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.

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

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.

Labels: aggregation, Business Information, hoovers, jigsaw, Manta, Zoominfo

BtoB Online covers the launch of the refreshed ZoomInfo business information portal, equipped with a much more usable interface and improved content quality. The home page features three main tabs: company searches by keyword or company name, people searches and job searches via content from Zoominfo's content partner Indeed. Company content and most of the other site content is ad-supported, while searches for people by keywords and company name are part of a premium package that includes more powerful search tools. An interesting addition to the home page is a tag cloud representing popular keywords used for searches on ZoomInfo - some of which seem to show left-over preferences from testing but which in the long run should give users a sense of the "buzz" being generated by business information users.

It's interesting that the default search for Zoominfo is now keywords rather than company name, implying that the tool is useful for people trying to locate companies that offer specific products and services. A search for "flushometers" yields eight companies that seem to fit nicely, each with a summary of their strengths. One can refine their search with further clustered subcategorizations - in this instance "flushometer manufacturing"and "flushometer tank"are available - as well as by geography or annual revenues. A quick click of an icon next to the results adds the company profile into a Zoominfo "QuickList" at the bottom of the browser window; a user can define multiple QuickList folders for reference. Company profiles include revenues, number of employees, industrial classifications, Web site thumbshot and contact data - most of which is gleaned directly from Zoominfo's Web mining operations. A search results listing of competitors can be displayed by clicking on a link on the profile page; a competitive search for Sloan Valve Corporation yielded 29 potential competitors, most of which seemed to be very much in the thick of their competitive space.

Ad-supported visitors can get access to personal profiles built from Web content, which provides a Web-derived employment history, references to key Web pages covering the person's activities and the opportunity to build social network contacts with the individual. Registrants can maintain this profile information if they would like it to provide more accurate information. A search for Factiva's Clare Hart yielded one seemingly accurate profile but other people with a more complicated professional life still challenge Zoominfo's improved semantic processing. A search on Presidential advisor Karl Rove, for example, yields a robust list of alter egos defined for Rove in the online press, including a number of epithets.

Searching people by keywords or company names and titles yields an anonymous list of matches for ad-supported visitors, which can be converted into a listing with names associated with titles for premium PowerSearch subscribers. The shift to PowerSearch from free results gives somewhat different information, but with the additional filtering tools available in PowerSearch you can zero in on key contacts very quickly and get a list of probable phone numbers and email addresses. Gliding over a given contact name in the search results in PowerSearch mode pops up a summary of the person's profile page. Job searches work similarly overall, with filters for proximity, job types, job sources and company revenues.

While the improved technologies in ZoomInfo seem to yield improved results in many instances, the notable improvement in this release is the professional-grade design of the interface. Functions are easy to navigate and are organized consistently from one function to another: there's little guesswork involved. It's easier to normalize company information online than personal profiles, so this edition of ZoomInfo rightfully emphasizes this capability. In doing so ZoomInfo is positioned as a very useful multi-purpose company mining tool that can help both purchasers and sales and marketing professionals zoom in on the right targets for their efforts very quickly. The more problematic personal profile information is only going to be as good as the Web itself in most instances but that in and of itself can make ZoomInfo a very useful tool for accelerated "Googling" of people in professional roles. And once one gets into the PowerSearch tools the information can help to accelerate prospecting with ZoomInfo's frequent update cycles.

As we noted in our earlier news analysis on Zoominfo and Generate born-on-the-Web content is becoming the default "golden source" for corporate information, giving tools such as ZoomInfo a strong leg up as a structured reporter of how companies have positioned themselves in the marketplace. This shows up especially when one takes advantage of the on-the-fly clustering of company profiles: pop in a term like "Wiki" that's not in any industrial classification system and you get a relevant listing of companies that provide Wiki software and services. More traditional business information tools offer more sopisticated services and broader data sets to mine, but this edition of Zoominfo serves as a reminder that Web-first business information services are becoming a key resource for today's professionals.

Labels: Business Information, products, Zoominfo

Companies such as Zoominfo and Generate are using born-on-the-Web content and technologies to create business information services that are several notches above previous efforts to glean quality information from Web sites and other key sources. With an emphasis on analytics and semantic processing and business plans that are targeted towards the meat of traditional business information markets you could say that Business Information 3.0 has been born. Are traditional vendors ready to take on these well-funded BI 3.0 challengers?

Click here to read the full News Analysis

Labels: BI 3.0, Business Information, Generate, News Analysis, Trends, Zoominfo