Micro-Monetization

Yes, I just made up a new buzzword, micro-monetization, which is meant to describe a huge trend online to create services to monetize things that previously couldn't be monetized because they were too fleeting, too small or too difficult to bring buyer and seller together. It's a fascinating area full of large, latent opportunities, and I believe B2B publishers can find opportunity here as well.

What they heck I am talking about? Consider one of the best-known examples of the genre, AirBNB.com. This service allows people to rent out their apartments or even spare bedrooms to strangers as a low-cost alternative to hotels. Not to be outdone, another service called Camp In My Garden actually allows people to rent out their backyards to campers. And it's not just real estate. RelayRides will let you rent out your car to strangers by the hour or by the day.

There are also numerous services that let car services sell their down time efficiently. Consider PlaneFinder.com and EmptyLegMarket.com, both of which sell empty legs on private jet itineraries. My point is that that there is remarkable activity, creativity and opportunity in this area, but the focus so far has been consumer-oriented. Can this work in business? Absolutely. Consider the example of GetLoaded.com, one of several services to help truckers find cargo to haul on what would otherwise be an empty trip home.

Companies such as LoopNet help businesses sub-lease excess space. Put your creativity to work. Does your vertical market have expensive capital equipment or facilities that typically aren't fully utilized? Are there inefficiencies you can address on a spot market basis - opportunistically matching buyers and sellers? Here are just a few top-of-head examples to get you thinking: would restaurants rent out their kitchens on the days they are closed to the growing number of people creating small batch products for sale? Could companies rent out their parking lots at night to truckers seeking a safe, hassle-free place to park overnight? Could companies rent out their conference rooms to other companies looking for a place for out-of-town meetings? Crazy ideas? Perhaps. But who would have thought that you could build a business letting people rent their backyards? And don't get caught up in liability and other legal concerns right out of the box - many of the companies cited above pushed ahead despite myriad legal vagaries.

So put your thinking caps on. You know the players in your market, and as importantly, they know you. That gives you a credible, neutral central market position that will go a long way to building out a micro-monetization opportunity in your market.

Sentimental Journey

Sentiment analysis represents a real opportunity for many data publishers to add new, high-value, proprietary and even real-time insight to their data products. But sentiment analysis has inherent strengths and weaknesses you need to appreciate when considering if there is a sentiment analysis opportunity for your data products.

A wonderful example of sentiment analysis at work is represented in a new service called the Twitter Political Index. Working with two respected political polling organizations, Twitter analyzes over 400 million tweets per day, to determine how people are feeling about the two presidential candidates. The key word here is "feeling," because that's what sentiment analysis is all about -- guessing how people feel about a topic. It's not easy, and it is particularly complex for tweets, which are short and often lack context. Moreover, most sentiment analysis tools go well beyond simply binary like/dislike assessments and try to gauge the degree of like or dislike. It's tricky stuff, but the potential applications are numerous and exciting.

This is often the point where many people will start questioning such issues as whether or not Twitter offers a representative sample, and what level of precision and confidence sentiment analysis can offer. These are valid questions, but be careful not to fall into the trap described by research industry veteran Ray Poynter, who notes that all new research methodologies are invariably measured against the standard of perfection. This implies that all current research metholodogies are perfect, which is far from the case. When using tools such as sentiment analysis, you need to consider the application, then pick the methodology, seeking the best fit possible.

That's why data publishers should be thinking about sentiment analysis. You don't need to analyze every tweet; indeed you don't necessarily need Twitter at all. Sentiment analysis can be applied to research reports, blog posts and press releases. And if you can help your customers better understand how the world currently views a company or product, for example, you can deliver a useful new layer of insight that differentiates you from the competition, makes your products more valuable, and can be acquired and implemented fairly quickly and economically.

And particularly with new research methodologies, I think it's useful to remember the saying, "don't let the perfect become the enemy of the good." Building powerful new data analysis tools is a long journey, one that both publisher and customer are taking together.

The Strategic Use of APIs

Looking for change, challenge, growth? Increased innovation across your organization? New content models and revenue? A new audience acquisition strategy? The ability to knock out the competition? Then think about giving third party developers to access to your content and data in a structured and open manner via APIs -- Application Programming Interfaces. APIs represent a way for publishers to develop new sources of revenue by increasing content distribution fueled by technology and bringing outside ideas in.

Consider Twitter and the constellation of products created by third party developers in its orbit. Twitter provides users up-to-the-minute content on a continuous basis and generates ad revenue through sales of promoted tweets. Twitter is a relate-able and familiar model to publishers.

By allowing third party developers access to its content, Twitter invited innovation from the outside in, increasing the use and value of its content and boosting its revenue. Third party development using Twitter’s API makes Twitter even more useful and draws a larger user-base to its content. Twitter’s ongoing evolution holds valuable lessons for those producing and distributing content.

Innovation, Increased Data Use, Expanding Audiences - APIs provide external talent the ability to develop novel useful new pathways to your content which increases data use and revenue and helps companies innovate and evolve past its competition. Providing access to content and data in a structured and open manner for third party development provides the opportunity to design entirely new ways for existing customers as well as new customers to experience content.

Successful publishers understand the importance of aligning content to the capabilities new technologies bring. It’s a tough job since publishing as an industry has traditionally under-valued and under-funded R&D and struggles with accepting external ideas. APIs represent the next step in developing new ways of presenting and pricing content as well as meeting the expectations of an audience which is constantly growing in technological sophistication.

Monetizing APIs, Controlling Access to and Pricing Content -APIs offer endless possibilities to monetize content which are limited only by the imagination of app developers. Technology exists for controlling the access to and securing content as well as the tools necessary for monetizing it.

