Blekko: Breakthrough or Me Too?

There is a lot of buzz about a soon-to-be-launched new search engine called Blekko. Who needs another search engine, right? Well, not surprisingly, Blekko isn't trying to confront Google head-on. Blekko is betting its future on an interesting twist it offers called "slashtags."

A slashtag is essentially a filtering tool to restrict search results. This offers up some interesting capabilities. For example, in Blekko you could enter the search term "healthcare" just as you would in any search engine. But with Blekko, you can add the slashtag "/conservative" after "healthcare" to see only the conservative perspective on healthcare.

You're probably already a step ahead of me and asking that all-important question "How do it know?" That's where it gets interesting. A slashtag represents a list of websites and web pages. Humans will build and maintain the lists associated with each slashtag. Blekko intends to build some popular ones, but ultimately it wants its users to build slashtags, either for public or private use. Long story short, Blekko is a horizontal search engine that offers as its primary feature a vertical search capability.

 

I don't want to sound too dismissive of Blekko; the ability in particular to combine slashtags provides real power. Want to know what the conservative media in the UK is saying about healthcare? Simply enter "healthcare /conservative /ukmedia" into the Blekko search box.

Keep in mind too that Blekko is a general search engine, so it is not restricted to news. It's entirely possible that you could enter "American Refractory Corp. /companies" into Blekko to have it only search public company databases. 

The weakness I see in Blekko is its approach to slashtags. Apparently, anyone can make one, anyone can name one, they won't all be equally good, and they won't all be maintained. Until Blekko nails these issues, it's a curiosity and a tool for power searchers.

What's really interesting , though, is the larger statement that new search engines like Blekko are making: the game in search has shifted to filtering and limiting search results. Less is more in the next generation of search. It began with vertical search; now Blekko is offering what might be called multi-filtered vertical search. The ultimate challenge of course is to get to fully structured data that can be searched and filter with precision, a business data content producers know very well.

 

 

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Go With the Flow

I stumbled across a fascinating new website called Flowtown. It has a simple but powerful premise: Import a list of email addresses, and Flowtown then matches them to the major social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In and a number of others), and returns a consolidated profile that turns an email address into a name, a location, a company name and job title, and indication if the individual has Twitter, Facebook or Linked-In accounts, even a photo. Flowtown also has an intriguing indicator to flag those who are particularly influential by analyzing how many people are reading their online posts.

Many of us have amassed email lists that we know little if anything about. Flowtown brings these lists to life, quickly and easily, giving you a fascinating picture of your audience. You can also integrate Flowtown into your own applications using a Flowtown API.

The primary function of Flowtown is to provide automated engagement with those on your list -- you can reach out to them with varying messages at varying frequencies to stay in touch and keep them interested. What particularly caught my eye was that these profiles could be downloaded as CSV files.

 

I signed up for a free trial of Flowtown, and uploaded a sample of business email addresses to see what would happen. I got about a 60% match rate (not bad at all), and the matches appeared to be of high accuracy. The free trial didn't provide the download option, so I am not exactly sure what the CSV export file looks like, but there's a lot of useful information that can be extracted from Flowtown, no matter how you use it. It's worth a look.

Everyone's a Prospect

Facing a sales downturn, many companies decide the best solution is to sell harder when really what they should be doing is selling smarter.

I just got off the phone with an account representative for a major office supply company who wanted to drive out to my office and take me to lunch. I inquired, "Do you know how much we spend with you annually?" The answer was no. When I shared that we were a long-time low three figure customer of theirs, we both quickly agreed that the meeting probably wasn't necessary.
A salesperson from a computer retailer called me to announce we had been upgraded to "national account status" and that all sorts of wonderful benefits wil be ours. After confirming this special status didn't cost anything, I said, "Sure, why not?" The consequence of this was daily calls from this salesperson, "just checking in to see what your needs were for today?" This from a company from which I had bought one small PC three years ago.

 

I could go on with stories like this, but the scary thing is, these are companies that know something about us, and they could easily know more with third-party data overlays. But rather than do the up-front profiling and segmentation work, these companies chose the scattershot approach, squandering scarce and expensive sales resources in the process. 

