Call Tracking: The Next Generation

Buying guides and call tracking have a long history together. For over 30 years, buying guide publishers have used various types of call tracking to help document response to advertisers. This is particularly important to these publishers, because buying guide advertising is sold primarily on its ability to generate direct response for advertisers.

In the really good old days when most business was done by postal mail, tracking response was easy. The publisher simply added a suffix to the advertiser's address, so that 123 Main Street might become 123-B Main Street. Advertisers could simply scan their incoming mail for proof of advertising efficacy, and there are legendary stories about buying guide salespeople dragging company CEO's down to their mailrooms to prove that their publications did indeed generate business.

As phone usage became the dominant means of doing business, resourceful buying guide publishers discovered Remote Call Forwarding. With this service, the advertiser would have a unique phone number that appeared only in the buying guide, and all calls to that number would be seamlessly forwarded to the advertiser's regular main telephone number. Best of all, the publisher (not the advertiser) would receive a monthly phone bill that showed the number of calls that had been forwarded that month. It wasn't a lot of detail, but it was hard concrete proof to counter that age-old advertiser renewal objection, namely "I didn't get any calls." Remote Call Forwarding didn't provide much data, was expensive and was a logistical nightmare for publishers, but it worked.

Because of the hassle and costs, publishers were quick to embrace the next generation of Call Tracking, which was based on 800 numbers. Besides lower costs, 800 numbers not only told you how many calls were made to the number, but the phone number of each caller. It was a huge step forward, but many smaller advertisers were reluctant to use 800 numbers in the belief that they wouldn't be viewed as local businesses if they sported a toll-free number. Call tracking stalled a bit for this reason.

The last ten years have seen something of a renaissance for call tracking. Local phone numbers began to become available with all the same data as toll-free numbers. The growth of pay-per-call created a demand for information such as call length (to judge engagement) and even digital recording of calls (to address concerns of advertisers who didn't want to pay for non sales-related calls). But with such heavy use of email to communicate, call tracking seemed destined never to regain its former prominence.

This may now be changing. A Toronto-based company called Telmetrics is a hotbed of innovation in call tracking. It's just introduced software that, when embedded in a mobile phone app, can track calls made from an advertisement with no need for a special phone number at all. And if that isn't intriguing enough, the company now also offers audio-to-text transcription of all calls, and can even scan the text to look for commonly used words and phrases that might inform keyword advertising purchases! It's remarkable stuff, and online buying guides need all the sales documentation tools they can get. 

Less Glitter on Twitter

It's shocking but true: Alec Baldwin has suspended his Twitter account. Apparently, a recent war of tweets with American Airlines didn't yield the support he expected from his fan base, so he's offline, at least for a while.

Interestingly, Alex Baldwin is not the first celebrity to flee Twitter after ill-considered, politically incorrect or just tone-deaf remarks (think John Mayer, Sinead O'Connor and James Franco). And that's just entertainment. Consider the number of politicians who discovered how much controversy could be generated from 140 characters or less (Anthony Weiner and Sam Brownback are just two examples).

When an actor like Alec Baldwin walks away from a medium that provides direct access to over 600,000 of his fans, that's significant. And it points out that social media comes with both power and pitfalls. Consider this from two perspectives. First, part of the appeal of following a celebrity on Twitter is feeling closer to the celebrity because it's the authentic voice of the celebrity, who is encouraged to tweet frequently by the short message nature of the medium. But too much candor and spontaneity can backfire easily. A case in point is Ashton Kutcher, who handed over control of his Twitter account to his publicists after some ill-advised remarks. Of course with that level of safety, authenticity is lost.

Second, there are no rules of the road with social media. What's personal and what is professional? What is public and what is private? Are rants about poor service authentic or inappropriate? Right now, the only way to know when you've gone too far is to go too far.

At a time where toilet paper brands have Facebook pages, where retailers offer gift cards to customers who "like" them on Facebook, where people are finding they can get their grievances with big companies addressed more quickly through a tweet than direct contact, we are all making it up as we go along. And if it's this hard in the B2C world, it's twice as hard for B2B companies trying to formulate a social media strategy. Social media is a mountain road with hairpin turns and no guardrails. And in such situations, there is only one correct response: go slow.  

