When News Corporation took over Dow Jones two years ago, it was quick to move out key senior Dow Jones managers and move in its own team that had a vision for how to make the brand a profitable and thriving outlet for business news and information. At that time I said on ContentBlogger, "The opportunity is for News Corp to enable a more aggressive melding of enterprise and media services as the differences between today's business media outlets and today's enterprise portals begin to narrow." I also speculated at the time whether Dow Jones Enterprise Media head Clare Hart would stick around to become a player in this mix or move on, suggesting that at least for a time she was respected enough that it was worth her hanging in there.
Two years later, Clare Hart and her work for DJEM remains respected, but times have moved on, and, according to news reports, so has Clare as the enterprise media group at Dow Jones is being merged with their consumer media group. Dow Jones CFO Steven Daintith is taking over the Dow Jones COO role for now, an indication that a promotion into that role for Hart was not in the offing, so moving on seems like a good bet for her at this time. While some may read "glass ceiling" or "Murdoch loyalists" into this move, I think that it's more a matter of where companies like Newcorp need to bring business information services such as their Factiva property to gain more profitability. The direction for more profits from the licensed business media sources in Factiva's database is definitely towards the online media side of Dow Jones operations, a move that requires a different set of skills than those needed to make subscription business information database services successful in increasingly complex enterprise technology markets.
As I noted last October in ContentBlogger when the Wall Street Journal Pro Edition was launched, the rise of real-time Web news aggregation is accelerating the need for business media properties to become more effective news aggregators. At the time I noted that this would be a good move to make better use of Factiva assets in the Pro Edition framework, a move that seems far more likely to unfold now that the siloing of Factiva and other Dow Jones enterprise assets has been eliminated. Among those other assets that are more likely to emerge more aggressively in the new alignment is the Dow Jones Business & Relationship Intelligence group (formerly Generate), whose alerts-oriented mining of news sources will have a broader market to tap into via the Pro Edition platform. Thinking of Newscorp's push to gain more online revenues from paid content sources, these types of premium services are ripe for better integration into ad-supported Dow Jones content.
This is also, of course, a somewhat back-handed way to say that there really isn't much of a strategy available to Dow Jones to increase revenues simply by waving a wand over broader segments of its existing online content. That ship sailed many years ago, as the WSJ Online edition gradually moved towards a large portion of its content being available online without a subscription. Their hope lies in providing more value in their offerings to individuals who may not have access to large subscription databases and sophisticated alerts services in their companies or who have found access to such services harder to justify under central information budgets. Moving to make DJEM resources more available via their consumer and "prosumer" platforms is a natural bridging strategy into these needs that can set up broader enterprise sales strategies over time.
In the meantime, though, this move is somewhat of an admission that the subscription database business for business news is a dying business model. Factiva has been as aggressive as any other player in business information in adding features and integration capabilities to its offerings, but at the end of the day the value-add from such services is drifting away to enterprise technology players more quickly than Factiva or other enterprise news aggregators can counter with improved products and services. There are just too many enterprise platforms in which this type of content is needed, creating broad product and feature disintermediation. Harvesting structured information from unstructured news and information sources is one approach that many enterprise content vendors are taking to counter this trend, but this alone ultimately doesn't justify the typical subscription structure for news databases.
You can see where this consolidation of enterprise-oriented resources with consumer media resources at Dow Jones may spell problems in focusing on enterprise opportunities, but at the end of the day the software and the thousands of licensed content sources that Dow Jones pays for have to grow profits for them more quickly if they are to be worth the price. With enterprises increasingly reluctant to pay for licensed content that offers few or no advantages over Web-accessible content, the Web is the only probable point of strong growth for old-line news aggregators. This may not be a pretty transition for many Factiva staff, but it's one of those long-delayed and necessary moves that will at least set the stage for more robust growth in enterprise markets for Dow Jones in the long run - even if that growth comes from non-traditional channels.
iPhones rocked, Google shocked and social media was no longer mocked as publishers and technology companies flocked to online content business models;
Bing had a fling and even Windows 7 would sing as Kindle took wing, but proprietary platforms are no longer king;
Those in the cloud were quite proud of profits that wowed enterprise and media markets and vowed that all content would thrive in its shroud;
Enterprise vendors clung to tight margins and hung on to hopes of new profits among rescaled businesses flung across a changing world;
Twitter got the Web a-flitter about real-time chitter-chat, making news publishers bitter about the new heavy hitter;
Murdoch howled about profits fouled by search engines that prowled for news, while AP scowled at content reuses that tempted its members to throw in the towel;
Smart phones got fast and netbooks now cast a shadow over the last bits of old-school computing;
Save the best for last! It's Wave, the rave of brave trend-setters, promising an enclave that will repave the road to the Web's future;
Feel like you need a suture or two? Don't worry. The couture of content will change soon enough. The future is bright - for those who are tough.
Everyone at Shore Communications wishes you a great holiday season and a fantastic 2010. Enjoy what is important, and let's build the future of content together next year! I hope that you enjoy the following year-end video.
While business information remains a robust market segment in the content industry, it has not been without its challenges in recent years. Increasingly rapid changes in organizations and careers trigger demand for ever-fresher information on companies, people and products, making services that can help it to be found and used effectively critical to most business operations. What was once an industry of bulk data, mailing lists and a few integrated company reports is now a market that demands integration of business information into sales and marketing platforms, strategic dashboards and all-in-one online services.
It's no surprise, then, that Dun & Bradstreet is among the companies mentioned by Reuters putting in a bid for infoGroup, the Omaha, Nebraska-based business information service that produces mailing list services and OneSource, an integrated database of global business information sources targeted at major corporations. D&B finds itself in the awkward situation of having a "gold standard" reputation for its core company information listings but relatively few options for it to leverage that information for greater profits in its own operations. D&B's Hoovers online business information service is doing well in capturing users in small and medium organizations with a mixture of subscription and ad-supported services, but that leaves larger organizations and bulk data services to others - including its parent D&B.
While the infoGroup bidding process could go any number of ways, including a "no-sale" decision, my guess is that we're very likely to see D&B come out on the top of this process. D&B and infoGroup have much to offer one another, in terms of both operations abilities and markets. For infoGroup the pluses it brings include a huge wealth of business and consumer contact data, its ruthless efficiencies in driving out costs from data acquisition and maintenance and a OneSource platform that brings together a very broad array of high-quality business information sources in both its own online services and in enterprise platforms such as CRM and business intelligence portals. For D&B, its company ratings, profiles, Hoover's online savvy and its highly respected brand and enterprise sales and support organization would combine to provide a parent that could build a far more complete portfolio of business information services. No merger is perfect or without pain, but this looks like one that will create some pretty strong market mojo.
And it will take some mojo to keep up with the changes in the business information market over the next few years. The emphasis on business information services is on integration, real-time freshness and usefulness and having all of the sources at your fingertips needed to make decisions about corporate strategy, sales and marketing. Companies like Axciom and Experian are expanding their footprints in business information services rapidly, making an expansion of D&B's overall profile in business information services a priority if they are to leverage their brand effectively. And in the wings are expanding business information services from Dow Jones, and probable expansions by Thomson Reuters as well - with perhaps even an acquisition of LexisNexis assets from Reed Elsevier in play. Throw in younger business information brands such as Jigsaw, InsideView and Zoominfo beginning to cater to not only online-aware companies but core corporate markets as well, and you can see that business information is not a sleepy content market sector by any stretch of the imagination.
This appears to be one of those situations where two companies with both the right needs and the right level of maturities in their operations and management come along at the right time. It took a few years for infoGroup to whip its properties into better shape, and it's taken a few years for D&B to integrate Hoover's operations effectively and to identify the greater opportunities for their products and services. Here's hoping that these two companies find that their fits are as complementary as they appear to be.
