We are pleased to announce that A.M. Best has received a 2007 InfoCommerce Model of Excellence award for its BestLink offering.
Labels: A.M. Best, BestLink, Infocommerce
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Back when I was applying for college, what powered my generation's choices was the Guide to American Colleges, produced by Barron's Educational Services. Barron's stood out by bravely trying to rate colleges, putting them, as I recall, into five broad categories such as "highly selective" and "competitive." The categorization was largely driven by SAT admission scores, and no attempt was made to rank colleges within a particular category. By today's standards, it was pretty tame stuff, but at the time, it was revolutionary.
The Guide to American Colleges is still being published, but has nowhere near the influence for which I remember it. That honor now appears to belong to America's Best Colleges, published by U.S. News and World Report which is so dominant and so important, it not only changed the fortunes of U.S. News, it appears to have radically altered the higher education landscape as well. Wherein lies its power? Its straight numerical ranking of colleges, from the very best on down and down and down.
What qualified U.S. News to rank our institutions of higher education? Nothing really. It just decided it wanted to do it. It selected a number of measurements it decided were proxies for quality, crunched the numbers and published the results.
In the beginning, colleges played along. Their listings gave them free publicity, and the high ranking colleges wasted no time asserting their bragging rights. When reports started coming out that some colleges were actually altering their admissions processes purely to improve their U.S. News rankings, that spelled trouble. And now a growing number of colleges have concluded that the U.S. News rankings have gotten too powerful and announced a boycott.
Colleges are a wonderful example of the difficulties inherent in trying to rate services. To a large extent, only you can assess the value of a particular service you receive. Because a service is something you can't see or touch, its value is based on your own personal perceptions, and value is often wrapped up in how you choose to make use of the service you receive.
Perhaps not surprisingly, interest in rating something seems inversely related to the difficulty of rating it. Because it's so difficult to tell what you're getting for your education dollar is precisely why ratings of educational institutions have such enormous appeal and influence.
Implications for data publishers? Ratings systems are extraordinarily powerful things to offer. But when you rate, you create winners and losers. And the losers will often hate you more than the winners will love you. Too, while anyone can rate anything, the most powerful ratings systems are invariably fueled by strong brands, so when you rate something your brand equity is on the line. That means at the very least you want your rating methodology to be as bulletproof as possible. And you may also want to re-consider the Barron's approach to ratings that created value for the user while engendering less competitive tension. The lesson here for data publishers is that it is sometimes smart to strike a balance between utility and controversy.
Labels: America's Best Colleges, Barrons, Guide to American Colleges, rankings, ratings, U.S. News and World Report
Zaio Corp., which develops and maintains a site-verified database of photos, valuations and property information, announced this week that its subsidiary Zaio Inc. will acquire the assets of Kirchmeyer & Associates and Real Info. Inc.--affiliated companies that have strong operations in the real estate field. Kirchmeyer & Associates is the largest appraisal firm in New York State and Real Info is a business-to-business real estate information and automated valuation provider.
Kirchmeyer's strength is offering products and services that reduce cycle time and costs associated with evaluating property risks and closing transactions for real estate appraisal needs. This includes relocation appraisals and construction inspections. The company has relationships with more than 7,000 U.S.-based appraisers. Real Info provides automated property valuations to home equity lenders, credit unions and real estate professionals. Its proprietary Internet delivery technology provides searchable real estate data on more than 85 million parcels across the U.S. via its Access subscription offering.
In a company statement, Zaio officials noted that these acquisitions will give the company the resources (people and products) to provide better service to customers. Since this deal is such a great fit for all companies involved, the integration of the three entities should be fairly seamless. And customers should benefit very quickly. These customers are apparently in store for even more as Zaio looks to increase its presence and portfolio further with additional partnerships and acquisitions.
Business-to-business Summit Business Media LLC last week acquired Agent Media Corp., a database and marketing company for the life, health and annuity segments of the insurance industry. The deal increases Summit's presence in the life and health insurance segment.
The deal includes Agent Media products such as Agent's Sales Journal (both national and regional editions) and Insurance Marketing, as well as more unique products such as The Agent's Market Pack, a direct response agent recruitment tool, and eProducer Connect, an email list of more than 1.6 million licensed agents and registered representatives.
This deal is a smart move by Summit, which wanted to bolster is market position in the insurance industry through the acquisition of key industry properties. When companies decide to buy--and not build--to either establish or increase their presence in a desired market, it's imperative they put themselves in position to hit the ground running. Summit appears to be doing just that by acquiring a strong market player with an innovative portfolio of products and services that don't need any help. They have an established customer base that will likely continue to grow as a result of Summit's ownership. This is an acquisition strategy to model. Summit says more acquisitions are planned for the future. They will most definitely fit the formula of this latest deal.
ECNext this week announced its Manta business research site is now allowing users to modify its more than 45 million company profiles. ECNext feels that Manta's content will become more robust as a result of about 4 million monthly unique visitors updating the profiles. Company owners and executives are being encouraged to update their own company information.
ECNext hopes to further engage Manta visitors in the future. According to the company, this initiative is the first in a series of new features available on Manta designed to involve visitors in the development and enhancement of the site.
This is a very interesting idea, especially during a time when user-generated content is increasing in popularity. But user-generated content also brings a unique set of problems to the table. First of all, how is ECNext planning to police the data entry conducted by visitors? How will the company ensure that contributed data is accurate data? Second, ECNext doesn't own this information, so essentially they are allowing visitors to edit third-party content. The success of this initiative hinges on ECNext's ability to control the flow of the contributed data. There is certainly the potential to make Manta a more robust source of business information; and if this initiative is successful, Manta will likely become a main source for many business professionals. However, there is a very real risk of creating a service that is anything but reliable. It's worth keeping an eye on.