Talk About Buzz!
Our conference is just 2 weeks away, and there are now just 37 seats remaining. DataContent 2010 is where ideas get ignited and business gets done. When you attend, you' re among the industry's hyper achievers, so you hear about emerging trends and big news firsthand. Need proof? Here's a sampling of what some of our presenters have been up to in just the last few days:
Reed Construction Data announced the creation of a new company, SMARTBIM LLC, which is a spin-out of its BIM Solutions Division. SMRATBIM LLC will be part-owned by Source 2, a private investment company focused on technology-enabled service companies. Don't know much about BIM (Building Information Modeling)? Well, you're in luck. Reed Construction Data CEO Iain Melville will be the keynote speaker at DataContent 2010.
2007 InfoCommerceModel of Excellence award winner Noza announced that it has been acquired by Blackbaud Inc. It looks like a perfect match: Noza's respected charitable giving database will now be paired with Blackbaud's powerful software for non-profit organizations. Noza founder Craig Harris will have a lot to talk about on our Excellence Revisited panel.
For innovation and rapid growth, look no further than InfoCommerce Model of Excellence nominee Universal Business Listing. UBL is making a strong international push, opening offices in the Netherlands while launching a new business identity management offering in the UK. More to come? You bet, and you'll learn more from Doyal Bryant, Universal's CEO and co-founder, who'll be presenting on our Revenue 2.0 panel.
Success is all about the company you keep. DataContent 2010 gives you access to those who make the news, and who can have a significant impact on your plans and future. Register now to join us at DataContent 2010. You'll be in excellent company!
Symbolic Failure
Remember when the musician Prince changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol back in 1993? Such a move could have put the artist out of business. After all, how do you sell music when nobody can look you up by name? But because Prince was the first to try this, a potential business disaster became a public relations bonanza. It also didn't hurt that the alternate appellation, "the artist formerly known as Prince" stuck with him, making it possible to still search on "Prince" and get to his music in most cases.
Intriguingly, things haven't progressed much on this front since 1993. Just last week, it was reported that a new CBS television series, '$#*! My Dad Says,' was paying an unexpected penalty for its choice of title: the show couldn't be found by the search software in most digital video recorders because of its use of symbols. With some 38% of U.S. households now owning a digital video recorder, this is no small issue.
Symbols in a name may sound like an obscure issue, and to a great extent, it is. But it speaks to a larger issue: in today's digital world, you are your index. How you permit your content to be accessed is as important as the content itself.
And while search technology seems to get more powerful every day, site searching, including database searches, remains a real backwater. "Better searching" is always on the short list of user requests when we survey users of both free and paid data products. Users expect, for example, to see search results that include both "&" and "and" regardless of which one is entered. Users want search software that can handle common misspellings. Data publishers can add a lot of value by normalizing their data to minimize some of these issues. But ultimately, users want search software that can do a lot of the thinking for them and that frees them from having to become conversant with your editorial style rules in order to get optimal search results.
Great, valuable data is only great and valuable if users can easily access it. Too many data publishers focus obsessively on creating great data, while settling for off-the-shelf search technology that doesn't do justice to their content. It's important to invest resources in both areas.
Interesting Point
The rapid growth of mobile and trendy applications like Foursquare have put a spotlight on the need for so-called point of interest data -- latitude and longitude for museums and attractions, but also for all businesses as well. And where there is a need, there is opportunity.
Not surprisingly, traditional B2B databases compilers such as InfoGroup and Acxiom have stepped into the geocoding fray. I previously wrote about an interesting company called Placecast that launched a product called MatchAPI that attempted to reconcile the varying results produced by the various geo-coding vendors, and ambitious master data play.
Of course, when a need for data like this crops up, somebody immediately starts to figure out how to give it away for free. In this case, it's a company called Factual, which through its "Free Database of Place," is giving away geo-location data on over 14 million businesses. You can see an actual sample of the dataset by clicking here.
This is exciting news for data publishers who would like to do more with mapping and adding other types of geo-aware intelligence to their data products. At the same time, it's a rude reminder that it's hard to maintain a proprietary data edge in this world. Of course, if Factual wants to deliver good quality data, that means real costs associated with data compilation and maintenance (and oh how often we see brash young start-ups that made no provision to maintain their data!), which ultimately means that some revenue will have to be generated. But for now at least, here's a valuable, free dataset that you can use to kick-start your thinking about the many ways you can make your data geo-aware, especially as mobile access continues to proliferate.
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.