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Friday, November 13, 2009

Business Information Consolidation: D&B Pursues InfoGroup to Diversify Offerings

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.

Labels: axciom, Business Information, CRM, D+B, dun and bradstreet, enterprise, experian, infogroup, insideview, integration, jigsaw, onesource, Zoominfo

By John Blossom - posted at 12:20 PM

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Monday, September 14, 2009

An Adless Recovery? The Rise of Social Media as a Major Marketing Investment

With many forecasts beginning to predict a bottom of sorts in the ad-supported content market, can an ad recovery be too far behind? It's a question that is probably harder to answer than ever, given the rise of social media tools as an increasingly important platform for marketing influence and insight. Yes, we're bound to see increases in ad spending as the economy improves, but while the ads were away, companies have been learning how to listen to their clients more effectively through public social media channels and their own online forums and customer support platforms to influence markets cost-effectively. One of the leaders in helping organizations to listen and to respond to their markets effectively is Lithium Technologies, which provides both community forum tools and social media monitoring tools that integrate with popular CRM platforms such as Salesforce.com. To some, tools such as Lithium may seem like stuff down in the bowels of product management efforts rather than marketing efforts. But in fact, it turns out that investments in social media gathering and monitoring are having measurable effects on marketing efforts.

As noted in a recent Lithium white paper, a Harvard business review study recorded a 56 percent increase in sales for an online auction site for people participating in the site's online community features. Similar results were seen at one Lithium customer, which reported $41 million dollars in increased sales from their online community members along with $8 million in reduced support costs. In other words, companies are learning that customers generating millions of page views on their own Web sites and social media portals learning from other customers and their own staffs are becoming powerful channels for revenue generation and brand management, as well as reducing support overhead. Of equal importance, though, is the ability of tools such as Lithium's "Social CRM" suite to monitor feedback and discussions in forums and social media outlets that can be channels to support staff and sales and marketing teams in ways that enable them to respond to market opportunties and threats expressed in social media even as they are emerging online.

With capabilities such as these, advertising becomes less of a critical tool to formulate messages that can be spread widely and effectively to the most important and influential market participants. Instead of focusing on "spinning" markets through ad campaigns, engaging markets through social media tools and empowering clients to have influence over their peer purchasers can enable companies to empower peers and product specialists whose influence can be more direct and immediate on sales processes than ads placed in online content of general interest. Why bother paying a prominent media figure like a sports hero, for example, to get people charged up about a new product or service via ads when influential peers whose opinions are trusted by others can do it for you for free?

So while advertising will play an important role in marketing for some time, the nature of how influence is spread through markets has changed fundamentally via social media, helping people to gravitate towards content generated by the markets themselves and by companies and organizations able to communicate effectively with markets on a peer level. To put it another way, when your clients and prospects generate more content and more engaging content than traditional publishers, you're going to put your marketing monies down on the content that produces most cost-effectively. I believe that we're just at the very early days of publishers beginning to understand the likely impact of social media on their own organizations - even as their clients are already well down the path of exploiting it directly for their own purposes. So much for intellectual property rights when you can have intellectual influence rights.

Labels: advertising, CRM, economy, lithium technologies, sales and marketing, Social Media

By John Blossom - posted at 10:49 PM

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