Power to the People

What jumped out at me in the course of completing a number of recent client research projects is that market leaders in several different verticals were offering their subscription clients not just content, but analysis and sometimes consulting as well. What we may be seeing playing out is the "high tech/high touch" trend identified by futurist John Naisbitt. He predicted the rise of high touch as consumers sought more emotionally satisfying experiences in their business experiences. I think in the world of B2B, it's a lot more practical, but just as profound. Information providers that offer access to an analyst staff are really offering skilled hands to substitute for the reduced levels of support businesspeople have within their own organizations. Where in the past, a corporate staffer might turn to an assistant or the corporate information center to chase down a specific fact or statistic, now these businesspeople are turning to information providers. It's not so much that this is simply the influence of the new generation of workers who can't or won't think for themselves. Rather, what we are seeing is time-pressured people seeking knowledgeable help wherever they can get it. That this help is skilled, readily accessible and bundled into the price of an information product only makes it more compelling.

This trend is larger than just access to analysts. Increasingly, we hear information providers tell us that companies routinely buy not just their data, but additional help in using it and extracting value from it. Many data providers with strong brands in their vertical markets report that they are regularly asked to consult to their clients on big picture issues and industry trends. This move towards advice takes many forms, but it seems to be bubbling up everywhere. Admittedly, it is not a small decision to offer your subscribers access to your analyst staff, especially if you don't currently have one. But I will note that where we see it, such access is almost always a high-value differentiator. I know a number of data publishers who have turned down consulting projects because it is a very different and labor-intensive activity, but sometimes a smart partnership can yield most of the benefit with limited if any downside. My advice: think about offering advice. It's not the right decision for every market or publisher, but it is a clear path away from the "just the facts ma'am" historical positioning of the data publishing industry, and has the potential to deliver a durable boost to your overall value proposition.

Two IPOs That Merit Review

Angie's List and Yelp, both BTC review sites, are now making the leap to public ownership. Angie's List went public yesterday, ending its first day up 25% from its offering price. Yelp has filed papers for a public offering in the near future.  At a high level, these sites are remarkably similar, arguably even a bit competitive. Dive into the business models, however, and they couldn't be more different. Angie's List has a model that defies conventional wisdom: call it a B2C paid community review site. Get this model right and you build something with enormous power: a massive army of reviewers who have a vested interest in honestly and accurately reviewing local businesses because they are paying for the privilege of accessing that same base of reviews. You also get an engaged community, something that advertisers (at least well-reviewed advertisers) are anxious to tap. Indeed, Angie's List reported advertising revenue of $34 million last year, versus subscription revenue of $25 million. The most remarkable feat of all: avoiding real or perceived conflicts of interest while selling subscription access to objective reviews then selling advertising around those reviews. Spend just a few seconds on the Angie's List site and you will see the intense focus on transparency and objectivity. No effort has been spared to make both businesses and consumers feel they are getting good value, trusted information and fair treatment. It's a delicate business model, but Angie's List has been perfecting it for over a decade. Contrast Angie's List to Yelp, which has a free access model in which access to business reviews are free, and revenues are generated from advertising. Yelp has unquestionably impressive metrics: over 22 million reviews, and 61 million users for starters.

But beyond the differences in business models, Yelp is a distinctly different business. And while its free access model afforded fast growth, it has paid a price for being free. As Yelp became increasingly influential among consumers, it started attracting false and biased reviews from businesses seeking to improve their own ratings or damage the ratings of competitors. Yelp responded with a series of opaque algorithms designed to root out fake reviews, but that ended up doing real damage to Yelp's perceived integrity among both consumers and businesses. Even worse, Yelp showed little sympathy to businesses that claimed that demonstrably false reviews were ruining their businesses. That's an especially big issue because Yelp depends on such businesses for advertising revenue. This lack of transparency and perceived conflicts of interest came to a head when a number of businesses accused Yelp of offering improved ratings to those that advertised. It was a PR disaster, but one caused as much by the business model as specific business actions. And that's another place where you see huge contrasts: company leadership. Angie's List is run by Angie Hicks, who exudes Midwestern values and integrity, and is completely aware that while her mission is to inform and empower consumers, her business model can also recognize and reward good service providers, and that works to everyone's benefit. Contrast that persona with Josh Stoppleman, founder of Yelp, who fashions himself as something of a consumer advocate, with businesses of all kinds inherently the bad guys. When the New York Times asked him about a business trying to get Yelp to remove a bad review for a dish it didn't even serve, Stoppleman's nuanced reply was, "why believe the business owner?" After several such interviews, Yelp's PR team finally got Stoppleman locked in a closet for the good of the IPO. It's difficult to say with certainty which business model is stronger. The Angie's List approach has a lot going for it, but it's a hard road to build a business like this, making the company even more impressive. At the same time, Yelp is to date a success story in its own right, but like so many other large review sites, is fighting issues and complications on almost every front. The need for consumer reviews is clearly large and durable, but we are a long way from a firm conclusion as to how they should be collected and presented.