In a move that shocked many B2B media insiders - including Incisive Media CEO Tim Weller - global information provider Reed Elsevier has announced the resignation of their CEO Ian Smith, to be replaced by Erik Engstrom, CEO of their Elsevier division. While early speculation from FT's Alphaville blog depicted the management shift as "a proper executive-level knifing," more considered comments from industry analysts and insiders in The Independent seem to indicate that Smith was falling on his own sword in recognition of some major challenges not easily resolved by someone with limited media experience. Three key factors were arguing strongly for changes at Reed Elsevier sooner rather than later: the selloff of Reed Business Information assets had stalled, pre-tax profits were down 52 percent in half-year results and investors lacked confidence in both projected earnings and Smith's aggressive recapitalization efforts. With Smith's mentor Jan Hommen having departed from Reed Elsevier's board in January to head the ING bank, a graceful exit was probably in order.
For all of the corporate drama that this move has generated, it's easy to forget that Smith's move to float more stock to reduce debt and to fund Reed Elsevier for more aggressive organic growth was a very sound move, even if it is one that displeases investors in the short term. The real question is whether Engstrom will be up to the challenge of using that capital effectively in a struggling economy. Certainly Engstrom's Elsevier unit is the most effectively positioned business unit in the Reed Elsevier empire today, with deep and widely successful enterprise information products and a growing folio of academic and scientific publications. Yet as relatively strong as Elsevier may be, growth will be a major challenge for Reed Elsevier, even if the economy is laid aside as a contributing factor.
The key problem that Engstrom faces is that few of the tricks that have worked for Reed Elsevier in the past are likely to lead to growth in the future. B2B magazine publishers over-romanticized the likelihood of revenues from traditional channels in the face of massive changes in online information delivery and were therefore ill-prepared to adjust to cutbacks in events attendance and slimmer online ad revenues. At the same time growth by title acquisition, licensing and data integration was making for a relatively rosy top line for Elsevier and LexisNexis but failed to leave enough room in budgets after debt and development costs to fund new product development. Fairly aggressive staff and operations streamlining at LexisNexis have improved the outlook for their business information operations somewhat, but the overall forecast for both LexisNexis and Elsevier highlights modestly incremental product development.
On the surface the smart approach would seem to be to "Glocer-ize" operations at Reed Elsevier as rapidly as possible. Thomson Reuters CEO Tom Glocer moved rapidly in recent years to pare away redundancies and legacy products with limited upside and to focus operations on enhanced integration of enterprise content services across their holdings. Unfortunately there are far fewer synergies available between LexisNexis and Elsevier than those found in Thomson Reuters holdings, with the cultures of the two divisions still remaining miles apart, both literally and figuratively. With ever-broadening competition for the core content licensing services of LexisNexis, including more aggressive development of Dow Jones' enterprise information holdings, Reed Elsevier looks increasingly like a company with one fairly stable boat and three heavy anchors failing to find a bottom.
While speculation remains in the air about a possible move to merge Wolters Kluwer operations in to Reed Elsevier, the more probable short-term solution would seem to lie in disposing of some or all of LexisNexis as promptly as possible while its asking price is still worthy. One possible solution would be to spin off LexisNexis operations to Thomson Reuters or Dow Jones to bolster their competitive positions in legal and business information. Thomson Reuters would be a better strategic fit overall for a spinoff, especially if Thomson Reuters could flip back some or all of its scientific holdings to Reed Elsevier, but regulatory concerns about merging LexisNexis into Thomson West would probably make a wholesale spinoff to Thomson Reuters doubtful. A more probable resolution to overcome regulatory hurdles might lie in offering LexisNexis legal assets to Dow Jones and its news licensing assets to Thomson Reuters, which has lacked archives depth since returning its interest in Factiva to Dow Jones.
Whatever the specific solution may be, Reed Elsevier needs cash to focus on building up its scientific and medical assets for growth as rapidly as possible. Cheap financing as a means to grow stables of titles is off the menu for a while, thankfully, so Smith's forecast for organic growth requires an acceptance that it will have to come by focusing far more aggressively on its Elsevier division. Elsevier is not without its own challenges - scientific publishing faces strong pushback from corporate and academic libraries that find it increasingly hard to afford the full range of journals that most publishers offer - but both scientific research and applied sciences are markets still crying out for productivity gains that would warrant increased product investments. By contrast, productivity in legal markets are moving away from many of LexisNexis' core database strengths, which would benefit from more integration with other platforms.
There's always the possibility that Engstrom may decide to go for short-term gains and shuffle the Reed Elsevier portfolio just enough to tweak out a year or two of decent earnings. Here's hoping that he finds the courage to make some very tough decisions as to what is likely to provide the best returns for Reed Elsevier investors in both the short run and the long run. Moving on a sale of LexisNexis, by far the most attractive disposable asset available from Reed Elsevier, will enable them to take advantage of its value while it still has some attractiveness in the enterprise information marketplace. Without further integration of their information with financial market information and successful media operations, LexisNexis is not likely to contribute significantly to Reed Elsevier growth for some time to come. We'll see how Engstrom decides to cut his losses, but here's hoping that his moves help to strengthen both Reed Elsevier and enterprise information markets overall.
I've been suggesting to my friends at Dow Jones for more than five years that they needed to consider how to use their Factiva content more aggressively on the Web as a source for virtual aggregation of news and business information. Well, five years isn't that long in enterprise content product cycles, I suppose, so when I tweeted the announcement by Dow Jones of its new Wall Street Journal Profession Edition yesterday morning, I was pleased to see that the WSJ had finally started to package licensed content from Dow Jones Factiva's news and business information database into an editorially-managed online edition. The WSJ Pro package will be strictly a premium offering, offered at first only to Dow Jones' enterprise customers starting in November, with wider availability expected next year.
In a loose sense you can think of WSJ Pro as a Huffington Post for business professionals, a mix of content developed by WSJ staff writers and six sections of sector-oriented business news and information culled by WSJ editors from Factiva's extensive database and Web search infrastructure. However, using the extensive search-based analysis tools that Factiva has amassed, WSJ Pro will also provide its subscribers with the ability to unearth trends from its content. With a year of archived Factiva licensed content available along with two years of WSJ archives, WSJ Pro subscribers will be getting access to both content and trend analysis from in-depth premium business information sources unavailable in on the Web in many instances. Other must-have features such as custom alerts for email and mobile devices are also included in the subscription package, which will cost USD 49 a month.
Some are labeling the WSJ Pro package as a shot across the bow at Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters, which is a shot not too far off the mark, given that for decades many financial services companies have been able to negotiate similar price points from major financial information services for people off their trading floors, who used them mostly for news retrieval and casual price quotes on securities. WSJ Pro is aimed largely at such people, who are very Web-centric already in their information retrieval habits and looking for something a little more professional-grade. The trading arena itself uses more machine-executed trades and the remaining people on trading desks using very sophisticated analysis packages, so there are fewer people who can use the high-grade financial information products developed by companies like Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters. It makes sense, then, to focus on average professionals accessing better-than-the-Web information about business and finance who are willing to use a ad/subscription-supported prosumer product like WSJ Pro.
This move is also, of course, a way to counter some of the stagnation that Factiva faces in large-scale enterprise subscriptions. With central information budgets facing cutbacks in many of the enterprises targeted by Factiva and other major business information providers, using a more media-oriented model for delivering business information to specific individuals who are willing to pay for it offers Factiva a way to slide its content over into a new sales profile that can weather central budget cutbacks by appealing more to individuals who may be willing to carry a personal subscription to their products from other budget sources - perhaps even from their own pockets. Pioneering Web business information providers such as Hoover's have established the viability of this type of media/subscription model for years, so there's no reason to think that it won't succeed for Dow Jones as well.
