal's a pick.
InfoUSA announces it is going to acquire Opinion Research Corporation, a major market research organization. It characterizes the deal as "compelling" and "strategic," but is short on specifics other than extolling putative cross-selling opportunities. The backdrop to this deal is an ongoing, public feud with a major shareholder over financial performance and management issues, and a recently negotiated standstill agreement with the company's founder who makes periodic noises about taking the company private. Who says it's dull in Omaha? Is this acquisition a good deal for infoUSA? Possibly. Is it a compelling and strategic deal? Sorry, no, and on that point we rate this one a pan.
Major League Baseball got shaken out of its fantasy world by a federal judge who told the organization that, no, it did not have the right to prohibit others from using the names and performance statistics of major league baseball players. Apparently, the Major League Baseball Players Association struck out on this case by not properly taking into account such inconveniences as the first amendment and the Supreme Court's decision in Feist. When data ownership claims move into the realm of silliness, they hurt even those seeking more modest protections for their data, which is why we rate this decision a pick.
TheStreet.com announced the acquisition of Weiss Ratings from Weiss Group Inc. Weiss Ratings, a 2004 Models of Excellence award winner, provides performance ratings on over 16,000 mutual funds and 6,000 stocks. It also rates the financial strength of more than 13,000 financial institutions. Weiss did a remarkable job building a ratings business from scratch, against a pack of strong and established competitors, but with the buzz from its often-controversial ratings starting to fade, it needed a second act to maintain visibility. What better partner than TheStreet.com, no stranger to using controversy to get attention, with a huge base of loyal investors, and a need to differentiate itself from other consumer investment sites. Now here is "compelling" and here is "strategic." This one's a pick.
Google's recently released white paper designed to smack down growing claims of click fraud qualifies as a white paper largely because it can be easily printed on white paper. With its j'accuse tone, it was designed to shoot down the methodologies of several click fraud detection services. Yet to make its case, Google repeatedly relies on such compelling proof statements as "their records don't match ours" and "yes it was fraud, but we didn't charge the advertiser for it." In response to one case where the same person appeared to visit an advertiser's site three time in the course of ten minutes, Google simply informs us that this is normal comparison shopping behavior. Well, with that kind of documentation, we know we will all be sleeping more easily. Despite making some valid points, you would think a huge corporation with so much at stake could have done a better job than this, which is why we rate it a pass.
Does Data Defy Definition?
An increasing challenge in InfoCommerce Group's business of monitoring the data publishing industry is to maintain a good working definition of what constitutes a database product. In the good old days, it was easy to spot a data product because it was held in database form. But now, it seems almost all content is stored in a database, from press releases to magazine articles.
The simplest definition of a data product focuses on the fact that it is highly structured and fielded content. But since publishers of news and textual materials have gotten wise to the power of taxonomies and content tagging, and with the widespread adoption of XML, that definition no longer serves.
Most recently, it seemed that workflow integration could uniquely define a data product. While lots of publishers have jumped on the workflow integration bandwagon, it was clear that only data products could truly become integral to a user's workflow, because they alone could be married with software to not only provide information, but take action.
Well, two recent deals by Congressional Quarterly, just days apart, are now challenging this definition as well.
A number of years ago, Congressional Quarterly saw the writing on the wall and began migrating its print publication, which provides news and analysis on Congress, politics and public policy, to its flagship website CQ.com. It all seemed oriented to news and not data, and particularly when you applied the workflow integration test, it didn't seem to qualify as a data product.On July 25, however, Congressional Quarterly announced the acquisition of Political Money Line, a database of election campaign contributors that will be integrated into the CQ.com offering. Now a database will sit alongside text-oriented content, complicating an otherwise easy label for CQ.com.
Then on July 26, Congressional Quarterly announced it was teaming up with Potomac Publishing to provide a new service that will greatly reduce the time it takes to determine how legislation will affect existing public law. Called CQ Legislative Impact, the service brings together CQ's enhanced Bill Text service with two new databases provided by Potomac Publishing -- the U.S. Code and Public Laws.
CQ Legislative Impact will allow users to call up a bill -- from this Congress or previous sessions -- and instantly see which parts of Public Law or the U.S. Code would be altered, or were altered, by the bill. Similarly, users can find laws they care about and easily see how various bills have been amended in previous years. Certainly, this is automating work processes previously done manually, and probably quite slowly. Smells like workflow integration.