You Had to Be There!

The theme of this year's DataContent Conference was "Crowd, Cloud and Curation." But in addition to those big themes, another word cropped up in almost every session: mobile. The excitement around mobile was palpable, and there seemed to be general agreement that tablet devices are already starting to have a significant impact on the industry, and a largely beneficial one, provided publishers embrace the tremendous shift to mobile online access and start to leverage the power of these new devices. My view? As a reliable skeptic, you might expect some push-back, but I'm fully on board. Mobile devices, tablets in particular, are rapidly changing how users access data, and even how they do business. This creates opportunities in some markets, but more fundamentally, it means publishers cannot allow themselves to be left behind as usage patterns and user expectations for data products begin to radically shift. Our keynote speaker, Clare Hart, CEO of Infogroup, nicely set the stage for the sessions that followed by noting that to maximize the value of data, "you have to innovate around it." This well sums up the InfoCommerce Group view that data publishers need to focus on "data that does stuff," not simply providing mountains of raw content from which users are expected to find and extract value on their own. Clare illustrated this with a sneak peak at a soon to be launched Infogroup product called Yesmail Marketing Intelligence that will provide remarkable competitive intelligence to marketers, coupled with a powerful user interface and real-time alerting. Among our 2011 Models of Excellence nominees, we got in-depth looks at two barely-launched ventures: BestVendor, which is doing some exciting work in social discovery, and First Stop Health, a new data-driven health concierge service. We also got a good overview of FeeFighters which matches businesses to credit card processing services, an area that's gotten a lot of attention lately. We also learned about newly launched Chaikin Power Tools, which integrates mountains of data and sentiment analysis into a simple, elegant buy/sell indicator for investors. We also heard from another startup, Brilig, which lets online marketers precisely tap specific market segments, precision that's been sorely lacking to date. Resolute Digital and b2bAnywhere confirmed the stampede to mobile in our session on that topic, and gave us some useful thinking on how B2B mobile will evolve. Anne Holland of Subscription Site Insider presented some preliminary findings from a study conducted in conjunction with InfoCommerce Group on paid subscription product renewal rates and retention marketing best practices. In our always popular "Excellence Revisited" Wanted Technologies, Alacra andAgencyFinder offered candid assessments of what went right - and wrong - with products that had previously won them our Model of Excellence award. The level of candor, as always, was incredibly insightful. Also insightful were presentations from DonorBase and The Praetorian Group and our own Janice McCallum who offered specific revenue generating ideas with potential applicability to many in the audience. And we also got helpful case studies from Depository Trust, PDR Network and ZoomInfo about what's involved in launching a new data product inside a company that's not in the data business, and how to successfully re-position existing data businesses that have lost their way. We also went interplanetary this year, as we learned about the launch (first publicly announced at our conference) of Saturn, a new service jointly developed by Locationary, Neustar and theLocal Search Association. Designed to be a frictionless cloud-based platform where data publishers can upload data, the goal of Saturn is to help business partners standardize, synchronize and maintain their data to improve accuracy. There's a lot more to Saturn, and the potential to revolutionize data collection, enhancement and maintenance is huge. Best of all, none of this vision involves making all information free! Conference attendees also got the inside scoop on Infochimps, a company with the ambitious goal (well underway) of collecting all the data on the web, arguably doing for data what Google has done for text. It's a breathtaking vision, a vision, I should note, that fully supports the role of paid data products. In fact, Infochimps would like to be the central marketplace for such datasets. The 2011 Model of Excellence award winners? This year, the awards went to Artlog, Depository Trust and FeeFighters. If you now really wish you were there, you can view some of the speakers and presentations here, in Pancasts provided byPanopto. Our compelling programs are our best advertisement, so consider this our first promotion for DataContent 2012. You have to be there!