Old-timey revenue and pricing models publishers are already familiar with: ad-supported, transactional and subscription as well as somewhat newer models like DaaS (Data-as-a-Service) can be implemented in conjunction with systems for tracking and billing for data usage.

APIs and Expectations - Across industries and businesses APIs are redefining how companies develop their products and conduct business and the steadily escalating growth of APIs will influence and shape expectations about how content is accessed, used and priced.

-- Nancy Ciliberti

Learning from Start-Ups

Monitoring what's going on with online start-ups is not only a great way for me to identify interesting new data-driven products and new market opportunities, it's also a touchstone for assessing how the publishing industry is doing relative to the best and brightest online innovators. Here are just three recent examples, each interesting to me in a different way:

Mixpanel, an undeniably hot and respected web analytics company recently gave an interview where the founder proudly stated that, "The next leap we're taking is being able to tie data to an actual user." If that sounds like an audience database, that's because it is. And the publishing industry has seen the opportunity in creating comprehensive user/subscriber profiles for years now, and poured significantly resources into this effort. And based on the audience database projects we've been involved in, I am pleased to report that many publishers are well on their way to databases that will truly be cutting edge in the targeting and insight they can deliver.

Another hot new start-up, Retailigence, does one thing: it helps big companies put their store inventory data online. This isn't a new concept; companies like Milo have been offering similar services to smaller retailers for years. But what is intriguing about Retailigence is that it is selling to big companies, those with big SAP applications and the like. The lesson here is that even the largest companies, those with the resources and the incentive to do it themselves, will still turn to a third-party vendor for a well-crafted solution that helps them quickly address a business need. And with all that product data (and information on what is selling where and how fast), one has to wonder if Retailigence has a data opportunity at least as large as its software opportunity.

Finally, here's an elegant data product that solves a small but important problem: how can online retailers easily offer discounts to senior citizens, college students and active duty military personnel? It's something that is done so routinely in bricks and mortar retail that nobody thinks about it. But online, it's next to impossible to do this in a seamless, hassle-free way.

Enter SheerID, a new database that helps automate this process for online retailers, right inside the shopping cart. The need is clear and the concept couldn't be simpler. What jumps out at me is that something like this is just being addressed in 2012 - a powerful proof statement that for all the amazing innovation and progress we've seen on the web, there are sizable infrastructure opportunities still to be found, and many of these opportunities will be data-driven.

So should you ever start to feel that all the good opportunities have been mined, or that you're falling behind the technology curve, take a good look around you. You're sure to find both re-assurance and opportunity just about everywhere.

Twitter and LinkedIn Battle for Eyeballs and Loyalty

On June 29, Twitter and LinkedIn decided to end a partnership that began in 2009. Before the 29th, tweets had the ability to flow seamlessly from Twitter to LinkedIn. That's no longer possible. Twitter has restricted its API to prevent tweets from posting to LinkedIn user profiles. LinkedIn users can still create updates to publish to Twitter - it is a matter of clicking a button and it happens.

More significantly, the separation is a story which illustrates the difference between how collaboration looks on paper and how it plays out in practical terms when collaborating companies mature and change and business models uncomfortably bump up against one another.

If you are a regular reader, you are likely an information provider. As an industry, publishers are familiar with business model conflict and the Twitter and LinkedIn the split is not surprising.

The pairing made sense for convenience reasons: compose once and publish twice. A seamless flow of tweets from Twitter to LinkedIn added aspects of community that LinkedIn, with its origins as a structured database, had lacked from its inception.

As a website for professional networking, LinkedIn succeeds in its ability to connect people. Once connections between people on LinkedIn are made, the ability to share information is limited. LinkedIn Groups have found wildly varying degrees of success. (InfoCommerce LinkedIn Group members: please check out my colleague Megan's question posted earlier this week regarding how helpful you find LinkedIn Groups and weigh in).

But is this loss of seamless "tweet flow" truly a big loss for LinkedIn? Arguably not.

Although the collaboration enabled sharing of information between LinkedIn connections, the pairing was not without its problems. Pacing and content between the sites were a less than ideal match. Overall, LinkedIn is much slower paced than Twitter. The Twitter partnership produced significant amounts of content for LinkedIn. Yet Twitter users who tweet often (say 15 or more times a day) tend to stand out and can crowd or eclipse LinkedIn generated updates displaying on the site. Perhaps this is the reason why hiding tweets on LinkedIn was an option.

Further, tweets aren't entirely consistent with that which should be shared on a professional networking site. Twitter content that doesn't play well to an audience of business connections could carry more significant consequences than just personal embarrassment. And even anodyne tweets, because of their economy of space, still offer ample room for miscommunication.

LinkedIn and similar sites using Twitter's API have created a range of value-added products from Twitter clients to analysis tools. These products have improved Twitter's value and reach. Even though LinkedIn was never really a destination to go to read tweets, LinkedIn and others using Twitter's API may have funneled some traffic away from Twitter which presents a challenge when money is in the mix. Twitter's revenue model relies on ad money (promoted tweets).  

As International Business Times' Valli Meenakshi Ramanathan notes: "Though the end of the partnership was nothing new in the social network landscape as search giant Google moved away from the microblogging sweetheart recently, leaving Twitter to spruce up its search function to stay on track, the changes did call for LinkedIn having to redefine its strategy and operations."

Bottom line, this is a battle of eyeballs, user loyalty and control of content. And while LinkedIn might look like the loser, it probably is time for LinkedIn to put more effort into enhancing its value proposition, rather than papering over the issue with a tidal wave of tweets.

-- Nancy Ciliberti