Good Leads Come to Those Who Rate
I was fascinated an intrigued to read about a start-up company called Inbound Score that is literally just opening for business. Its business is simple but powerful: it takes email sales leads and automatically scores them for you.
In a simple application, supposed you have a "contact us" form on your website. Information from the form is generally sent to you via email. What you know about the person contacting you is generally very little. And if you are getting any volume of such leads, you can immediately see the value of rating them.
According to an article in VentureBeat, what Inbound Score offers is a new tool that seamlessly integrates with your email software and scans new messages for sales leads based on parameters your provide. When it encounters a lead, it uses the email address supplied by the sender to scour the web, social networks and private databases. What is returned to you is the original lead with up to 25 additional data fields appended, along with a score that rates the lead on a 1-100 scale. Pricing for this service starts at $29 per month.
As you can surely see, this is a new spin on what many B2B publishers are already providing (or trying to provide) to advertisers -- basic lead contact information, enhanced with additional data to further qualify the lead, and some kind of lead score.
This concept isn't entirely new, but it's a neat spin on the concept, particularly the notion of scoring the lead when it is delivered to an inbox. If services like this take off, publishers will have to consider both the information they are supplying as part of their lead programs, as well as the format. Excel files (still the most common way leads are delivered) will start to look very tired by comparison.
And let's not forget the opportunities here for data publishers who can be powering tools such as this with fast access to proprietary, structured data. There are lots of interesting angles here, including possible a la carte up-selling of deep company or individual backgrounders.
Exciting stuff!
An Age-Old Problem
Most of us are familiar with the incredible success story of our 2004 Model of Excellence winner, the Internet Movie Database (IMDB). IMDB began life as a Usenet group list, morphing into arguably the first example of a database built with user-generated content. In 1998, the non-profit hobbyist venture was acquired by Amazon.
In those frothy dot com days, it would have been reasonable to expect a huge backlash from all those who had voluntarily contributed to IMDB and watched their effort absorbed by a for-profit entity. But Amazon handled things perfectly. It lavished paid editorial resources on IMDB to quickly prove to users that it was going to make IMDB even deeper and more comprehensive. As importantly, it kept IMDB free. It worked. There was no backlash and usage of the site kept growing. Amazon then linked its DVD catalog to IMDB to increase sales of movies, and that worked as well. More recently, Amazon launched IMDBPro, a paid subscription version of IMDB with even more content for movie industry professionals. It has integrated local movie show times. It added ratings and rankings. Usage has soared along with advertising revenue. It's been a great ride for IMBD.
But now IMDB is embroiled in a truly odd and very public dispute with an actress who doesn't want her real age published in IMDB. The actress, who prefers her age to be listed as age 26-33, was incensed that IMDB listed her as -- gasp -- age 40. She promptly sued Amazon for $1 million.
The basis for the lawsuit? Older actresses get fewer movie roles. How do we know this? Because a study was done of the earnings of older actresses. Of course, if actresses regularly lie about their ages, one probably shouldn't place too much weight on such research.
IMDB hit back hard, with its lawyers calling the lawsuit frivolous and trying to get the actress to publicly identify herself, something they might have thought would force the actress to drop the lawsuit.
But an interesting detail that has got less attention is that IMDB apparently determined the true age of the actress by accessing credit report data when she ordered an IMDB subscription and paid by credit card. If true, this takes editorial research to a new level.
There may be additional facts to this case I don't know, but while I give conceptual brownie points to IMDB for being so committed to data quality, my view is IMDB went beyond the call of duty. Data publishers have a long and proud history of not removing information when requested or threatened, but crossing the line into private detective work is rare. IMDB is also playing in a dangerous gray area when the information being obtained is on an individual and not an organization.
On a more practical level, my guess is that IMDB wasn't doing the same intense research on every actor in its database, and intensely checking only a few actors doesn't help IMDB or its customers. And even if IMDB had made a commitment to getting true ages for all actors in its database, would its customers really care that much? The industry has managed to thrive for many decades despite dubious age data. Do movie producers really want to automatically screen actors in or out based solely on age? If so, perhaps IMDB shouldn't be working so hard to enable such discriminatory behavior. Overall, it seems like a lot of effort for very little benefit ... to anyone.
On the most practical level of all, my recommendation to the actress in this case, as well as to all those who want to take control of their identities: if you are going to lie about your age, don't do it with an age range, just pick a number. IMDB editors probably couldn't enter an age range in their database, and that's probably what prompted the research in the first place!
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
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