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Insight Out: Hoover's Connect Uses
Social Media to Build Networks from Trusted Sources |
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7 November 2006 |
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Social networking services for people in professional roles
are booming, but business information providers have made
relatively scant use of them to boost the value of their
own services. But with the debut of the new Hoover's
Connect service business information browsers can benefit
from their social network being right at their fingertips
when they're sizing up potential opportunities in the
Hoover's database. It's an interesting twist on workflow
integration that puts the power of business information
alongside personal contact information in a trusted
environment without a lot of CRM gibberish to get in the
way. This is a powerful combination to watch - and to
emulate. |
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While business information
providers have been sidling up ever closer to CRM applications
and sophisticated business intelligence tools lately they've
been relatively aloof when it comes to playing with social
network products such as
LinkedIn
and Jigsaw.
Although business information providers have been eyeing social
content collection as a potentially valuable strategy, both
they and their enterprise clients have fretted about its
content quality and the ability to manage content based on
beyond-the-firewall social connections.
Credit Hoover's, Inc.
with stepping up with a new take on how social networks can
benefit business information services. It's new
Hoover's
Connect offering developed with partner
Visible
Path joins a powerful enterprise-fueled social networking
service with Hoover's company profiles to create a value-add
feature for their business information service unlike any
other. In the rush to come to market Hoover's Connect is still
working out some kinks, as noted by
The New York Times (premium), but in previews it
demonstrated some unique capabilities that place business
information in a new light for sales and marketing
professionals.
The key difference in Visible Path's approach to building
social networks is that it's designed to respect the boundaries
of both corporate and personal information very effectively.
When a user signs up for Hoover's Connect, the Visible Path
software mines the content in one's contact management system,
emails, messages and other sources to develop a map of not only
paths to a potential target through one's contact network but
also the strength of those paths based on an analysis of the
content associated with contacts.
But instead of carting this information off to a public
database, Visible Path keeps the information tightly under the
control of an individual: your network is your own and cannot
be mined by others without your opt-in.
Inside the firewall a corporation can use the Visible Path
engine to build an enterprise-wide database of social networks,
providing instant access to potential inroads from one's
internal colleagues. This, too, remains in the control of the
enterprise.
As with external contacts Visible Path will only expose
identities of "first degree" network contacts inside the
enterprise to a user: this allows your corporate chums to act
as a resource without risking being bypassed in a business
transaction (yes, power does count in social relationships). If
an individual leaves a company their internal corporate network
will disappear but they can retain their own personal networks
built up
outside the company if they maintain their own
individual subscription to their tool.
Hoover's Connect is a branded deployment of Visible Path
that integrates nicely with Hoover's company information.
Within the Hoover's portal if one is looking at a company
profile a Hoover's Connect subscriber will have a nifty little
pane embedded in the left-hand side of the page that will
provide a graphic and text display of what the user's network
for this company looks like for a contact in the Hoover's data.
Simple, clean - and far more effective for people who are first
browsing for opportunities rather than contacts. Instead of
slogging between applications, the person researching a company
can test out potential contact paths right within the Hoover's
portal.
While integrated applications such as Hoover's Connect are
hardly headline news, their use in a business intelligence
portal for social networking content puts a unique new
twist on how business information platforms can serve as points
of workflow integration. Here are a few things to consider
about this new way to deploy social networking tools for
business intelligence:
- Sometimes workflow needs to go with the flow.
There's an awful lot of emphasis these days on trying to get
business information to work effectively in software designed
to improve someone's workflow. Oftentimes these solutions
wind up being "all-in-one" packages built by a content vendor
that are supposed to be the centers of all activities. But in
a content environment in which browsing multiple sources has
become an essential activity you can't always develop a
product that houses all content effectively under one
interface or database - especially when there are issues of
content ownership in play. Be it in a subscription product
like Hoover's or via an enterprise portal, business
information providers need to allow their clients and users
to have a lot of flexibility in defining the contexts in
which their content provides value to them.
- Strong partners are a key path to success. The
partnering route chosen by Hoover's allows a user's content
to find valuable context while they're browsing business
information without interfering with the core functionality
of either product in any significant way. With this OEM-style
relationship a content vendor can build a network of
capabilities that can easily flip between being the
integrator and the integrated as a customer demands.
Sometimes owning a given context is not as important as
making sure that you're deemed valuable in that context.
- Try to fit lifestyles that are both public and
corporate. In my experience this is the first social
networking tool that seems to fit the shape of how people
actually network in business not only day-to-day but in the
course of a career. Some pieces stay with you, some come and
go. While services such as LinkedIn and Jigsaw are doing an
excellent job of leveraging public Web presences to build up
their content, Visible Path has benefited from thinking about
the realities of corporate social networks - and corporate
infrastructure - as a starting point for developing their
tools. Sometimes your public Web site traffic ratings are not
going to be the best metrics for establishing success in
online business information services.
While Hoover's Connect is not likely to change the shape of
the core Hoover's product any time soon it's a great way to
position its content for both public Web users and their
increasingly enterprise-centric audiences. By bridging into key
needs for managing social networks Hoover's can thrust its
content into the middle of corporate audiences' business
intelligence needs at the point of trying to execute important
deals. Doing this with an innovative partner like Visible Path
should offer Hoover's great market positioning and many
interesting opportunities for years to come.
-
John Blossom
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