So as much as professionals who already use Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters services may be targets for WSJ Pro, clearly a broader range of enterprise business information users may find the package to be appealing. The "prosumer" segment of business information is likely to be one of the fastest growing segments for business information use in the years ahead, as central information budgets recover slowly from the effects of the economic downturn while more aggressive executives in need of support for decision-making decide to up their personal investments in business information to close their knowledge gaps.
You can quibble a bit about the pricing, perhaps, which is not high compared to WSJ print packages but at a non-bulk price still a little high compared to some premium business information services, but no doubt WSJ has done their homework on this and is likely to meet their revenue goals with their "prosumer" WSJ Pro package. I have little doubt that this package will be a strong success - if but because both Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters are now scrambling to come up with business news assets that can help them to broaden their own offerings. When you get the incumbents moving quickly, you must be doing something right.
After a day or so of tweaking, software downloading and restoring files from my JungleDisk network backup drive, Ariel has come to life in full. The fourth of a series of Dell Latitude laptop PCs that I have used (we'll forget that Compaq that I had for a corporate job), Ariel is the third unit I've owned named after archangels, a small but welcome comfort when I have need of a machine that can deliver some assurance to a hard-working road warrior. The processing power of this ES6400 model and its solid-state RAM drive certainly help Ariel to deliver those assurances. Having been out of the PC purchasing loop for several years, now, though, I must say that Ariel is representative of a new place in the content hierarchy for PCs than former units that I have owned, more a waystation than a destination in the stream of real-time content going and coming from a myriad of inputs and outputs.
The edges and guts of Ariel are bristling with interfaces to all kinds of content sources and outputs. An SD card slot on the front for camera and mobile media, a Firewire port and four USB ports for high-speed serial connections, one of which doubles as an eSATA port for high-volume storage units, high-definition video output port and a plain old LAN connector. Inside are wireless cards for WiFi, broadband, GPS and for Bluetooth-enabled devices. A CD-DVD drive is there for legacy media and storage, while the slot for the analog modem finally said goodbye. In other words, this machine is more like a switchboard for the galaxy of content sources and output devices surrounding it than a little walled garden unto itself. The fact that I have oodles of disk space is not as important as the peta-oodles of storage and processing available in the networks surrounding Ariel.
The notion of PCs as switchboards and waystations for content is underscored by the main reason that I finally decided to spring for a new unit. My old unit was fine for browsing the Web and office automation tasks, but it groaned at the memory and processing required to produce video content. A new webcam that I purchased, able to produce high-definition video, was just not up to the task, complicated by a USB interface that was underpowered for processing video. Ariel is more than up to these tasks, equipped with its own tiny webcam to boot and a screen that is proportioned perfectly for video presentations. In a world in which video and other multimedia are beginning to become the focus of more mobile content than ever before - wait for a new generation of powerful mobile phones next year that will accelerate this trend signifcantly - PCs are becoming more of a filtering and production platform for sophisticated content that is consumed on other platforms oftentimes.
The other key factor that Ariel's power underscores is the depth and breadth of real-time information sources that it's able to handle. Dozens of browser tabs are no sweat for Ariel to manage, with streams from Twitter, email, videos humming along while I chug along on word processing, spreadsheets, graphics and slide presentations. Its dual-core CPU processor is designed to maximize the efficiency of multi-process computing, a capability that's underused via the Windows XP operating system loaded on to Ariel but a help nevertheless. This is power that used to be available only in the trading rooms of investment banks consuming hundreds of real-time information resources to make split-second decisions on securities.
With affordable multiple screen displays and larger displays becoming more common in both office and home computing to consume all of this information, our desktop and laptop computing capabilities are starting to focus on the types of benefits that used to be the focus of only a handful of securities traders. Integration of multiple content sources to help people attain the benefits of real-time computing power is going to become only more important as machines like Ariel begin to dominate the PC end of content production and consumption. With video and multimedia sources an increasingly important part of this real-time stream, the winners in publishing will the those who are able to understand the integration and collaboration requirements for people consuming information in ever more immediate decision-making cycles.
The other factor that's highlighted by Ariel's strengths is the constancy of content consumption in today's online environment. I settled for batteries that could keep Ariel going for about ten or twelve hours without recharging, but I could have opted for an even larger add-on unit that could have extended its off-cord power to eighteen hours. High-power mobile smart phones and smartbooks are about to enter this realm soon also, with the ability to power video, Web browsing and other content-intense applications for days between recharging. This "always on" culture of content production and consumption is leaving fewer and fewer gaps for people to consider alternative forms of publishing.
As emerging technologies such as Google Wave make instant content sharing and collaboration more immediate and global than ever before, the world of real-time content is going to produce even more emphasis on instant awareness and consensus-building through publishing services. While the world has not become Wall Street, in some ways the content marketing concepts - and challenges - that shaped financial markets with new generations of technologies in previous decades are becoming the baseline of how most enterprise and consumer publishers will have to adjust to content markets in the years ahead.
Immediacy is not just important, but essential to the process of making good decisions. Sophisticated analytics are needed to help people make sense of a myriad of real-time inputs and related archives. Sophisticated networks are needed to help people collaborate rapidly on high-value opportunities and to execute on those opportunities cost-effectively. All of this requires sophisticated and affordable cloud infrastructure that will enable these services to scale cost-effectively and to minimize technology investments in markets that reward rapid adoption of new technology advantages. Look no further than to companies like Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters to understand the full cycle of changes that will be required for your own markets if you plan to survive and to thrive in the years ahead as real-time information changes your own markets.
So here I go, off to a new era of slugging it out with my keyboard, mouse and webcam to produce and consume content in real-time more productively than ever before. I am glad to have Ariel as my new road warrior compadre. My travel bag will be a lot lighter thanks to all of its built-ins and my life will be more content-centric and real-time than ever. I hope that's a good thing.
I am at a customer site today as part of our team that is delivering the results of a project based our new narrative research techniques that we're using as the basis of our new subscription study, "New Rules of Engagement: Re-Tooling Information Sales and Marketing for the New Economy," sponsored by the Software and Information Industry Assoication and Special Libraries Association. Narrative research has evolved out of efforts to understand the often weak and ambiguous signals from global terrorist networks. Needless to say, you can't really do market research on terrorists, but we saw that this technique is an excellent way for our clients to analyze customers rapidly in an innovative way that fits with many of their most critical research needs.
As with terrorist networks, many publishers and technology companies are dealing with rapidly shifting client behaviors, with lots of asymmetrical behavior that's difficult to analyze using tradional research methods. In traditional research, one formulates a hypothesis to test using quantitative or qualitative research techniques. In quantative studies, for example, someone interviews subjects and then filters down the results into a cohesive picture. In quantitative research, a questionnaire asks specific questions that requires people to respond to specific possible responses. These are both good techniques if you want to filter out a lot of possible answers that may not be your focus. But as good as that can be, many of the opportunities and threats that our clients face lie beyond this type of pre-determined focus.
An analogy as to why this is important was used in our client presentation today. We asked the people in the room to look at a short video of six people passing basketballs to one another, three wearing white shirts and three wearing black shirts, and to count the number of times that the people with white shirts passed the ball to one another. There was some disagreement on how many times the white shirted people passed the ball, but surprisingly several people missed another key input - a person in a black gorilla suit walked in and out of the scene during the passing. In other words, our ability to filter and to concentrate on specific goal not only may not give us exact anwers but may also ignore or focus on interesting phenomena that could be potentially important or a actually just a distraction.
