Busy Time At WAND

WAND has made a lot of noise lately in the search world. The company recently announced that it has expanded the scope of its taxonomy expertise by creating custom sets of tags and keywords associated with product and service categories. The data can help clients' websites keep up with the Web 2.0 phenomenon by adding metadata to company profiles, blogs, product reviews, catalog pages and video clips. The tags can also yield more intelligent and responsive keyword-based searches of digital assets, according to WAND. The tags can be integrated with the WAND product and service taxonomy to combine benefits of structured and unstructured search.

In separate news, WAND has collaborated with European information services provider Telegate to launch a local search service in Germany. WAND provided more than 180,000 keywords to Telegate's system of 8,000 headings to help users yield the most relevant results from their searches. Prior to working with WAND, Telegate produced failed searches for many of its users.

To solve that problem, WAND matched Telegate's business categories to its taxonomy to produce a large amount of synonyms that could be included in the Telegate database. WAND also analyzed Telegate's query logs to find missed searches and extract additional search terms to include in its taxonomy. Now, more than two out of three searches that previously failed yield relevant results for users.

Both of these announcements certainly illustrate the value of WAND's services in a world where Internet search and Web 2.0 are top of mind with every company that has an Internet-based businesses. Creating a service that helps these companies better handle Web 2.0 technology is a smart move by WAND. Many organizations still don't know how to adapt their sites to take advantage of everything related to Web 2.0 and will likely welcome this helping hand from the experts at WAND. While they can't (or don't want to) do it themselves, they certainly recognize the urgency to have such capabilities. As word continues to get out about this new offering, it will undoubtedly become one of WAND's most popular services.

WAND's partnership with Telegate should also benefit the company in both the long and short term as Web customers of all sizes and locations strive to make their search functionality the best it can be. They realize that users are going to bypass their sites if they can't find exactly what they are looking for, and find it quickly. Having great search functionality on your site is a necessity, not an option, these days. And WAND is certainly well-positioned to capitalize on that trend.

Too Much Information

With all the excitement around user-generated content, and so many new sites launching that depend in large part, if not exclusively, on it, relatively little thought seems to have been given to the question: what if it works?

We were early fans of TripAdvisor a 2004 Model of Excellence award winner. Yet TripAdvisor's phenomenal success came with a hidden price. It is now routinely held up as an example of a data provider that became a victim of its own success. Look up a particular hotel on TripAdivsor and you can find dozens of user reviews. Do they provide information? Yes, lots of it. Do they provide insight? Not really, because they are invariably and passionately contradictory. One person loves the hotel; another had the worst experience of his life. How does a user of the TripAdvisor site extract value from such extreme inconsistency? It's not easy, and it can be frustrating even to try. That's not a good user experience.

Some of the pioneers in user-generated content are acutely aware that user-generated content can quickly turn into user-generated information overload. Yet, discouraging user-generated content is contrary to the business model and editing or policing it creates costs that make the whole model less attractive and more complicated. What's a publisher to do?

One excellent example of how to encourage user- generated content while maintaining its value is provided by review site yelp.com. View a typical hotel review on Yelp and you can click on a "rating details" link that elegantly and instantly summarizes all the dozens of full text reviews that appear below for you to read -- or not.

There's an important underlying lesson here: value is not created by amassing the greatest amount of stuff online. It is created by making information accessible, digestible and actionable. These are some of the tasks routinely performed by data publishers on a daily basis, and it's one of the key reasons that the data publishing business is thriving right now. We are in the right place at the right time with the right skills.

Valuemetrics

Okay, valuemetrics is a made-up word. But maybe it should be a word. After all, anyone who has ever sold a data product, whether advertising or subscription- based, knows the number one renewal objection from current customers revolves around value, specifically, not enough value. For ad-driven data products, that means advertisers don't believe their advertising generated a high enough level of response. For subscription-based publishers, that means that subscribers don't feel they used the product enough to justify the subscription.

This is very frustrating to publishers, who know that there is often a gap between reality and what customers believe, especially when it revolves around an advertising or subscription renewal decision. Why the big gap? That's because for the most part, these customers aren't doing any systematic response or usage measurement. Instead, they are heavily influenced by specific, often isolated events, both good and bad. To those events, they add in perceptions, gut instincts, stray comments made by others, and mix them all together to create what in their minds seems like objective certainty. How do you argue with a customer who is certain of something that's not true?

