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Deeply Personal: OneSource Maximizes
Data Mining to Power Sales Insights |
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18 October 2004 |
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Data mining has been around for some time now and is a
successful tool for major institutions seeking to find
deeper answers to complicated questions that impact their
operations. But as OneSource Information Services is
demonstrating with its new mining-powered services, the
answers that data mining can provide are increasingly
likely to come from raw and untamed sources as much as from
highly structured databases. This is providing new and
highly compelling value points for content publishers and
aggregators who are squeezed between commoditized content
collections and bruising battles for owning a user's
workflow. It requires mining a deep understanding of your
users' human needs, but once understood
it can turn most any pile of content into diamonds in the
rough. |
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At last
week's Amercian Business Media/SIIA event on "rich data"
products [weblog
coverage] much was made of the power of databases to add value
to publishers' online products. Taxonomies, adding data
elements and metadata along with text to facilitate content
retrieval, audience-contributed and maintained content - these
are but a few of the tools and techniques used by today's
database publishers to keep their products fresh and valued
for their professional audiences. Very powerful stuff, but what
happens when the content that a client needs doesn't exist in
easy-to-assemble format? Data mining is a technique that has
offered much promise in assembling concentrated content value
out of reams of dross information. Used extensively at major
institutions for several years, data mining is just beginning
to come into its own as a source of value-add content for
premium content products. Instead of drilling
through dozens of reports and documents for real analytical
answers, automated data harvesting and analysis tools can
rapidly assemble human-scaled answers to "quick, the meeting is
in ten minutes" questions that can make or break a business.
InfoUSA's
OneSource
Information Services Inc. has been focusing on these
human-scaled problems in sales and Customer Relationship
Management content integration and has started to apply data
mining techniques to provide dramatic improvements to the sales
development process. OneSource today
announced extensions to its Business Browser and AppLink
interfaces that accomplish this on two levels. Its new Company
Insights module uses data mining techniques to scan news and
research articles assembled from premium content sources to
identify and extract text defining strategic initiatives that
companies are undertaking, as well as deriving SWOT
(strengths-weaknesses-opportunities-threats) analysis from the
same text sources - the kinds of insights that salespeople need
to zero in on sales suspects that may have a need for their
products and services. The Company Insights module also
uses mining techniques to assemble corporate relationship data
that may give a salesperson an inside edge - identifying a
client's key customers and competitors ("Quick, Joe, take XYZCo
out of the demo and put in BrandZ!"). The new Executive
Insights module assembles detailed profiles of key company,
including bio information assembled from Web site information -
structured "Googling," if you will - with additional details on
key memberships and relationships of executives that may
provide new entry points into establishing a meaningful sales
relationship. All of this derived from premium and open Web
sources that had the information imbedded in them but had
nobody unlocking the key to this kind of advanced analytical
value.
By deriving content value from less-tamed sources that can
be used by a broad professional audience, aggregators such as
OneSource are pushing the value of techniques such as data
mining to the fore of premium publishing and aggregation. What
are some of the key factors to be learned from this trend? A
few thoughts come to mind:
- Aggregators as fabricators rather than
collectors. A lot of energy goes into the concept of
supporting the workflow of professionals in adding value to
content aggregation services. Supporting workflows is
important, but eventually someone else comes along with a
better piece of technology and the game is back to overcoming
the commoditization of a content collection. Today's
competitive environment requires content aggregators and
publishers to look at the creative process that they use to
assemble content collections and to consider how to fabricate
new value out of sources that were previously considered too
raw to be of any further value. There is a need for constant
and curious innovation in fabricating unique content value
today that is moving further away from the importance of
specific content collections in providing that value.
- Quality assurance is important, but the value of the
materials being checked is the key. Not long ago content
from the open Web would have been considered low quality by
most premium content vendors. While Web content can be far
from perfect, the preponderance of individuals and
institutions using the Web for displaying their public
profiles to the world is providing a certain degree of
self-regulating quality control that is making Web-derived
content more valuable than ever. If you're in a serious
business and know that you're going to be "Googled" - or have
to respond to corporate regulatory requirements for public
statements - then your public information is going to be very
fresh and authoritative. As a result premium content
aggregation is moving rapidly from a service to simplify
premium publications subscription to a capability that
identifies the most valued content available regardless of
its source. In the choice between quality assurance on raw
diamonds and refined quartz, more content consumers are
opting for the diamonds.
- Owning a human solution is more important than owning
the content or the technology desktop. The beauty of
solutions such as OneSource's new modules is that they take
data mining beyond the realm of fact extraction and towards
the realm of context extraction, content that makes sense to
people in a human context to solve a human-scaled problem.
While OneSource provides services for a wide range of
businesses, its strategy of solving specific kinds of
business problems for specific kinds of professionals -
sales, in this instance - is fast becoming a norm in a
content industry that is learning how to place human-oriented
solutions above both traditional publishing and pure
technology. In this user-centric environment that Shore calls
The New Aggregation, being all over your users' needs is
far more important than being all over a published collection
or a particular technology platform. It's a different kind of
business for many publishers and aggregators, but one that
successful companies such as OneSource are learning rapidly.
Data mining is allowing publishers and aggregators to move
from distributors of information to enablers of deep human
insight, using sophisticated techniques to identify and deliver
what people value most. It's not a panacea for all content
problems, but being a part of the personal solution that most
content users need today is the key positioning that publishers
and aggregators have to move towards as quickly as possible. As
content delves ever deeper into technology, it gets closer to
our true human selves. Strange, yet true.
-
John Blossom
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