 

Of course, no matter how wasteful these calls are, they are head and shoulders above the sales prospecting calls I receive. One was from a roofing company (hint: a tenant in a multi-story office building isn't likely to be involved in decisions regarding the building's roof). I get an endless stream of sales calls from IT outsourcing companies (hint: number of employees is a good proxy for scale of a company's IT infrastructure). There was the real estate agent who wanted to lease me 100,000 square feet of warehouse space (hint: consulting firms tends not to have warehouses). 
 
The lesson for data publishers is not to get too far ahead of your customers. Some of the new data products I have seen lately are breathtaking in their sophistication and ability to segment and target prospects, but in the wrong hands they just won't get results. If you've got a cutting edge data product, never underestimate the need to train and support your customers, because if they don't succeed you won't either. And always remember that much of what we take for granted as data producers is nothing short of rocket science to those who use our products.

Feet on the Street

A fascinating post in The Business Insider mentions today that commodity traders -- big dollar buyers of all types of business information -- are now following posts by farmers on Twitter, a free and decidedly erratic information platform. What's going on?

It's simple. Traders will do anything -- and pay anything -- to get a trading edge. The more they know about what is going on, and the faster they know it, the more opportunity to profit. And that's what Twitter is offering them. If a corn farmer in Kansas notes low yields, that's a potentially valuable insight. Of course, these traders then need to not only confirm the information, but determine whether or not it is an isolated event or a trend. That's a lot of work, and it's not work traders want to do, which is why they would happily pay others to do it for them. I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this.

This news item also reminded me of a story I had heard years earlier.  A major Wall Street firm had a huge investment in the stocks of major waste management companies. A managing director of the firm who was in charge of this investment grew frustrated with his lack of insight into trends in the business. This was despite receiving thick reports on the industry by investment analysts on a regular basis. His solution: "a deep dive on dumps." Yes, he started calling landfills around the country to ask them if they had business, and which companies were sending in the most trucks. To this day, the visual of this top Wall Street player (I always pictured suspenders, a big corner office and a fat cigar) chatting it up with the guys checking in trucks at the city dump makes me smile. But it worked. The story as it was told to me was that this regular monthly flurry of calls ultimately led to a profit estimated at over $40 million.

The lesson here is that those of us who can provide our own primary research in our markets create for ourselves real value and differentiation. Those who can deliver it quickly add even more value. And those who can quickly wrap up primary research into actionable insights and recommendations offer the best value of all.

Do you have an opportunity to somehow leverage "feet on the street" (or perhaps "tweets on the street") to make your customers smarter, faster? If so, it's an area well worth developing.

Influence Peddling

There's a lot of buzz building lately around a firm out of London called PeerIndex. PeerIndex has set out to perform a significant but complex task: identify who's worth listening to online. Think about it: with everyone on the Internet offering their opinions about everything, how does one separate the good from the bad? How do you know if someone is respected and trusted?

 

What PeerIndex is doing currently is monitoring LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter activity, and through a proprietary algorithm, assigning bloggers and the like ratings based on their authority, activity and audience.

 

While there is probably a consumer play in here somewhere, PeerIndex has wisely designed to follow the money: it's selling its ratings to those who want to influence the influencers. Think what a public relations firm for an airline, for example, could do if it knew which bloggers talked about air travel, which ones had the biggest audiences, and which ones were the most influential?

 

This isn't exactly a new concept by the way. I first came across it in healthcare, where pharmaceutical companies spend big dollars trying in various ways to identify Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) -- healthcare professionals who are well-known and well-regarded in some specific area. The goal is identical: influence the influencers. What particularly interests me about the various efforts around identifying KOLs is that they tend to draw on far more data sources than PeerIndex is currently using -- physician credentials databases, journal articles, conference attendance and speaker lists, and much more. Because of their structured format, databases can be particularly powerful inputs into these types of influence assessment engines.

 

PeerIndex is worth taking a look at, and perhaps talking to. PeerIndex may have use for your data, and vertical market opportunities are sure to proliferate for content such as this. Better yet, non-politicians can now sell influence as well!