Questions About Answers

A new enhancement from giant Canadian yellow pages publisher Yellow Pages Group caught my eye this week. It seemed to promise a live concierge service for users. You pose a question, such as "I'm looking for a good Chinese restaurant in Toronto," and you get a real-time response.

I surfed over for a look at the new feature, called "Yellow Pages Answers." Immediate disappointment. Here's still another publisher that simply grafted a social networking capability onto its database, with no apparent understanding of the fundamental dynamics of either social networking or yellow pages publishing.

First and foremost, social networking demands engagement, and that in turn usually means shared interests or some other compelling reason to participate and remain involved. Are there really people who find it cool, fun or interesting to be part of a community of yellow pages users? What shared interests do these millions of users who are doing quick information lookups have? Would you trust their recommendations?

Equally important, yellow pages is what I like to call a "point of purchase" medium. You only use the yellow pages when you want something, usually immediately. Submitting a question where you have to keep checking back for an answer, which might never come, is antithetical to the yellow pages raison d'être. The only people inclined to respond promptly are those with vested interests (owners of Chinese restaurants in Toronto, using my earlier example), or people with way, way too much time on their hands.

If Yellow Pages Group had launched a real concierge service that used it own staff to provide immediate answer, I'd be impressed. Certainly there would be lots of issues for an advertising-based medium to make recommendations, but at least there would be real user value. But encouraging your users to make vendor decisions based on recommendations from strangers comes with plenty of issues as well, not the least of which is how does this help my advertisers?

I hold up Yellow Pages Answers not to ridicule it but as an example that while social networking tools have their place and can be powerful and valuable, just because you can graft them onto your website doesn't always mean you should.

Labels: yellow pages answers, yellow pages group

No Reservations About OpenTable

OpenTable went IPO on Thursday, running up nearly 60% in its first day of trading (NASDAQ: OPEN). It was a much-needed "green shoots" moment for Wall Street, but it also speaks to the current favor in which subscription-based data products are held.

Does it seem odd that I am describing OpenTable, a nationwide online reservation system for restaurants, as a data product? We had a lot of discussion around that when we gave an InfoCommerce Model of Excellence award to Open Table in 2006. What swayed us in the end was its incredible workflow integration characteristics, coupled with all its data potential, much of it still unleashed.

Nobody could ask for tighter workflow integration. Restaurants that sign up for OpenTable have no choice but to make a total commitment to letting OpenTable manage all their reservations -- online and offline. You simply can't use it effectively otherwise. And once a restaurant has accustomed itself to OpenTable, enjoyed its convenience and seen the power of the online reservations pouring in through the OpenTable booking website, there's no turning back. Restaurants turn off OpenTable at their own peril!

But what about the data? Well, it starts with the fact that OpenTable is building a huge experiential database of dining activity. Registered users of the system even supply demographics, and OpenTable can easily overlay more. That means OpenTable knows with incredible precision, who eats where and when and how often. Think about an analytics and advisory business based on that data, much like MasterCard created MasterCard Advisors to leverage it analgous base of transaction data.

OpenTable is also well positioned to track no-show reservations, the bane of every restaurant. OpenTable could create a no-show score, much like a credit score. This would permits restaurants the option to either defensively overbook or perhaps demand a credit card in advance from such diners.

Open Table could help restaurants understand how they are doing versus their peers and competitors. It could help them learn how they are being discovered on the web. It could create customized promotion codes of landing page URLs that restaurants could use in their advertising to track response rates. It could tie into mapping data for site selection research. And the more it does, the smarter it gets, and the more valuable it becomes.

Intriguingly, Zagat Surveys was an early investor in Open Table, a relationship (presuming it still exists) that has been woefully underexploited. Tie the leading online reservation system to the leading rating system and an incredible number of opportunities emerge.

The key to OpenTable is that it successfully injected itself into an industry's order flow. Act One was to perfect the technology to make that possible. Act Two will be mining the rich data that results. From there, the future is OPEN.
(Since this may read as if I am playing stock tout this week, it seems right to mention that we have no business relationship or financial interest in any of the companies mentioned here.)

Labels: MasterCard Advisors, OpenTable, zagat

When Features Collide

Google's uses an annual press event it calls Searchology to trot out its new search features and other new offerings. Two new features caught my eye. Individually, they are useful and fascinating. In combination, they are potentially disruptive.

The first new offering, scheduled to go live imminently, is called Google Squared. It's an attempt to present search results to the user in spreadsheet format. You'll type in a standard free text query, for example, "baseball teams" and Google will return a spreadsheet where the rows consist of each team in baseball, and the columns are determined dynamically, such as location, league affiliation, etc. In short, Google is attempting to create structured data from unstructured web page content. Does it work? As you might suspect, it's far from perfect, but at the same time, it's a remarkable start.

Another new feature announced by Google is called "rich snippets" which involves putting more structured data in search results by drawing on web page metadata (in particular, pay attention to Google's support of a microformat called hCard). With rich snippets, which is being rolled out slowly, Google can now display star ratings for restaurants right in its search results, standardized address information for businesses, and disambiguated person data (initially courtesy of Linked-In) that will show company affiliation and job title right in the standard search results screen.

