Getting Real

You've built an online service, something of a cross between eBay and ThomasNet. It's focused on facilitating B2B connections in the explosive China marketplace. It's so well received it generates over 10 million sales leads annually. That's just part of the massive success story that is Global Sources. And what does Global Sources do next? It launches a print trade magazine.
Okay, the Global Sources story is actually more complicated than this, but my point remains: with everyone working so hard to find success online, how is it that some of the most successful online players are making moves into print?

Consider another undisputed online success story: TechTarget. Born online, it now has not one but three print titles now. And they serve high tech markets of digital natives, where the conventional wisdom would suggest print should be long out of fashion.

My absolute favorite example is still Search Marketing Standard, a new print trade magazine serving SEO and SEM professionals. Even those whose profession is to show others how to market and sell online still apparently want to receive their information in print.

It's easy to say, "hey, if companies will buy ads and people will read it, why not do a print magazine?" Fair enough, but that doesn't get at the bigger question: what drives the enduring appeal of print to both advertisers and readers?

Quite likely, there are multiple drivers, many of them quite banal, that work to make things look more complicated than they really are. But one factor, and I've heard this from both publishers and advertisers, is that print "makes you more real." Think about it. Anyone can create a website cheaply and easily, but few can afford to publish a print magazine. It speaks to commitment, substance, authority and influence on the part of the publisher. Advertisers say basically the same thing. The print medium lets them be more creative and deliver more complex messages. Just as importantly, a full-page print ad lets an advertiser stand out from the crowd, and demonstrate substance and commitment that's a lot harder in the pay-per-click online world. In short, print lets both publishers and advertisers make a real statement. And generate real business, which in turn generates real profits. And that's real good.

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Labels: eBay, global sources, health content07, Infocommerce, print medium, search marketing standard, tech target, ThomasNet

A Stately Alliance

LexisNexis this week announced that it has expanded its partnership with State Net, a provider of legislative and regulatory intelligence, to provide state legislative history content within LexisNexis services. Users will now be able to view legislative history since 2003 and search the full text of documents such as committee reports and fiscal notes. Both companies expect this new content will help customers improve their legal and compliance processes.

This alliance is proof that publishers of all sizes can benefit from alliances. Even large publishing giants like LexisNexis clearly see the value in partnering to add more depth to their content and help bolster the services they offer to customers. Customers don’t care if you build or buy--it doesn't matter to them if you create a new product offering from scratch or if you acquire or partner to bring that new feature to them. They only know if you don't have something they need. LexisNexis does a great job keeping a pulse on what’s happening in their customers' world. The company understands customers' problems and it works to find solutions that will conquer any task those customers face. LexisNexis knows, as we all should, that if you can't help a customer accomplish his goals, he will find an information provider that can.

Creating a Community

Online real estate service Zillow.com celebrated its first anniversary with last week's launch of Home Q&A, which includes features that connect buyers and sellers in a community atmosphere. HomeQ&A is essentially a platform that enables those buyers and sellers (and real estate agents) to ask and answer questions about particular properties.

Site visitors can also now create their own profile pages that contain photos and contact information. They can also add an unlimited amount of photos to a specific home's Web page. If a house is for sale, visitors can indicate that and also include the asking price. Zillow.com also launched EZ Ads, a tool that enables real estate agents and home sellers to purchase ads targeted to a specific region (by zip code).

While many online content providers are still investigating the potential value of online communities, Zillow.com certainly hasn't wasted any time adding such a feature to its service. It will be interesting to see how quickly Home Q&A develops and if buyers and sellers utilize this new community they've been offered. If it works in this market, will it work in yours? This is definitely a development the online database publishing community needs to keep an eye on.

A New Search Engine for ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo last week launched a new version of ZoomInfo.com that utilizes the company's patented semantic search technology. As a result, the company promises better search results for users. The company says the semantic search engine will crawl the business web for information, scanning such sources as Web sites, press releases and electronic news services. Then, it will semantically tag, aggregate and organize the information into usable profiles.

New features that ZoomInfo.com now offers include free company searches, comprehensive job searches and highly relevant product searches. The site will also continue to offer plenty of free (and small fee) functionality. Searching people by name will still be free, while ZoomInfo is now touting low-cost access to deeper people information (such as work history, education, contact information and web references) as part of its ZoomExec service. ZoomInfo has also announced an initiative serving B2B advertisers later this year.

Services, such as those offered by ZoomInfo, are now abundantly available on the web for people seeking contact information for other individuals and companies. (Among ZoomInfo's competitors: Jigsaw and LinkedIn.) Because this new "market" is getting flooded with players, it’s more important than ever for these companies to provide even better offerings. The big differentiators in this marketplace will be the most accurate information, found quickly and presented in an easy-to-use format. By bolstering the functionality and breadth of its offerings, ZoomInfo is on the right track. Time will tell if the new ZoomInfo.com is really different--and better --than the rest.

Under Review

Three discussions in one week on the topic of user-generated reviews is a sure sign that publishers are on the bandwagon. But what these discussions helped underscore is that user-generated reviews are largely unexplored territory, meaning unanticipated outcomes in some cases.

One publisher, after pushing a user review feature on his site for well over a year, is finally getting a decent volume of reviews, but they are distributed very unevenly. Some companies have garnered dozens of reviews, while the majority still have none. The publisher was considering a promotion to the companies with no reviews, urging them to encourage their customers to post comments. At the same time, the publisher was aware this might inspire some of these companies to game the system by reviewing themselves or only encouraging their most satisfied customers to post reviews.

Another publisher was having the exact opposite issue: too many reviews for anyone to possibly read, and often wildly contradictory to boot. Was he simply aggregating "gigabytes of garbage" he wondered? Could anyone find value in information that was routinely all over the map?
A third publisher, trying to avoid some of the issues of free-form commentary, has instituted a user rating system. His concern? Virtually every organization in his database was scoring between 7 and 8 on a 1 to 10 scale. Beyond the curiosity of it all was the problem that ratings aren't very useful if everyone has essentially the same rating!

There are no easy answers to these situations, but I would offer this basic guidance: if we institute user ratings, we need to work with and trust what we get. If we view ratings as a value-add to our core dataset, then it's clearly not our problem if not every company in our database has a rating. Similarly, numerous and contradictory comments about a company may not offer a clear answer, but if we help the user to conclude "where there's smoke, there's fire" or "proceed with caution," we've still delivered real value. As to the problem of similar ratings, remember that we are still creating useful differentiation from those companies with no ratings. TripAdvisor is trying some innovative things to summarize user comments to make them more actionable, so it's possible that technology may ultimately allow us to smooth out some of the issues relating to user comments and ratings. In the short-run, however, other than working to try to keep user posts useful and honest, don't get hung up trying to perfect this content, which is inherently messy and imprecise. User-generated content is simply color commentary that enhances what really matters: your underlying database.