Mind Your Model
I stumbled across a fascinating interview given by the new CEO of Dex One, who rather candidly admitted the company is searching for a strategy.
Not surprisingly, this ill-timed shopping spree caused R.H. Donnelley to file for bankruptcy in 2009. What emerged from the bankruptcy was Dex One, still a major player in the industry with a $500 million market cap and over 3,000 employees. So when Dex One admits its next act isn't clear, this is big news.
I have long chastised the yellow pages industry for not having a deep understanding of its own business model. Very simply, yellow pages publishers have long been little more than ad sales organizations. Every other aspect of the business was viewed as an expense and an annoyance.
So when the Internet came along, the major yellow pages publishers saw Nirvana: it was a chance for these inherently regional publishers to quickly expand nationally. The natural expectation was the formula that had worked so brilliantly on a regional level would work just as well when extended nationally. But it did not work out that way at all. Here's why.
These yellow pages publishers thought all they needed to do was license a national business database of names, addresses and phone numbers and they would be ipso facto, national yellow pages publishers. Not true. In yellow pages and buying guides, it is the advertising, not the name and address listings that is the content. Throwing up 10 million name and address listings is easy; selling the requisite number of ads to have a meaningful base of content nationwide was well beyond the resources of even these giant publishers. Users quickly discovered that online yellow pages weren't very useful for sourcing products and services because there was so little content depth, so they started to look elsewhere -- easy to do online -- creating an opening for all sorts of competitors who delivered deeper content that both detailed and differentiated vendors. These competitors have been merrily chipping away at the formerly impregnable yellow pages franchise ever since.
Dex One is re-positioning itself as a marketing services company in the belief that its relationship with its extensive advertiser base is now its core asset. That's not an unreasonable approach, but one wonders if that will be enough at this stage in the evolution of the Internet.
The story of online yellow pages is an important cautionary tale for all buying guide publishers. It did itself in by trying to grow too much, too fast because it didn't understand its own business model. Buying guide publishers can't sell advertising on a sustained basis unless they are delivering value to their user bases as well. Forgetting one side of your business can cost you your entire business.
What's Not to Like?
I just learned about a new web service called Optimizer from a company called Frosmo that puts an interesting new spin on web analytics. Rather than the endless traffic-based percentages and counts provided by most web analytics software, Optimizer will deliver you a demographic profile of your visitors: age, occupation, location, job title, and lots more. How does it perform such magic?
Optimizer goes further than this too. It can allow you to greet visitors to your site who have Facebook profiles by name, and even tailor the content they see to match their interests, which you as the website operator will also know. This is a concept that has been discussed forever, but rarely implemented. Facebook, which reportedly has two million websites already enabled to allow Facebook users to flag or "like" them, is setting the stage to make this a common occurrence.
Consumer implications of this are clear and huge. Business-to-business implications are less clear. If we acknowledge the rapid blurring of lines between our personal and professional lives, however, it seems quite possible that B2B sites will soon start sporting Facebook "like" buttons, and competing to build the biggest Facebook audiences with the best demographics. It's not crazy to think of these Facebook aggregate profiles of being the next generation of BPA and ABC statements -- everything you want to know about your online audience from a trusted, third-party source. It's indeed possible that all the energy and passion that has been poured into achieving top search result rankings will now shift to getting "liked" the most times by Facebook users.
Like it or not.
Blekko: Breakthrough or Me Too?
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. 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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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.
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.
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
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.
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.