Narrative research addresses this key gap in human perceptions in interpreting information about markets by enabling people to tell and to code unbiased stories about how they use or make decisions relating to products and services and then have them passed through software that relates their responses to key themes. When patterns emerge from this process, research sponsors can then refer to the original, unbiased stories and find new ways to analyze them. Instead of being "locked in" to specific biases or ideas that formed the information, you can refer back to the original unbiased stories and find new ways to interpret them individually or in aggregate. When you get enough stories to draw statistically significant conclusions, the result is an extremely powerful database that can answer different questions again and again over time on a very cost-effective basis. If you add more stories over time to that database, the results can be even more powerful, as you can begin to track changes in perceptions that you would not have been able to detect if you had had to form a specific idea ahead of time for testing via traditional research.
The net result for "New Rules" subscribers will be a rich, reusable resource of hundreds of stories from executives and implementers in enterprises telling how they use and make decisions on obtaining information services that they use to perform their jobs. In today's volatile economy, being able to hear unbiased stories from these complex and shifting decision makers and to analyze them quickly and effectively can be a critical factor in responding to the many changes in organizations that are compelling new and accelerated approaches to buying and implementing enterprise information services. Combined with the on-site workshops what we will be conducting for the core research subscribers I expect that "New Rules" will be the core element of many company's strategy planning efforts this year. I encourage you to investigate our prospectus and to see if you're ready to take advantage of this ground-breaking approach to market research that can power the marketing of your information products and services.
With newspapers and magazines folding virtually every week now in the face of a global economic crisis Clay Shirky is comparing the scope of change being experienced by the rise of online publishing's challenge to newspapers to the tumultuous change sparked by the rise of printing presses nearly five hundred years ago. From my perspective I think that the scope is actually far broader than that. As I outline in the Content Nation book, the scope of change fomented by the rise of online publishing is likely historical on an even broader scale, a scale perhaps never seen since the rise of centralized publishing by the world's first recorded civilizations thousands of years ago.
Whatever the ultimate breadth of the challenges facing traditional publishers, one thing is for certain: timidity in addressing the challenges presented by online publishing has not served them well. This timidity reflects not just in the online portals offered by most traditional media companies but as well in their print strategies. You'd think that some of the lessons learned from online publishing would have worked their way into print offerings a long time ago. Yet more than two years after Wired Magazine offered its users the ability to put their own photo on a customized cover of their magazine (part of a promotion by Xerox), the mass customization of print remains largely a novelty in the eyes of most mass media publishers. But there are glimmers of hopeful signs that publishers may be getting ready to push further on into print customization.
One recent sign of hope for mass customization is a new offering from Time, Inc.'s consumer media group called MINE, a service that allows people to build their own custom magazines from articles found in eight of their leading consumer publications. The actual customization seems to be quite limited at this point - you may specify your address, your age, up to five Time-owned magazines that you'd like to have content from and provide answers to four questions that indicate your presumed tastes (Like sushi or pizza? Sing in the shower? Would you like to learn juggling or celebrity impersonation? Would you like to have dinner with Leonardo da Vinci or Socrates?). From these choices Time will pop out articles tailored to your profile in five issues of your MINE magazine print or digital form, all for free (Lexus appears to be the major sponsor for this effort).
On the scale of today's print offerings this is a fairly bold experiment, enabling Time brands normally built up separately through their various flagship publications to comingle in a common publication. It echoes in some ways the use of The Wall Street Journal's branded business content in some local newspaper editions, but with a level of customization not seen heretofore the editorial side of a magazine cover. Silicon Valley entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki notes tongue in cheek in a recent Twitter message that perhaps it's even a copy of his Alltop's "online magazine rack" of popular topics concept. While I wouldn't discount that self-flattering comparison of Guy's entirely, I think that it's far more likely that Time has finally started to consider a broader range of lessons from online publications - albeit a bit late in the game - and how they may apply to their traditional strengths as direct marketing mavens.
The truth is that Time has been customizing both editorial and ad copy for years based on zip codes and other key demographic groupings. It may not be apparent to the typical person flipping through Sports Illustrated or whatever, but oftentimes they're highly tailored publications. With the technology in place already to do this type of customization on a per-title basis, it's a relatively small step to stage content on a more granular level from multiple titles into MINE issues. So in most respects MINE is an evolutionary step towards enabling multi-branded content in one delivery package. In a way MINE is akin to a "my [name of portal]" type of customization that has been part of online offerings for more than a decade - not only just evolutionary from a print perspective but old, old news from an online perspective.
So while MINE is a positive development, why is it that it is taking traditional publishers so long to develop business models that make more efficient use of print technology as a content delivery system? I for one don't believe that print is at all a dead medium: it's just a horribly neglected medium that has been allowed to die in the hands of very inefficient business models as all of the publishing efficiencies flow to online venues. Reprint services demonstrate every day that print can be a highly effective and profitable targeted communications medium. Yet most publishers derive single percentage digits of their revenues from custom printing. Hmm, tiny slivers of highly profitable printing versus huge swaths of increasingly unprofitable printing...what's wrong with this picture?
It's great that Time is trying out the market for custom aggregations of its own content, but let's he honest - publishers need to be far, far more aggressive in packaging their content in personalized publications tailored for individuals. Unfortunately for some publishers, the greatest opportunities in custom printing lie with those who are willing to let other business models drive the aggregation technologies that make that possible. Some of those business models may yet wind up in the hands of major publishers, but it's far more likely that after years of whining and wrestling, newspaper and magazine publishers will finally surrender to the notion that enabling their content to be licensed through whatever print or print-like electronic vehicle services their audience most effectively is going to be the most profitable and effective way for their print-formatted content to gain exposure. Applying the lessons of the Web to print must be a priority for print publications to survive and to thrive.
While I agree with Clay Shirky that the triviality of making electronic copies of content has changed the economics of the publishing business fundamentally, until some electronic medium has the simplicity, ease and readability of print publications there will be a highly exploitable market for print. In many instances people love to curl up in a time of relaxation to catch up with a print publication, oftentimes on a weekend or during travel. It's a luxury to spend time reading "unplugged" content - a luxury that will only be spent on a handful of print publications. Why not enable people to put whatever content will be of interest to them into that luxury experience? Branded portals for publishers are becoming less and less of a driver for building online revenues: why shouldn't publishers become more aggressive in putting their audiences in the driver's seat for aggregating the content that's of interest to them in print as well?
So kudos for Time testing the waters for their MINE publication, but I do hope that major publishers will finally begin to see the light and start enabling the printing of massively customized print and print-formatted publications that aggregate content from whatever sources interest their audiences the most. The result will be far higher ad rates, far higher returns on investment and a much more healthy print publishing business in the long run. Let's stop allowing printing presses to go dark in major cities just because the one publishing company running them cannot build a business model to support them. Let those printing presses role with whatever content will command the highest interest from audiences from whatever sources produce it, and the money will follow with due haste.
Building on Wednesday's launch of free individual and bulk company data from Jigsaw there's an announcement from business information provider Hoover's on its addition of more than a million new contacts for mid-level executives in major companies from an unnamed third party source (but given which service is focused on harvesting mid-level contacts from sales professionals it's not too hard to figure out). Pull up the record for GE, for example, and Hoover's provides access to more than 4,500 employees, now including employees from subsidiaries as well. That helps to cut down on the "which of those doggone divisions is he/she in?" conundrum that can slow down the search for appropriate contacts. With company records becoming increasingly commoditized this emphasis on contacts data integrated in with its Hoover's Connect social media feature is a key component of Hoover's future.
The other neat function is the ability to add one's own profile into the Hoover's business information database, somewhat along the lines of what ECNext is doing with company information on their Manta platform targeted at small to medium sized enterprises. Add in your bio, education, memberships in associations, add an option to receive contact via the Hoover's platform and it's off to their editors for final review and posting. You have to go looking for the feature way down on a company page, but it's there and is a start towards enabling the gathering of the kinds of valuable information that LinkedIn and other business-oriented social media services are enabling.
