Meet Data Publisher Steven Connolly.

 

Steven Connolly, Senior Product Manager, Lattice Engines

Meet a very discerning data publisher, Steven Connolly.

 As the Senior Product Manager at Lattice Engines, Steven is on the hunt for content for its sales PRISM product platform. By now his eye for data is pretty good. He’s been building and working with B2B products for over 15 years , having worked on SIIA CODIE nominated or winning products from Thomson Financial, Copyright Clearance Center and most recently, Onesource Information Service’s iSell product.

Steven knows what’s at stake. A recent CSO Insights survey revealed that 89 percent of sales reps miss opportunities because they can’t keep up with information, in spite of the proliferation of ever more powerful sales management systems. According to Steven, it’s not just the ability to find the right data, but knowing the relationships between data that makes sales reps successful.

At DataContent, he’ll tell you how Lattice Engines, named to the Inc 500 fastest growing private companies in 2010, is taking relationship selling to a new level and why big data + predictive analytics = big opportunity for data publishers.

According to Steven, “Much is always said about the proliferation of content and the incredible growth in the amount of the knowledge that is available to people and professionals.  Advances in technologies in medicine allow physicians to understand cure rates and treatment plans.  The legal industry has been benefiting from big data advances since allowing for pre-trial “eDiscovery” to occur.   And finally, big data for sales is quickly gaining traction, but there’s still a long way to go.  A recent CSO Insights survey revealed that 89 percent of reps miss opportunities because they still can’t keep up with information.   That’s going to change,  and it’s going to happen in part by identifying the relationships that exist in  content that reside within their CRM, marketing automation system, financial systems, in the social selling sphere, in press releases, and in public or proprietary collections.  As the users become more accustomed to working with big data and achieve success, the questions will no longer be focused on which data sets need to be used, but instead on how to easily identify and understand the relationships between data sets that will allow reps to be successful.  It’s this challenge and this value that generates excitement here at Lattice Engines.” 

Join Steven and close to 200 data producers gathering at DataContent to explore the intersection of Data, Communities, and Markets.

At DataContent, you’ll get a clear understanding of where data fits in your future. Most importantly, you’ll leave with an understanding of the trends that are the most profitable AND the contacts and know-how to incorporate them into your own business.

Our sessions go beyond the data hype—we’re assembling the people advancing, transforming, and disrupting the industry to give you straight talk on why the data business is the hottest segment of the information industry and why it will continue to grow.

Attend DataContent Oct. 9-11, 2012
Register today

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How Cortera is Mobilizing Communities to Create Intelligent Networks

Jim Swift, President & CEO, Cortera

Jim Swift, President & CEO, Cortera, and opening keynote at DataContent, understands connection. He knows business is personal, and that risk management is not just data scores. Cortera is built on his vision of bringing the power of community to the commercial credit market so that credit ratings reflect the experiences that we all have with the businesses we interact with. He has built a place where the voice of small business can be heard, and at DataContent 2012 you’ll see how his “wisdom of the crowds” driven business works and why it’s giving industry incumbents a good run for the money.
During his keynote participants will learn:

  • How community-based information has transformed industries and served as a valuable intelligence base for analytics.
  • How community information asset development & usage are evolving as technology and communication advancements change the world around us.
  • The factors in building momentum in the community.
  • What future community-based assets will look like and achieve.

According to Jim, “these are exciting times to be a data geek. We’ve seen advances in computing power and communication that have enabled the creation, collection and dissemination of vast amounts of data. Now I think we will see an acceleration in innovation around analytics, where the data will enable interesting new solutions to old problems.”

For more information on this keynote, and DataContent 2012 visit the conference schedule.

Attend DataContent Oct. 9-11, 2012
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Meet Data Publisher Eric Jackson.

Meet a combative data publisher, Eric Jackson.  

Eric Jackson, CEO & Co-Founder, CapLinked

Eric Jackson, CEO & Co-Founder, CapLinked

As PayPal’s head of marketing from 1999 to 2004, Eric was a leading champion of that company’s mission to overhaul global currency markets. On this quest to make Internet history Eric had to combat the dot-com bust,  hordes of government regulators,

trial lawyers, and organized crime rings, and wage a fierce and ultimately losing battle with eBay – all of which he documented in the riveting The Pay Pal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia and the Rest of Planet Earth.  

After this, Eric was battle tested and ready to enter the investment arena on the side of the David’s. His mission was to arm them with the same capability to raise and manage funds as the Goliaths. His startup, CapLinked, matches up entrepreneurs with private investors and provides them with a secure “deal room” to post news and updates on their startups. But its real power, and the reason it has garnered a 2012 InfoCommerce Model of Excellence,  is in marrying the transactional benefits of a marketplace with workflow tools that keep marketplace participants active and engaged.

