Information Meets Commerce

A quick note this week on two recent developments at the intersection of information and commerce, our sweet spot...

First, a fascinating post at Screenwerk, details the huge strides being made by companies trying to capture, aggregate and in some cases syndicate, retail inventory data. I've previously discussed the most established player in this field, Milo, but another company that hadn't previously hit my radar, called Retailigence, is now claiming that it is collecting data on 5.3 million products representing a stunning 25% of all US retail sales volume. Oh, the back-end data possibilities! To its credit, Retailigence is all over this opportunity, and is offering predictive intelligence on consumer sales behavior, along with sophisticated consumer profiles. As usual, B2C is leading the way, but retail/distributor inventory data opportunities abound on the B2B side.

Second, while you have doubtless heard about the loud battles being fought by companies such as NetFlix and Hulu in the online movie distribution wars, there was a somewhat quieter entry into this marketplace recently: Amazon's IMDB subsidiary. Yes, the Internet Movie Database, an impressive database of movies with incredibly rich detail, is being used as Amazon's platform to stream online movie trailers and sell movie tickets via mobile devices. And if the movie whose trailer you are viewing happens to be available through Amazon's Instant Video, there's a convenient link for cross-selling purposes.

What interest me with IMDB is that is represents that fascinating point where databases and catalogs blur, and where data content companies move from describing products to selling them. There should probably also be an award for IMDB for its creativity in developing, advertising, subscription and now transactional revenue elegantly and simultaneously. Expect that award from someone other than us, since we have already recognized IMDB with our Model of Excellence award way back in 2004.

Infocommerce gets sweeter every day.

Roll Your Own Search Engine

It actually happened with lightning speed: after a groundswell of online complaints from the technology cognoscenti about increasing spam-laden Google search results, Google recently responded in a remarkably aggressive fashion. It tweaked its search algorithms to knock out more spam and junk and it now allows users to individually filter out sites of no interest.

Score one for the marketplace and the power of the blogsphere you say? If so, you'll be pleased to know you are in the majority. Google has garnered lots of praise for its fast and seemingly strong response. But for me, this move by Google has some intriguing implications that haven't been widely acknowledged.

First, if Google could so quickly re-jigger its algorithms to eliminate so much junk and spam, why didn't it do this unbidden? Part of me thinks that this is a prime piece of evidence that Google has become complacent. I am also intrigued that the two moves Google made here precisely mirror approaches employed by recent competitive start-up search engines that garnered a lot of press: Blekko and Duck Duck Go. Is Google also starting to feel the heat from tiny start-ups?

Second, let's think a little more about this new filtering capability offered by Google. What if it were to truly catch on? The basic concept is that you can now easily and permanently take out any domain from your Google search results. Consider what this means: suddenly, nobody is seeing the same search results. What is the implication for search engine optimization programs and providers? What happens to search engine marketing? If you drop, say, bizrate.com from your search results, will Google continue to serve you Bizrate ads in AdWords? If it doesn't, what is the revenue impact to Google? If it does, has it done a disservice to Bizrate, since you have seemingly signaled you are not thrilled with Bizrate?

And speaking of signals, Google has already indicated it is going to watch the list of sites being blocked as possible signals or indications of what sites it should block for everyone. Yes, it's possible you'll someday be able to use Google to in effect vote on what websites, companies and institutions you don't like, with possibly ruinous implications for those that get blacklisted.

Perhaps most profoundly, after all of us have spent the last decade or so in a fevered rush to get top search engine resulting rankings in Google, we may be moving to an environment where that goal may be both unachievable and meaningless if everyone is effectively going to be seeing different results from the same search.

My view of these recent changes is that Google is getting sloppy about search as it diverts its attention in its own search for the Next Big Thing. Impossible? Think back to the days when Yahoo owned search, until it got bored with search and decided there was a much bigger opportunity in transforming itself into ... a portal. The rest is history. I also think that we may be entering a distinctive new phase in the evolution of the general search engines, one where the search engines are no longer a mass medium. Odds of this happening? Search me!

New and Nifty

Spiceworks, a service that helps companies manage their IT networks and a 2010 InfoCommerce Model of Excellence award winner, has just launched a new offering called Vendor Pages.

What's exciting about a new IT industry buying guide? Well, nothing ... and everything.

First of all, Spiceworks has over 1.3 million companies using its software to inventory and manage all the components of their networks. In exchange for using its free hosted software, Spiceworks runs targeted advertising to this audience. Targeting in this case is something of an under-statement, as Spiceworks knows the make, model and serial number of each piece of equipment on the networks of its users. The upshot of this is that people involved in buying and maintaining IT equipment are using Spiceworks all day long. In short, Spiceworks has a ready-made community for its new vendor product.

What's also exciting is that Spiceworks didn't go the useful but conventional route of listing vendors by product category and letting them run ads in those categories. Rather, Spiceworks borrowed from FaceBook to build a brand-centric offering. Advertisers can organize their product information in one location, and interact with Spiceworks users. Spiceworks users can even follow particular vendors. In all, it's a refreshing, brand-oriented, highly engaging and social approach to product advertising that's rarely seen in B2B.