Overall Hoover's continues its efforts on reviving the once-flagging brand that had been turned into a cash cow by D&B just about the time that it needed serious new investment. The need to turn the cow into a star again is now clear at D&B and many of the efforts are starting to pay off. Long a leader in pressing the envelope for online workflow design, The Hoover's interface manages to present a ton of information and a wealth of features in a highly usable form. The real question seems to be, though, when and how often people will visit the Hoover's portal - or any heavy-duty business information portal.
Business information tools like Zoominfo beckon with a Google-esque simplicity to its ad-supported design and fairly rich features, if with less in-depth content, from its subscription-level service. The growth of Zoominfo in particular seems to be putting a damper on both established business information services and up-and-comers as it aggregates content harvested from with web with licensed content supplements. Part of Hoover's response to this "stickiness" issue is to highlight their editorial staff via topic-oriented business blogs that are featured prominently on the ad-supported front page and elsewhere within the site. It's an innovative move, but one that seems to be still looking for a big payoff in improved site traffic.
The main problem that Hoover's and other business information services face is that it's hard to keep on heaping on great portal features and expect to get commensurate returns on the investment in those features every single time. With a wide range of contexts in which people want business information on a personal and professional basis the ability to integrate content in contexts far beyond one's portal becomes a key factor for building the brand value of business information. At the same time there are more opportunities to use the value of contexts in a portal such as Hoover's to gain more lucrative positioning of ad-supported content. Instead of having some mass-market ad show up when someone with a known business profile is looking at a company's information, isn't that the perfect opportunity for that company to tout itself or to have related B2B products and services crop up from a ThomasNet network or such? The ad value of business information is still very underappreciated and under-exploited.
So overall the Hoover's portal continues to make healthy strides forward but it must continue to build innovation in a year in which the economy makes "pretty good" free or more targeted substitutes more popular than ever. Both the short-run and long-run track for Hoover's continues to offer challenges that they must battle, but at least their sword is getting sharper in order to take them on.
Hats off to Jim Fowler, who has to be one of the gutsiest startup CEOs out there. Taking on the heart of the business information industry with his Jigsaw collaborative community that collects business contact and company information is one thing: personally announcing the launch of their new Open Data Initiative in a YouTube video shot on some of the more funky streets of San Francisco is quite another. It sets the scene for a very interesting move into promoting the use of Jigsaw as a service that can enable people to get high-quality contact data by giving people free access to company information.
Jigsaw has built up a base of about 450,000 people who give and take business contact information and challenge one another's submissions via the Jigsaw portal. Think of Jigsaw as Wikipedia for business contacts with far better rules and to boot a premium content model. It's a "give-to-get" model that allows people to earn credits towards getting business contact information for free if they provide enough quality information themselves but which will also charge people to see contact information if they have maxed out their quota for free contact views. On the back end of this database Jigsaw has built a tidy little business selling the information collected via their portals to enterprises and other services that need up-to-date contact and company information in their internal databases and sales automation services.
It's a good business, but the hard part has been scaling the online community to the point where Jigsaw becomes a must-visit destination that will enable them to build up information beyond the 2 million businesses and 8 million contacts already tracked in their database. Making the basic company name and address information available for free - it comes along anyway on the business contact information that people input on Jigsaw - creates a powerful endorsement for membership in Jigsaw that's likely to push its positioning as a default destination for inputting business contact information. In doing so Jigsaw may have taken a huge step forward in accelerating the growth of their database, helped along by the many key sales automation platforms that are already positioned to use content from the Open Data Initiative.
Company information is available for free elsewhere online, of course, through services such as Hoover's, ECNext's Manta portal and Zoominfo, so to some degree Jigsaw's Open Data Initiative is playing catch-up with the online positioning of other business information services. However, with the Open Data Initiative Jigsaw is making this information available in bulk form as well. That's a huge step forward in neutralizing some of the power of other services that have been building their bread and butter on filtered company lists -and a strong incentive to make Jigsaw a default plan "B" feed for company information, if not their plan "A". Major business information services, please take note: those low margins on your list services just got a bit of a challenge.
What's most interesting about the Jigsaw Open Data Initiative is its potential to increase the likelihood that Jigsaw can become a more timely source of updates for accurate business contact information both from online sources and from the many enterprise services through which Jigsaw information can be consumed, and, in theory, updated. The opportunity to make desktop and mobile sales automation and email services input points for real-time business contact updates works already in a limited fashion for services like Plaxo, but with a more serious footprint in the love-to-update-those-contacts culture of today's mobile sales forces Jigsaw may have found the accelerator that they've been looking for as they've continued to refine their offerings.
In the meantime traditional business information providers continue to be challenged on all sides by nimble competitors such as Jigsaw who are willing to view their audience as knowledgeable participants in the gathering of business information. Enterprises still move cautiously towards these new services, but as they discover that interactivity with users enables them to get more accurate content more quickly there is a tipping point approaching rapidly beyond which the Dun & Bradstreets of the world must worry mightily about the ability of their organizations and their business models to survive. There is still a powerful marketplace for quality business information, but Jigsaw challenges traditional suppliers to consider how the real-time collection capabilities of today's publishing-enabled audiences can accelerate the value of those services rapidly.
paidContent.org notes the USD 50 million that Austin Ventures has announced that it is pumping into its CEOs-in-residence fund to back Razorfish ex-CEO Jeff Dachis as he explores B2B opportunities for social media. While social media backing for consumer ventures seems to have cooled somewhat there appears to be a rising tide of private equity beginning to back social media plays for business services. Details are highly vague, just the promise of a Software-as-a-Service suite that would be positioned against LinkedIn, Generate, VisualPath, and others already in the social media business information space, according to PCDO.
And there you have it - a quick 50 million infused into a trusted ex-CEO and before you know it there will be another choice in the rapidly expanding market for B2B social media. While it's far from clear where Dachis will take this venture what's already clear is that business information aggregators are going to have more points of potential disintermediation for their services as new forms of content aggregation begin to arise in the space between media, enterprise and personal content services that is neglected oftentimes by traditional database licensors. All this in a year in which many subscription content services are going to be challenged in their renewal cycles as the ROI arguments for their services come under increasing scrutiny.
While some business information services are fairly young and already very promising, I would caution those beginning to put their investment dollars into this space that while there's lots of money to be made in the space there are only so many good tools for managing business conversations that are going to take hold in any particular market sector or for any particular role. This is in part because those services that are already out there have been building a few years' worth of content quality from mined content and socially collected content that is not going to be reproducable from the Web or brand-new social networks - no matter how good one's technology is. This will mean a) licensing content from existing distributors, b) taking more time to build up one's own unique content assets and likely c) needing to position one's services carefully so that they are not trying to reinvent already extant wheels.
So invest on, courageous private equity people, there are indeed great opportunities to create valuable business information services using social media. But be prepared for a lot more careful analysis of what it takes to succeed with business information using social media tools.
I had the pleasure to speak recently on an analyst call with Dow Jones' Darr Aley, incoming VP of Marketing and BD for their new Business & Relationship Intelligence unit being formed from their acquisition of Generate, along with Simon Bradstock, VP of Corporate Products. After congratulations to all for a great acquisition we went through some of the ins and outs of how Dow Jones will be using Generate's assets to generate new market opportunities and to accelerate their existing deal flow. While many of the details that we went over parallel closely my earlier post on this acquisition, we explored also the ways in which Generate assets will help Dow Jones to penetrate both global markets and other specific market sectors. Certainly, as I discussed earlier, the potential for WSJ.com assets to benefit from this new relationship will loom large, as will integration with Factiva content and platform assets, but in looking at the other assets of Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group, including its news wires, one can see more than just a few extra sources for an already robust business intelligence platform.