We’re happy Eric didn’t put up a fight to join the Making Markets session. In fact, he’s eager to tell you how he is building not just a diy investor relations vehicle and marketplace for the deal ecosystem, but a community which contains all the innovation, drive, competitiveness, and perseverance needed to create the economic powerhouses of the future.        

Join Eric and close to 200 data producers gathering at DataContent to explore the intersection of Data, Communities, and Markets.

At DataContent, you’ll get a clear understanding of where data fits in your future. Most importantly, you’ll leave with an understanding of the trends that are the most profitable AND the contacts and know-how to incorporate them into your own business.

Our sessions go beyond the data hype—we’re assembling the people advancing, transforming, and disrupting the industry to give you straight talk on why the data business is the hottest segment of the information industry and why it will continue to grow.

Buyers and Sellers Address Platform Diversity

Ten years ago, vendors developed content products for local installations or, increasingly, web-based delivery. Today, vendors develop for a range of platforms, including mobile (with multiple operating platforms), web (multiple browsers and platforms), and a variety of secure environments to meet the needs of customers.

Two years ago, organizations maintained tight control over where and how employees could access internal and licensed content to do their work. But increasingly, they became aware of breaches in this secure arrangement: Cloud-based file sharing services like DropBox were quietly used when employees really needed access to something from a remote location… and information managers knew that some content was finding its way onto smart phones and tablets, despite the fact that these were not approved devices.

Today, both vendors and buyers have to face the multiplicity of platforms on which users want to be able to access content. Vendors have to contend with the ever-expanding demands for development to keep up with these changes, and corporate buyers are slowly starting to address the emerging risks of BYOD (bring-your-own-device) if left unattended. As one respondent in a FreePint Research project mentioned with regard to mobile access to content, “The fact is, is that it’s happening. And if you don’t address it, then you have unaddressed risk.”

Since both buyers and sellers face challenges offered by a multi-platform environment, of course they are working together to find sustainable solutions, right? Wrong. Very little industry-wide discussion is currently taking place to set standards, encourage productive dialogue or establish best practices. Every organization is, frustratingly, on its own.

It is very difficult to plan for 12 or 24 or 36 months down the road in this kind of environment. To help buyers and sellers address this problem, the Content Division of the SIIA hosted a roundtable discussion at the SLA annual conference in Chicago. One of the topics for the session was to describe potential solutions for the challenges of a multi-platform environment.

Through the dialogue, the participants identified three key challenges which would have to be addressed for the problem of platform diversity to be considered “solved”:

Standards

One of the first elements that came up in discussion groups was the need for some level of standardization to be introduced at the industry level. An accepted standard for development and delivery to apply to mobile, cloud and locally delivered solutions would eliminate a lot of the uncertainty and barriers for both buyers and sellers.

During smaller brainstorming discussions before the whole roundtable group debriefed together, several of the groups came up with the concept of a filter or “normalizing” layer that could sit between the content and the user. This layer would align all content with the preferred delivery mechanism of the user (or the organization, if at the corporate level).

Customization and Control

The participants agreed that the trend toward user-centric expectations would continue: “anyone, anywhere, on anything” is the emerging expectation for content access.

Users will increasingly want to set their own controls for how they interact with content. At the same time, organizations need to be able to control what their employees can and cannot see, and vendors need to have appropriate controls for premium content, to manage their accounts.

In the past, buyer organizations have instituted controls by restricting access to specific devices, IP addresses, login environments, etc. This approach remains the most commonly used in the industry, particularly for companies in regulated industries, but users are chafing against restrictions and, increasingly, demanding more flexibility in how they access content.

Roundtable participants struggled with how to address these competing needs. Some wanted to open up all variables to user control, while others wanted to maintain some corporate-level control over where and how users could access content.

Many buy-side participants expressed frustration that every vendor has its own approach to product development and its own way of tagging and delivering content, making it very difficult to integrate that content with anything else.

Vendors in the room, for their part, wanted to look to solutions that put some responsibility on other entities – the buyer organization or a third-party technology provider, for example – to establish conduits for the content into the buyer environment, commenting (correctly) that if they were to anticipate buyer requirements for doing so, they’d likely get it wrong.

Sustainable Business Model

And how to charge for content that’s theoretically available “anywhere, anytime, from anything”? This topic was raised, wrestled with, and yet no clear answers were forthcoming.

Participating buyers generally seemed to prefer a “buy once, access anywhere” pricing model. Sellers were happy to agree in theory, but worried that the appropriate price tag to cover development and profit would not be palatable.

Again, buyers lamented the lack of an industry standard to guide them; they wish that vendors adhered to a standard set of approaches to pricing – for a single-platform model, let alone a multi-platform one.

No Firm Answers

The problems – and opportunities – posed by a multi-platform environment will not be resolved in a single dialogue, or even a single series of conversations. When buyers and sellers talk with each other about their perspectives on this shared challenge, however, every conversation makes progress in building partnership to come to solutions that both can live with.