In another fresh twist on an old idea, WhitePages.com (a 2004 DataContent Conference presenter) has launched a new product called Hiya. In a nutshell, it will allow you to upload all your contacts from various devices and services and Hiya will undupe them, consolidate them, and even furnish missing data elements where available. Best of all, borrowing from the original concept for Plaxo (before it mistakenly went social), Hiya will alert you to address changes for your contacts on an ongoing basis. It's a great concept, one I admittedly haven't had time to test yet, but I know whitepages.com is justly proud of the match/undupe technology it developed to build its core directory product. The price for Hiya? Nothing more than registering as a whitepages.com customer. Oh, and Hiya has a viral element, encouraging those who use it to email their friends to provide missing data. Simple, clever, and according to research conducted by whitepages.com, a product that meets a growing need.

Let's Get Granular

Take a look at four new online offerings that caught my eye just this week:

• StorkBrokers, a place to buy and sell used baby gear
• TopDish, a restaurant recommendation engine
• Room 77, a site to let you pick the best rooms within a given hotel
• Tello, a site to let you rate customer service at any businessQuick: what do they all have in common? On the surface, not much. But go up to 40,000
  feet, and what you see is highly-specific spins on well-established products and categories of products.

StorkBrokers is doing something you can already do with ease on EBay and Craigslist, and who knows how many other online classifieds sites.

TopDish is a new entry in the very crowded restaurant directory/review category, which brings to mind products like Zagat and OpenTable.

Room 77 jumps into the hyperactive world of hotel information, starting with sites like
TripAdvisor and Hotels.com, and ranging out to all the major travel booking sites.

Tello wants to play alongside the seemingly endless number of consumer review sites,
from Yelp to Angie'sList. Even the big online yellow pages sites are dipping their toes in here.

So what's my point? You could certainly say these are all brave new entries in highly competitive markets, but that's not particularly insightful. You could argue that these are all "me too" concepts, that might suggest a dearth of big new ideas. This line of thinking is always compelling, at least until the next big new idea comes along. We could say that these sites are just examples of the ongoing effort to "slice and dice" successful sites by pulling off some of their functionality and layering some new twist on top. There's something to that.

What intrigues me is that all these sites are trying to do something better for a very specific audience by tightly focusing their offerings. By limiting itself to baby items, StorkBrokers has a chance to attract more sellers, which will in turn attract more buyers, meaning more choice and faster transactions.

TopDish says that knowing what restaurants are out there is valuable, but knowing which
restaurants serve the specific dishes you want is more important, especially if, for example, you have food allergies. TopDish isn't for everyone, but those who find it appealing will probably use it heavily.

Similarly, Room 77 says picking the right hotel is only half the battle, and knowing which
room to request is equally important. Again, not everyone cares, but those who do will be loyal users.

Finally, Tello believes that a lot of people want to rate a business, but don't want to
write lengthy reviews. Its goal is to attract a specific following.

My takeaway: the web is beginning to mature. It is moving away from the land-grab
mentality of chasing ideas for the mass market to building highly granular, specific
functionality products for limited audiences. It's a concept that business information publishers have understood and practiced for over 100 years: target a vertical, serve it well at a granular level and profit handsomely. It's nice to see the online world finally catching up and online users valuing deep, focused, granular content

Forcible Entry

One of the hardest parts of implementing any kind of sales force automation system is getting the sales force to automate. That's because automation ultimately comes down to data entry, and the average salesperson either won't do it, can't do it or does it reluctantly (read: poorly). The result is often a nightmare, as those of us who have been called up to cleanse or enhance such databases can readily attest.

Let's face it: salespeople become salespeople, at least in part, because of an aversion to forms and paperwork. They don't see sitting at a desk entering information about things that have already happened to be a good use of their time. And to a large degree, they are correct. Do you really want your top producer spending valuable time on entering call notes? Yet at the same time, who else can do it? The salesperson is the only one who can report out on a client meeting, and it's valuable to both the salesperson and management to have some record of what transpired.

So how's it all working out? Kinda, sorta okay is probably the best summation. Salespeople are frequently coerced into doing necessary data entry by tying it to commission payments. Far less frequently, salespeople are incented to provide the needed input, and management gets by with the result. After all, if a salesperson mistakenly indicates a prospect has a 60% chance of closing instead of an 80% chance, it's annoying and a bit disruptive, but nobody gets hurt.

But what if bad data entry could get somebody hurt? It's not theory. Right now, the government is dangling billions of dollars in front of physician practices and hospitals in order to spur rapid adoption of electronic health record (EHR) systems. And how is patient data being entered into the EHR systems? Well, to a surprising extent, it is by physicians themselves, pecking away at keyboards. And not surprisingly, physicians are about as thrilled with this new data entry work as salespeople.

Highly productive physicians (and most are in our wonderful world of managed care) see this work as slowing them down. Some physicians don't think this is the kind of work they should be doing, and even those who are conceptually supportive of EHRs are often just plain not good at data entry. And when a diagnosis, for example, is entered incorrectly, the impact in the interconnected healthcare system that is emerging could be devastating. And there's another angle as well: patients are beginning to complain that their already conscribed time with the physicians is being further chipped away as physicians stand with their backs turned, entering information.

Of course, the healthcare economy has a solution to this problem that perfectly illustrates why healthcate cost control is so difficult: they are hiring data entry people, called scribes, to follow physicians around and enter information that is called out to them. Scribes are already fairly common in emergency room settings, but it probably won't be long before it gets even cozier in the examining room too. So much for the much-hoped-for costs savings EHRs were supposed to yield!

Object lesson for us all: never forget that when it comes to workflow applications, somebody has to enter data, and that person probably is neither trained nor particularly happy about doing so. The easier you can make it, and the more you can trap errors before they enter the database, the stronger the product and the higher the chance of successful adoption.