The obvious answer is to develop proof of your own to shoot down these misperceptions. Yet despite the obviousness of this answer, at this late date too few data publishers are providing credible and useful value metrics to their customers. And we still encounter too many publishers who don't themselves have any firm grasp of how much value they deliver. That we are now all online, working in "the most measurable medium," makes this all the more remarkable.
For advertising-based publishers, education and context are key. Generating online usage metrics is not all that difficult. But if the sales staff doesn't understand what the metrics mean, and if they lack benchmarks to know if results are good or bad, they will use this information reluctantly, if at all. Keep in mind that salespeople need more than a superficial understanding of usage metrics, because in most cases they'll be educating their advertisers as well, a situation in which a little knowledge can indeed be dangerous.

For subscription-based publishers, take the most obvious step: track subscriber logins and other usage metrics. We continue to be amazed that the relatively small percentage of publishers who do this at all are primarily interested in preventing password sharing and other abuse. Indeed, the bigger the subscriber, the less tracking we tend to see. For enterprise subscribers with IP-based database access, it's a rare publisher indeed who tracks anything at all. We're uniquely capable now of responding authoritatively to that oh-so-common objection, "we really didn't get much use out of your database," yet only a tiny percentage of the industry is leveraging this huge opportunity to improve renewal rates.

It's been said that data publishers have long been resistant to measuring usage and response because they themselves weren't sure they'd like the answers. Unfortunately, this new environment doesn't allow anyone to hide anymore. Besides, if you're not in fact delivering all that much value, wouldn't you want to know that while there is still an opportunity to fix the problem?

Labels: metrics

Reed Construction Data Builds Out Data Offering

Reed Construction Data (RCD) has partnered with RCMS Group, a building information modeling (BIM) services provider, to launch a new BIM suite of services for the building design and construction market. The main goal of the alliance is to promote the creation and distribution of content for an audience that consists of building product manufacturers, architects, general contractors and sub-contractors. Both companies will create content and building models for the Autodesk platform.

According to a news release announcing the partnership, there is approximately $400 billion new non-residential development underway in the U.S. each year, with $1.5 billion of that earmarked for building design. Both companies share the view that the BIM market will continue to grow.

Among the capabilities RCMS Group brings to the alliance are several value-added BIM services, including the development of "Builders" BIM model for general contractors and the creation of BIM content for building product manufacturers. RCD's portfolio includes more than 80 publications, 55 websites and various business-to-business services.

This partnership illustrates yet another example of the value of good content and finding ways in which to enhance its value even further for the end user. As professionals continue to demand content and services that integrate into their workflow, the timing of this launch is ideal. Customers will undoubtedly welcome the new BIM services; both companies recognized a need--and see the potential for enormous growth. It will be interesting to follow the progress of this initiative as the BIM market matures.

Polk Scores With New Offering

R.L. Polk & Co. last month released the results of a pilot program it conducted with an automotive dealership group to test the effectiveness of its Polk Lead Scoring product. During a two-month period, 14 MileOne dealerships used Polk Lead Scoring to determine which Internet leads were from customers most likely to make a purchase. The dealerships credited the Polk product for 45 additional vehicle sales and $70,000 in additional profits.

Using the analytics Polk has been known for for three decades, Polk Lead Scoring uses automotive intelligence and sophisticated analytics to help automotive manufacturers and retailers predict who is likely to buy and when they will do so. It enhances Internet leads with proprietary automotive information and demographic and lifestyle information to provide accurate lead scoring. The product also includes reporting and analytic capabilities to leverage Polk's ability to evaluate lead performance at the lead source, make and dealer level.

This is a very innovative product that truly complements past Polk offerings and provides potential customers with a tool that will likely use for a long time--lead scoring in the automotive industry is probably here to stay, thanks to Polk. Marketing professionals constantly struggle to identify their most valuable customers and this product promises to find just those individuals these marketers seek. These same marketers continue to recognize the value of analytics, but can certainly use a helping hand to access and analyze such data. If marketers don't already know the value Polk products afford, they will now. MileOne's results are rather impressive and will undoubtedly inspire similar automotive companies to give Polk Lead Scoring a try.