What will it take to establish standards, enable both customization and control and also create manageable and profitable business models? Many more conversations, within the context of a fast-moving environment.

Join the SIIA’s Content Division for future dialogue. Register your interest in notification about any upcoming Buyer-Seller Programming webinars, discussions, or announcements by reaching out to Jennifer Hansen.

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Robin NeidorfRobin has been working with FreePint since 2004, and, since joining full time in 2006, is responsible for strategic planning, product development, relationship management, research and communications. She currently heads the FreePint Research division.

Robin Neidorf ran a research and communications consulting business for 10 years, prior to joining Free Pint Limited. As a consultant, she focused on strategic planning, using information to make better decisions, and creating effective audience-focused communications across different media.

Robin has worked with a wide range of organisations in the for-profit and non-profit sector. She has developed online communities, publications and distance learning modules for a range of business purposes. She is the author of Teach Beyond Your Reach: An instructor’s guide to developing and running successful distance learning classes, workshops, training sessions and more (Cyber Age, 2006) and the co-author of E-Merchant: Retail Strategies for e-Commerce (Addison-Wesley, 2001).

Robin can be reached at robin.neidorf@freepint.com

Serial Entrepreneur Jim Fowler to Speak at DataContent

Meet a well-armed data publisher, Jim Fowler of InfoArmy.

A two-time winner of the InfoCommerce Model of Excellence, Jim will be speaking at DataContent. His mission will be to explain how he plans to use InfoArmy to revolutionize market research just as successfully as he revolutionized lead generation with Jigsaw.

Jim has joined our Excellence in Action session, during which he’ll take us behind the lines of his new launch to show how he’s building a global network of independent researchers to develop and regularly update detailed competitive intelligence reports on every strategically important company on the planet, and in multiple languages.

Jim will also explain how crowdsourced competitive intelligence can take public data well beyond a simple aggregation effort. What sets InfoArmy apart is both its tweaks to the traditional crowd-source model, and the depth and currency of the information it is collecting, and Jim can’t wait to tell you all about it.

Jim Fowler, Founder & CEO, InfoArmy

“Currently, if you want to learn about the competitive landscape for a particular company you must do it yourself. With an InfoArmy competitive intelligence report, however, you can learn in 2 minutes what would have taken 2 days to find on your own.  Simply pull out your iPad as you walk to a meeting or pick up a client phone call and quickly drill down to exactly the information you need. We believe this ability will be invaluable to a wide range of professionals, including financial services firms, executives, and marketing teams.

Other company profiles are often static, whereas InfoArmy reports are updated every quarter. This change in the data is one of the things that makes our reports so valuable because it allows for trend analysis on everything from leadership changes to revenue estimates to website design.

We also understand that data is far more useful when seen in context. InfoArmy reports present the company in the context of its competitive landscape. Our reports pull data from the reports of competitors and allow for direct and immediate comparison. The reports are each created by a team of two researchers, and all of the data are hand-collected and hand-verified.

Our model of crowdsourced competitive intelligence is brand new, and our ambitious goal is to cover every strategically important company on the planet, in multiple languages. In doing so, we aim to recruit an army of disciplined researchers who are able to make a living by creating reports.”

Join Jim and close to 200 data producers gathering at DataContent to explore the intersection of Data, Communities, and Markets.

Our sessions go beyond the data hype—we’re assembling the people advancing, transforming, and disrupting the industry to give you straight talk on why the data business is the hottest segment of the information industry and why it will continue to grow.

At DataContent, you’ll get a clear understanding of where data fits in your future. Most importantly, you’ll leave with an understanding of the trends that are the most profitable AND the contacts and know-how to incorporate them into your own business.

Attend DataContent Oct. 9-11, 2012
Register today

Quick Links:
DataContent Home
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Getting Buyers and Sellers onto the Same Development Page

During the SLA annual conference in Chicago in July 2012, the Content Division of the SIIA sponsored a roundtable discussion bringing together buyers and sellers of content products. The purpose of the roundtable was to facilitate meaningful dialogue about key trends in the industry affecting both buyers and sellers and to begin exploring solutions to the mutual challenges we face.

As the Director of Research for FreePint, a Content Division member company and frequent partner with SLA, I had the pleasure of planning for and leading this roundtable.

It was an opportunity to have, in real-time and face-to-face, a conversation I often feel like I’m having with one person at a time. Buyers and sellers of content products and services often complain about the same challenges and fret about the same technologies.

Too often, they resolve these issues for themselves, in isolation from their market or their suppliers. The result is a solution that misses the mark – and often wastes money as well as time.