What the Dow Jones-Generate acquisition deal represents in its broader context is a dawning era in business information in which new methods of rapid content aggregation and analysis from any potential source are creating a powerful new real-time economy with a high potential payoff for both enterprises and publishers. Much is still made about having leverage through licensable content. When the content's truly unique that's still a reasonable premise, but too often aggregators rely on commoditized content that doesn't enable businesses to get real execution advantages in business over their competitors.
By providing semantic analysis of freshly harvested information from the Web and other sources and mapping it to the relationships that an individual or an enterprise have that can respond to that analysis the combined capabilities of Dow Jones and Generate create powerful new real-time opportunities for creating value from those insights with specific business partners and clients. It's not so unlike what happened in financial markets as they provided more real-time harvesting and analysis of market data and news, but now business information sources from a far wider array of souces can provide similarly valuable and executable insights for a far broader array of business professsionals. If personal relationships drive the highest margins in business, then tools such as Dow Jones' new stable of business intelligence tools from Generate are going to be a key factor in helping professionals to harvest value from those relationships when they're the ripest for the picking.
Dow Jones is not completely alone in this, of course: I reviewed recently Yellowbrix's very intriguing value-add semantic analytics that map trends in news to financial markets and InsideView's semantics-driven sales tools driven by online news sources, subscription databases and relationship management tools are recent examples of how broader real-time insights into events affecting companies and people are driving the value in today's publishing. Much of this value comes not from externally licensed content from from the added value provided by the real-time analysis of this content regardless of its source. Over time the time series data built up through these kinds of services will provide other aspects of unique value for licensing, but these will be secondary to the ability to provide real-time context that can lead to deals at the most important point in time. It's like watching the financial market data business being reborn for the entire range of opportunities for executing business in a wide variety of business sectors. The future of business information is taking shape today - and it's very interesting and high-value stuff. Here's to very interesting times ahead indeed.
I was a bit nonplused to read an article in ZDNet today about InsideView's newly launched SalesView platform that just didn't seem to "get" what business information services are all about - much less what they are now starting to accomplish within some of the leading sales force automation platforms. Kind of strange, given the power found in the particular application that InsideView has launched.
InsideView has dubbed the mapping of business contact relationships to filtered content from Web harvesting and premium content sources inside collaborative software as "socialprise," a good label that describes how business information is gaining value in key contexts through aggregation and value-add services.
SalesView accomplishes this with content from the Web, from social networking services such as LinkedIn and Facebook and, at premium levels, major subscription databases such as Hoover's, D&B, Jigsaw and Reuters. Similar in general concept to Dow Jones's new Generate acquisition but more oriented towards existing Sales Force Automation platforms, SalesView filters incoming content to determine if it represents actionable triggers in a sales and marketing relationship with existing and potential clients and partners and maps it to relationships harvested from personal networks from both online services and SFA services.
The headline in the ZDNet article asks, "SalesView from InsideView: feature or product?" Apparently they weren't too tied in to how different the mission of most SFA platform providers is compared to most business information providers today. The data that most companies load from their internal databases or third party service into a sales force automation platform is just a starting point for people trying to figure out what they should be concentrating on in their sales, business development and marketing efforts.
Think of SFA contact records as the file cards onto which much be attached the prioritization of these targets and the intelligence that can help people understand who's really ready to move on business today. SFA tools don't provide those kinds of capabilities at all. It takes rich content, filtered through tools that will tell a person who's likely to be in a place where a call would be productive, to tell someone whether it's worth using that contact information in the SFA tool. Yes, from a platform standpoint this may look like a "feature," but if it's a feature that drives the key activities needed to generate revenues, then what's really important, the content "feature" or the software "product"?
SalesView takes a different approach from Generate's G2 platform, focusing more on aggregating a wider potential array of sources and social networks into a number of popular SFA platforms, as opposed to G2's focus on its own standalone application and enterprise API. Both approaches have their advantages, but the SalesView platform is nice in that it offers people hooks into a number of the business information services that they're already probably using to manage business social networks and to acquire information about businesses - all filtered through their sales trigger analysis software.
Generate may have gone down the road further in terms of building its own high-quality company and person information from Web-harvested sources, but SalesView enables people to leverage their own personal networking content very effectively for those who are already making use of social media services, while still being able to leverage intelligence from both online sources and subscription databases very effectively. For those companies that fit this usage profile, it looks to be that SalesView can give them a very cost-effective leg up on integrated real-time business intelligence that can yield greatly enhanced productivity. Sure sounds like a content product to me.
I was chatting with someone from Dow Jones' Enteprise Media Group at Buying and Selling eContent exhorting them to get more into virtual aggregation products while noting that folks from Generate were saying that a deal announcement with someone was eminent. This morning the deal news broke - with Dow Jones coming out the victor in a range of financing and exit options that Generate was considering. The Generate team will form the core of a new business unit at Dow Jones to be called Dow Jones Business & Relationship Intelligence, to be headed by Generate President and CEO Tom Aley in a SVP slot with Darr Aley, his twin brother and EVP of Marketing for Generate, taking on a VP of Marketing role in this new business unit.
With a softening economy challenging Generate's value-add strategy for short-term growth, this is one of those win-win deals that you hope for and are glad to see when they come about. Dow Jones' Factiva business unit, the business information backbone for their Enterprise Media Group, has done well enough but had seemed mired in its efforts to move its business intelligence capabilities beyond traditional aggregation of licensed content for most of its clients. The acquisition of Generate provides Dow Jones three critical springboards into a much more robust future based on The New Aggregation concepts that we've advanced here at Shore for many years.
The first springboard is the virtual aggregation capabilities that Generate's web harvesting provides. Generate, unlike some other Web harvesting tools for business information, has focused very heavily on ensuring that harvested data is cleansed and de-duplicated before releasing it into its databases. This doesn't make their data perfect, but with more and more institutions making their own Web publishing the "golden source" for publishing business information it does give them a distinct advantage in both update cycles and overall breadth of content quality that will accrue as more and more data gets released into the Generate/DJ databases. Now Dow Jones has an engine to build an independent and powerful source of business information that will not have to rely as heavily on licensed content sources.
The second springboard is a very robust intelligence front-end in Generate's G2 platform, which combines semantic analysis of incoming content for events that may trigger specific types of deal-oriented activities with a very rich and well-designed business intelligence application and API toolkit that has enabled Generate to build a market very quickly for its high-end business intelligence services. G2's integration of watch lists for both companies and people combined with real-time triggers will give Dow Jones a real-time business intelligence service far more powerful than what is currently in their quiver - with Factiva content helping to add value rapidly to the application.
The third springboard into making virtual aggregation a reality for Dow Jones is Generate's gClick tool, which enables content on people and companies served up from Generate's database to appear in a pop-up window or other Web display with a click of a browser-embedded icon or a Web page link. An entire page or a highlighted section of content can be analyzed by gClick to determine which companies and people are present and a customized dossier is prepared and displayed automatically. While the media applications of this tool have proven to be useful for some of Generate's clients, expect this to be particularly useful in enterprises where it's easier to manage features like this on a standardized basis. With many enterprise Web portals and search engines failing because they don't provide the right content in the right context this capability can help to build a foundation for many virtual aggregation services within the enterprise.
Put these three capabilities together and you have a huge leap forward in Dow Jones' ability to add value through business intelligence services beyond its traditional base of users. While they had been making some new inroads with their Factiva SalesWorks tools into the line managers who need more value from business information the data sets that Factiva alone could provide were not particularly better than any other set - with Web content left to the side in raw form. With its Generate acquisition Dow Jones has set the stage for a new era of growth in business information services based on the real-time, all-the-time world of Web content combined with sophisticated analysis that can transform this information into highly actionable business insights quickly and effectively. My congratulations to all involved: business information just got a lot more fun again.