Some poking around on the CQ.com site also led me to another existing service that tracks changes to the text of legislation as it moves through Congress -- still another example of adding workflow integration capabilities to what traditionally would be viewed as full-text products.
So what is CQ.com? Is it a data product? Is it a text product? Both? Neither? The answer is simple: CQ.com is one very smart product, and that's the message here -- none of us should be afraid to move outside traditional media boundaries or definitions if we are creating products that meet real and important customer needs.
Rick Wainschel
VP, Marketing Research & Brand Communications
Kelley Blue Book
Will Be a Speaker at InfoCommerce 2006
Is the Long Tail an Old Tale?
The hot buzz term for some time now has been the "long tail," and the concept is now the basis for a new book by Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson called " The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More."
On a surface level, the premise of the book is straightforward: Anderson believes that the 80/20 rule, where 20% of products represent 80% of sales, is increasingly being inverted by companies that have found they can make more money, more dependably, selling lots of little items as opposed to focusing on selling big blockbuster items.
Anderson focuses heavily on retail media companies such as Amazon, Netflix and iTunes, so his insights would seem to apply to the larger media/information industry. Yet the more I looked into it for implications for the specialized publishing industry, the more I asked myself: what about the long tail concept is new?
It's hardly a secret that while many book publishers chase blockbuster titles in the hope of making big money fast, most of them are sustained by what's called their backlists -- the hundreds or thousands of titles they have already published that sell a few copies here, and a few copies there over a long period of time. Assemble a sufficiently large and good quality backlist and it seems to me you've got the proprietary equivalent of a long tail.
The same is true for movie studios, that get sold for obscene amounts not because of the hits they might provide in the future, but because of the solid library of films they have produced in the past and still own. The bigger the library, the bigger the revenue opportunity. Another proprietary long tail. Ditto this for the music business.
In the data publishing world, our product is more perishable, but still we have our own variant of the long tale: by slicing and dicing our databases into ever more specific pieces, we have found we can produce more sales, and at higher prices, by providing customers the exact data they want. No particular selection of data may sell a lot, but a lot of selections selling a few copies each still approximates the long tail effect.
So is the "long tail" an old idea dressed up in a trendy new catchphrase? Yes and no. I think the buzz has distracted us from the more important, underlying point: that the Internet has made it significantly easier for buyers and sellers to find each other. By creating a more efficient marketplace, we can now consider making and selling small-volume products that wouldn’t be economically viable in a pre-Internet world.
The truly important message of The Long Tail is that the Internet has freed all publishers, including data publishers, from having to exclusively chase "home run" new product ideas, because it's increasingly possible to do quite well with a collection of singles and doubles. And that's a tale worth listening to.
It's Always Blurry Before the Dawn
We coined the term "infocommerce" six years ago to convey a fundamental transition that was occurring within the publishing industry. Today, publishers are applying infocommerce in many ways, and it has become the essential key to redefining their roles and value propositions. As a result, the lines between information and commerce are becoming more and more blurry.
What's the difference between a database product and a catalog? At one level, the simple distinction is one takes orders for the listed merchandise and one doesn't. But in terms of the underlying content, distinctions blur quickly. One of the finest examples of this is Amazon.com's brilliant evolution of its Internet Movie Database subsidiary, which is successfully defying conventional wisdom with an explicit strategy to be all things to all people.
What's the difference between a list compiler and a database publisher? Here, the distinction is even murkier, though both types of businesses live in their own worlds and consider themselves vastly different from the other. The fact that compilers, just like data publishers, are being forced to gather deeper and more valuable data is a guarantee their paths will cross if not collide in the near future. D&B offers proof of this as it creates new products to capture more of the small business market. InfoUSA offers another great example as it moves to expand its presence with the big business segment of the market.
We are even seeing a blurring of traditional roles among B2B magazine publishers. Once content to passively introduce buyer and seller through advertising in their printed pages, many of them are now moving to more actively exploit their central market position, and are operating call centers to develop sales leads, conducting market research, creating vertical search portals, offering print and online custom publishing capabilities, and much more. It's going to be hard to recognize much less categorize these publishers in a few years.
So while this re-definition heralds an evolution of the industry, it's also confusing and destabilizing because the frames of reference we once depended on to understand how things work are all in flux. The good news is that those who are creatively embracing change are uniformly re-shaping themselves into better, diversified and stronger companies, with much more exciting growth and profit opportunities that will usher in the dawn of a new golden age of publishing. But at the moment, it's still a bit blurry.