The mobile example

The most obvious example of this disconnect between buyers and sellers came with the flood of mobile apps in 2010, following the launch of the iPad. Sellers were bombarding FreePint with requests to review their freshly minted mobile apps for our publications. But when we asked our buy-side customers about their interest in these, they were indifferent at best. Of all the things buyers were interested in during 2010, mobile applications of content products were nowhere near the top 10. Or even the top 20.

Here was a case where the sell-side had dived fully into a new area without having a critical understanding of the interest or even readiness of the buy-side to go there with them.

Clearly the industry is going mobile – but it took 18 months for corporate buyers to start to get to a similar level of interest in mobile delivery as the sellers were in developing these solutions. Those 18 months represent lost time and opportunities, as well as deep investment in product development that lacked a viable market.

End User Focus

Similar miscommunications and disconnects currently occur in another area of mutual interest for buyers and sellers: focus on the end user. Both buyers and sellers have intensified interest in meeting the needs of corporate end users, yet they rarely work closely together to come up with comprehensive solutions for addressing this mutual need.

How often are buyers and sellers truly collaborating, pooling knowledge, to better understand, serve and get results from end users? I suspect that this disconnect represents another significant opportunity cost, like the disconnect over mobile was more dramatically and visibly in 2010 and 2011.

Mutual Benefit

Getting buyers and sellers talking offers benefits to both.

Buyers get the following benefits:

  • Purchasing improvements – Buyers that have closer relationships with sellers will also have better insight as to which solutions will best suit their needs… not to mention a bit of leverage to push for solutions that better meet their needs.
  • Strategic planning – The more buyers understand the problems sellers were trying to address with product design, the better they can plan for inclusion of those products in their content portfolios. Similarly, they can better train and support users of those products on their strengths.
  • Process engagement – Plugged-in buyers can inform and be informed by the product development process. Buyers who know that their seller-partners are working towards a particular outcome in a 24-month time horizon can plan along the same time horizon. That’s a whole set of variables buyers now have increasing control over or early warning on.

Sellers also achieve benefits:

  • Getting closer to the buyer – Product development has always been all about the customer: anticipating and meeting their needs. Sellers can accomplish this by having frequent conversations with savvy buyers about the desired business outcomes of their content investments. At the same time, sellers have to understand technology, content or purchase requirements that buyers face or expect to face in the future.
  • The right insight – Increasingly, sellers of content products and services may not be working with an information professional in an organization, but rather with a representative of a group of end-users. For example, the director of sales may be the first and last point of contact for a contract relating to a lead-generation product.

However, information professionals – whatever their current titles – have an incredibly important role to play in helping sellers understand their organizations’ needs. They are the professionals who should have a clearer, more strategic view of what the organization wants and needs with regard to content products, now and in the future.

In addition to insight from end users, sellers of content products and services are well-served by cultivating ongoing relationships with the information professionals who are no longer gatekeepers of sales. Even if a seller’s sales process does not require involvement of information professionals, they can help identify potential barriers and objections that even the smartest end-user would have no way of knowing.

Join the SIIA’s Content Division for future dialogue. Register your interest in notification about any upcoming Buyer-Seller Programming webinars, discussions, or announcements by contacting Jennifer Hansen.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Robin Neidorf

Robin has been working with FreePint since 2004, and, since joining full time in 2006, is responsible for strategic planning, product development, relationship management, research and communications. She currently heads the FreePint Research division.

Robin Neidorf ran a research and communications consulting business for 10 years, prior to joining Free Pint Limited. As a consultant, she focused on strategic planning, using information to make better decisions, and creating effective audience-focused communications across different media.

Robin has worked with a wide range of organisations in the for-profit and non-profit sector. She has developed online communities, publications and distance learning modules for a range of business purposes. She is the author of Teach Beyond Your Reach: An instructor’s guide to developing and running successful distance learning classes, workshops, training sessions and more (Cyber Age, 2006) and the co-author of E-Merchant: Retail Strategies for e-Commerce (Addison-Wesley, 2001).

Robin can be reached at robin.neidorf@freepint.com

Twitter and LinkedIn: It is Complicated!

 We are excited about our partnership with the InfoCommerce Group to produce DataContent 2012, coming up October 9-11 in Philadephia. The conference will focus on discovering the next big thing in publishing: The intersection of Data, Community and Markets at DataContent 2012. If you don’t know him, Russ Perkins the founder of InfoCommerce Group, is one of the more thoughtful individuals in our industry on all things data. As we lead up to the conference, we will be highlighting posts from his blog which focus on the issues and topics we will be discussing at DataContent 2012. Enjoy!

Twitter and LinkedIn: It’s Complicated

On June 29, Twitter and LinkedIn decided to end a partnership that began in 2009…the separation is a story which illustrates the difference between how collaboration looks on paper and how it plays out in practical terms when collaborating companies mature and change and business models uncomfortably bump up against one another. Read more…

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This post was written by Nancy Ciliberti.