Okay, here's the disruptive angle to this. Fast forward a few years and it sure sounds that with more structured business and individual contact information available through Google, along with tools like Google Squared that allow output in spreadsheet format, it's entirely possible that users will routinely be able to easily create and export business mailing lists, organizational charts and much more. The more microformat data Google is able to access, the more high quality, structured output Google will be able to deliver to users and in a popular data interchange format to boot. Given Google's preferred price point for information (zero), there's a very real possibility of some disruptive change on the horizon.

Recommended response? Remember that basic contact information had been becoming commoditized for a number of years now. These Google offerings will only accelerate an existing trend. The future for data publishers is to continue to relentlessly push up the value chain delivering deeper, smarter information to customers in ways that integrate into their workflows and business processes.
2009 Model of Excellence Award Nominee: Boardroom Insiders

We're pleased to announced that Boardroom Insiders has been nominated for a 2009 Model of Excellence award for its "Boardroom Insiders" product.
Click here for our full MofE product profile.

Labels: google squared, hCard, Linked-In, microformat, rich snippets

Remember Your CMP's

I am just back from the American Business Media annual conference in Florida. Since this is the leading association of business magazine publishers, I expected the mood to be dour. After all this, this is an industry that has remained stubbornly wedded to not just advertising, but print advertising, and has consequently been hammered in this economic downturn.

The mood I encountered was actually somewhat upbeat and distinctly resolute. This downturn, I heard time and time again, is forcing publishers to make hard decisions and take decisive action to evolve their businesses.

And what's the focus of this evolution? Interesting to me at least, it's not data. While these magazine publishers are increasingly appreciative of the stable, recurring revenues data products can offer, they remain largely outside their comfort zone. Instead, the conference buzz centered on the notion of magazine publishers evolving into marketing service companies. The idea is to move off a singular focus on ad pages to staging events and promotions, building websites, whatever the advertiser needs. As my colleague Janice McCallum notes, this isn't exactly a new concept, and it begins to blur the lines between publisher and agency.

Are there dangers in this? Most particularly, do publishers risk "biting the hand that feeds them" as they start to move onto agency turf? The conference panelists took a combative stance in response to that exact question, suggesting that agencies were moving onto what has traditionally been the turf of publishers, particularly in the area of building communities on behalf of their clients. No talk of cooperation or partnering here. Rather, the recommendation was "get them before they get you."I admit to being energized by all this talk of marketing services. It's a concept that makes sense, and the dollars and the margins being discussed are big enough to yield fast and positive financial results for many magazine publishers. My caution to these publishers, however, is to remember what's enabling this fast move into marketing services, something we call Central Market Position. Most business magazine publishers occupy a central, trusted, respected and neutral position in the markets they serve. Central Market Position provides a uniquely powerful platform to exploit any number of market opportunities. Moving too aggressively into marketing services risks damage to this position, and that could mean that the hunt for short-term dollars could conscribe future growth opportunities.

A Model of Excellence Winner Does Us Proud

I don't think you can gush too much about a data content company that has an army of hundreds of thousands of field researchers gathering company and executive information, data entering it all into a central database, and best of all, doing it all for free. That company, as you may have guessed, is Jigsaw, an InfoCommerce Group 2005 Models of Excellence winner, and the company is finishing up a very busy week.

On Wednesday, Jigsaw announced the launch of Data Fusion, a service that I think truly qualifies for the label "revolutionary." Simply described, Data Fusion hooks seamlessly to company CRM databases to perform continuous data scrubbing. This scrubbing goes far beyond merely standardizing existing data to deleting dead records, updating current records and even adding new records. Data Fusion is a SAAS (software as a service) offering, meaning no software to buy or install, and steady recurring revenue for Jigsaw. I've been in this business for nearly 25 years, and publishers have been fantasizing about an offering like this for at least 24 of them.

On Thursday, Jigsaw announced a deal to license its executive contact information to D&B. It's a pretty slick maneuver when you can turn a competitor into a sales channel, and if nothing else, it's a major validation of Jigsaw's data quality and increasingly comprehensive database. All-in-all, not a bad week!Lessons for the rest of us? First, you can build a trusted, quality database off user-generated content if you go about it correctly. Second, the users who contribute data to you don't seem to mind at all if you aggressively monetize the resulting database, provided they continue to see value in participating. Third, with a well-crafted licensing agreement, it is possible to do business with competitors, so don't rule out this possibility without thorough examination. Fourth, software can add tremendous value to data when it empowers the business processes and workflow of your customers. The goal, as I like to put it, is to move from reference-oriented data to "data that does stuff." Jigsaw is showing us all that success in data publishing isn't puzzling at all.

Mark your calendars now to meet this year's Models of Excellence companies at the InfoCommerce Group's annual Data Content09 conference, October 27-29, at The Ritz-Carlton, Philadelphia.

2009 Model of Excellence Award Nominee: Telnic Limited

We're pleased to announced that Telnic Limited has been nominated for a 2009 Model of Excellence award for its "dot tel" product.

Click here for our full MofE product profile.

Labels: DNB, jigsaw, telnic