UPDATE: A couple of extra thoughts that have been rattling around in my head today. The gClick feature will be a very nice proprietary advantage for the WSJ.com site in time, although it's likely that they'll still market the feature to non-competitive media outlets. Also, if you think of how the G2 platform has done well in financial markets to date it makes a wonderful complement to other DJ products in this sector - providing a new real-time oriented service that need not mess with stock exchange market data to make an impact on the markets. Neat.
Agricultural market information providers have been key innovators for many years in trying to bring buyers and sellers together into highly efficient global markets for agricultural products. But while many information vendors have tried to service these markets well with quotes, news, analysis and weather forecasting oftentimes the upside for these traditionally expensive services have not been big moneymakers in the lean-and-mean farm belts of the U.S. and Canada. At the same time online financial information services such as Yahoo! Finance and other major portals do a great job at covering major stock markets but leave agricultural futures in the lurch for the most part.
I find it interesting, then, that Interactive Data Corporation has teamed with agribusiness giant Cargill to announce a new portal providing free financial futures markets information on the Web. Aimed primarily towards people in agricultural markets who sell commodities to Cargill, The portal is on one level a fairly straightforward presentation of quotes in day and electronic markets for major grains, livestock and energy products along with market news, weather forecasts and market commentary from Cargill market experts. A nice little twist is that the content can be tailored by postal code to enable someone to get a sense of the market conditions for facilities where they can actuall sell their commodities to Cargill (nope, no grain elevators near Westport, CT).
But the other aspect of the portal is that it is captive, purely a Cargill platform that's being used to disseminate basic market information wrapped in marketing messages both obvious and subtle. Why mess with other marketing messages when people an turn to you for data and see nothing but your brand every day? The point is also underscored a little more subtly with the provision of market commentary from Cargill: it's professionally done and insightful, to be sure, but it's Cargill's take on the markets without having to wait for the media to show up and ask for their opinion. This is a great way for people to get rich data from IDC, a trusted source of market information, while enabling Cargill to build relationships with suppliers and build brand value. IDC benefits not only by getting its content into yet another online portal, to be sure, but also increases their experience in using corporate marketing dollars to sponsor their information.
While good news for IDC and Cargill it's yet another example of how B2B marketers are able to create their own relationships with markets through content without having to rely on traditional B2B media outlets. That's not going to stop farmers from pickup up other sources of agricultural news necessarily but it's a good example of how more and more marketing dollars that used to support those publications are paying for more captive audiences who can engage their brands inside their everyday workflow. It's also yet another example of how business information services can partner with corporations with marketing goals in ways previously reserved for trade publishers. B2B media producers need to think more like IDC and consider how they move more aggressively to help marketers build their brands wherever they want them built with their publishing expertise.
The rumbles of Hoover's initiative with enterprise social networking tools provider Visible Path began more than a year ago, but the partnership did not roll out its final production version of Hoover's Connect that uses Visible Path technology until last week - an announcement that also included the news that Hoover's was acquiring Visible Path. The reaction to this deal and product rollout has been somewhat mixed from content industry professionals, some clucking about customers wanting more security built into the product that resulted in slow testing and others doubting that enterprises will adopt an enterprise-based tool for navigating relationship networks that relies on email as its primary content source.
While there may be more than a grain of truth in these criticisms, it appears that Hoover's has taken an important step towards shifting its position with major enterprises from one of a supplier of a business information database aimed primarily at small to medium-sized businesses to one which offers a "hook" into enterprise operations that can help organizations to use Hoover's to leverage their own business information more effectively. Hoover's Connect enables individuals or enterprises to link to contacts identified in Hoover's content to contacts found in personal and enterprise content sources such as email and calendaring services that may lead to a stronger relationship with sales and business development prospects. Controls in Hoover's Connect enable individuals to control just how much information about their trusted business contacts that they share with colleagues, which may limit the quality of information available to them. But this flexibility enables people to give to the system as much as they feel comfortable doing - and to realize over time that in a give-to-get exchange of information with colleagues sometimes giving is a needed behavior.
All well and good, but will Visible Path help the perceived value of core Hoover's content? Inevitably the answer has to be yes, but with some important caveats. Visible Path tools in Hoovers Connect enable people to move quickly from business profile information in Hoover's content to navigating their personal and enterprise relationship "degrees of separation." This enhances the core value of using Hoover's content as a point from which to initiate the researching of potential business contacts through trustworthy information. You can also connect your own networks of contacts to other networks on an opt-in basis, enabling you to collaborate on specific business opportunities with other organizations or individuals in an environment that enables you to expose just the right amount of contact information to partners. That's a smart way to manage this content that parallels how people expose business contact information in the real world.
But as much as this is useful in and of itself, it would be more useful if the Hoover's content could be integrated into enterprise applications more effectively via Visible Path capabilities. As it is, the corporate profiles found in Hoover's database service seem to benefit only indirectly from this integration, and vice versa: there's not a sense that either desperately needs the other to be complete. One would hope that metadata from both services would benefit each other more directly, for example. But this may change over time as the capabilities of Hoovers connect open up more integration opportunities for Hoover's in larger institutions. For smaller businesses and organizations this "good enough" integration of business information with networked contacts may be sufficient for many to continue to leverage Hoover's core databases while enhancing the usefulness of their internal business contacts data.
Hoover's is moving to rebuild momentum as both an enterprise-oriented brand and an online brand that can both fend off newer competition for the attention of business audiences and to take on some of the more established brands in larger enterprises. This is no small feat to pull off, given the rapid rise of services like Generate, Zoominfo and other services that mine Web content and other sources to provide services that can pick away at Hoover's market share even as they try to pick away at Factiva, OneSource and other larger business information brands. Sometimes being the middle brand in a rapidly changing market is not much fun.
With its Visible Path acquisition Hoover's may be signaling a period in which they choose to add muscle to their capabilities that can push out into areas behind the corporate firewalls where other business information providers have feared to tread heavily thus far. It may take several more go-arounds of content development and major enterprise adoption for this move to pay off fully, but for now it's a very positive step for Hoover's to take towards being a trustworthy business information brand in an era in which individuals and institutions are calling the shots on what really constitutes quality content.
The buzz is increasing on a potential acquisition of the Plaxo contacts-oriented social networking service by Facebook, as noted by VentureBeat and others, and there are good reasons to think that this would be a good marriage if one can overlook the personality conflicts in the potential deal. Plaxo's new Pulse social networking service is going strong and helping to extend the value of its core contacts synchronization service, but ultimately Pulse is yet another social media login to maintain with features and functionality not terribly different from Facebook itself. At the same time Facebook is becoming an increasingly popular spot for professionals to congregate for networking of both a personal and professional nature, but it lacks gravitas for people trying to keep abreast of changes in people's professional profiles. Backing in Plaxo data and desktop synchronization capabilities into Facebook's infrastructure may offer an interesting marriage of capabilities that may give Facebook a more competitive posture with professionals as LinkedIn continues to gain mojo as a "social inbox" for the professional set.
Rumor squashers are quick to point out historical conflicts between management in these two companies that might squelch such a deal before it's out of the blocks. But with investors from Sequoia who have fingers in both LinkedIn and Plaxo perhaps there's reason to think that there's a priority being placed on getting Plaxo's potential up to speed as soon as possible in comparison to other assets in their portfolio. With reasonably healthy growth there's not an immediate need for Plaxo to pull the string on a deal just yet, but knowing that venture capital may be harder to come by for subsequent funding rounds in 2008 this might be a good point for Plaxo to exit into the hands of a player such as Facebook as it continues to attract professionals rapidly into its multi-faceted social networking portal. Expect an increasing round of high-profile deals for companies such as Plaxo as social media plays begin to consolidate to grow more effectively in a market that is scrambling for revenue-generating capabilities in a softening economy.
paidContent.org is clucking a bit at the USD 55 million price tag for Dun & Bradstreet's recent acquisition of AllBusiness.com, noting that it's well off the mark of deals from just a few months ago for business media properties. There's certainly a lot of bloom off the rose for online plays trying to find traditional media partners, with the whistling-past-the-graveyard optimism of M&A specialists of this spring giving away to a more sober view of where advertising revenues are headed in the short term. But I think that this negativity tends to bypass the fact that Dun & Bradstreet has found a media outlet that complements its other holdings very well - and promises to help transform them sooner rather than later.
The key issue that D&B needs to address is the declining media audience for its Hoover's business information product, a platform that single-handedly defined the Web business information market a decade ago but which has lost much of its media mojo as it focused on building a stronger presence in enterprise subscription sales. Hoover's online strategy helped it to get a strong base of small and medium sized businesses that it continues to mine. But with an increasing range of online business services gaining audience attention, including business media companies seeking to increase audience engagement through business information services, getting the attention of SMBs is a tougher game.
AllBusiness.com is a good match for helping D&B to address many of these problems. It's a nuts-and-bolts "how to" portal that is designed especially to appeal to the SMB crowd needing practical advice and input on the key challenges facing business professionals. AllBusiness.com also has a core of blog content from leading business experts that helps to give the portal a conversational tone. That's in line with research from Shore and other outlets which shows that business professionals are likely to respond to advice from peers as a key source of business information. Combining this content with Hoover's core business information and analysis tools is likely to increase the engagement of SMB professionals who want both easy-to-use business information and peer advice to solve business problems - engagement which in turn should lead to more successful marketing of their subscription products.
The real question, though, is whether this combination will giveDun & Bradstreet enough online engagement to counter increasingly strong business information media competitors. With Zoominfo growing as a media presence far more rapidly than either Hoover's or AllBusiness.com and traditional business media outlets like Forbes improving its audience share is it enough to marry high quality business information with high quality media content? Perhaps not, but the marriage is nevertheless essential for Dun and Bradstreet to build strong long-term engagement with SMB markets. But the Zoominfo model reminds us that business professionals have come to trust the Web as a key source of business content and look strongly towards companies that can help them to organize unstructured sources of information as data in more useful formats.
I think that we can expect to see many deals that parallel the D&B/AllBusiness paradigm in 2008 but I think that we'll also be on the lookout for transformative plays like Zoominfo that challenge traditional business information suppliers to make sense of the Web as a business information resource. Marrying business information and business media is a hot ticket these days, but make sure that you're looking at its hotness through the perspective of audiences who are more likely to embrace Web-based sources of content as a source of business insight along with traditional information and media content.
Was it any small surprise that Gordon Crovitz, President of Dow Jones Consumer Media and the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, would be leaving along with Zannino?
Hardly.
With a changing of the guard at the top of News Corp expected and Murdoch itchy to start transforming his new property to compete with other quickly moving global news outlets it only makes sense for Richard and Gordon to move on ASAP. This is of course no reflection on their ability to guide one of the world's premium business content brands into a highly profitable stance in the business media marketplace. This duo has to be credited with managing to maintain both an institution and a highly profitable and growing audience through some of the most challenging times in publishing history. But the new boss in town rivals New York Yankees baseball "Boss" George Steinbrenner for his fixation on goals and results. Lip service to tradition, yes, but hitting your mark comes first.
The goal: build the most sophisticated and recognized global brand of business news that can be wrapped around leading executives' decision-making processes in whatever context matters most to them and to monetize it in whatever way hits the bottom line best. Pride in subscription online portals and "the value of real journalism" be damned, it's the first to crack this converging marketplace that wins the gold. And Murdoch is not alone. With Reuters teaming up with The New York Times' International Herald Tribune to deliver business news in IHT's global daily news outlet and Bloomberg, LP choosing a media investments specialist for its top spot the marketplace for business media and information is shaping up to be increasingly complex. Add on The New York Times' stellar traffic growth since dropping its subscription firewall and it's anyone's game to build a new dominant position in business news and information services.
The odd leg out in this discussion so far, though, is Dow Jones Enterprise Media, AKA Factiva plus the remnants of Dow Jones' enterprise feeds business. The opportunity is for News Corp to enable a more aggressive melding of enterprise and media services as the differences between today's business media outlets and today's enterprise portals begin to narrow. No word yet as to whether Clare Hart is expected to move on, but with relatively little expertise within News Corp in managing subscription business information database services she may wind up being a well-positioned player - that is, if some of the industry's other merging interests don't tantalize her more than playing NewsCorp Survivor. With an established global base of clients Factiva is likely to become an important fulcrum as NewsCorp tries to leverage its way further into global business information circles.
There's a lot yet to unfold in this fascinating merger, but already we can see that promises of journalistic integrity in Murdoch's world view are not synonymous with the status quo for journalists in any sense of the word. In may ways this may turn out to be a great plus, as Dow Jones journalists get to play out their careers in an increasingly sophisticated global marketplace. In the meantime it's time for U.S. business journalists of all stripes to recognize that as much as they have been biting the hand that's fed them pretty well all these recent years this hand has been mightily slow in creating better long-term career options for them. Certainly not everyone will be happy with these impending changes at Dow Jones and some "old guard" insight is surely going to be lost along with this increased global nimbleness but there's no time to waste if NewsCorp is to make the most of the Dow Jones family of content brands. In this landscape the purity of outdated methods can be no match for the purity of mastering new ones.
I heard from a colleague yesterday who mentioned that TrueAdvantage, one of the early leaders in advanced sales lead generation tools, is in the process of being dissolved. No callback yet from TrueAdvantage or one of its key investors, but it sounds as if this is probably one that's for real. If so then it's not good news for the dozens of content and technology companies that have been focused on providing value-add tools for sales and marketing automation. TrueAdvantage's focus seemed to be spot-on: analysis of a wide variety of published and enterprise content sources to identify companies that are highly likely prospects for very specific types of products and services. With nearly seven years of refinement you'd think that this would be a strong winning formula for a subscription service.
But there are two factors that may have been putting extra pressure on TrueAdvantage: rapidly evolving content technologies and an increasingly crowded marketplace for value-add sales and marketing tools. Tools such as Generate are providing a higher level of semantic analysis of content to not only filter general characteristics of companies and products but as well specific analysis of content to identify where a company is in the overall acquisition process. At the same time there is a widening array of major business information vendors that are building far more sophisticated filtering tools themselves: what was a sophisticated, advanced tool for business information a few years ago is becoming an expected filtering feature for standard business information databases.
Which brings us back to an all-too-familiar theme for many content technology companies: if what your company is building is a feature in search of a marketplace you're in a deadly race against the clock to turn that feature into a real product. Many patient private investors hope that through careful cultivation they can build their sales base to the point where a feature can survive on its own as a product but without raising the fundamental question of whether there is a broad enough business problem being solved to justify this optimism. Content technology companies need to think more like electronic publishers from the start and to look beyond their software expertise to the business problems that need to be solved first and foremost. At the same time, though, publishers need to foster the entrepreneurial spirit of new content technology companies and learn how to experiment with new capabilities that might indicate an opportunity for new products and services.
But even with all of the right buttons being pushed we may be reaching a saturation point for value-add sales and marketing tools. Return-on-investment arguments premised on sales efficiency don't always add up collectively: that is, if you have ten solutions that promise a 25 percent improvement in sales efficiency, purchasing all ten of them is not likely to improve your sales efficiency 250 percent! Content technology companies need to focus more on 10x-scale solutions that will change dramatically to make any sort of major impact in a market for sales productivity tools that's facing a softening economy. Good solutions will continue to do well in this environment, but investors should be prepared to challenge the speed with which deals can be closed and expect pilot programs to play out longer as customers try to milk advanced technologies for as long as they can on the cheap before considering full-blown commitments.
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