Models Of Excellence: Innovation Around Content and Data

I’m pleased to introduce you to this year’s Model of Excellence recipients. The Models of Excellence program highlights young companies that are industry “exemplars,” setting standards for innovation in application, business, and content models. Each company is diligently reviewed and selected by our DataContent partner, the InfoCommerce Group. Honorees will be announced during the Model of Excellence Dinner during DataContent 2012.

This year’s Model of Excellence recipients:

  • Bundle is a true pioneer in turning Big Data into a high-value data product. By turning anonymous credit transactions into unbiased reviews of retail establishments, Bundle helps consumers make smart buying decisions based on objective analysis. They’ve made an impressive start to bringing hard data to the business of business reviews.
  • Caplinked leapfrogs the existing virtual data room services by providing a platform that is social, viral, mobile, affordable, and easy to use. Caplinked equips small- to medium-size companies with the same ability to raise capital, manage M&A transactions, and handle investor reporting that was once only available to big players. They have grown 6,000% in the last year and are assembling a community that represents the economic powerhouses of the future.
  • GovTrak addresses an increasingly important and complex challenge: finding, understanding, and tracking government legislation. GovTrak is a well-executed example of how the combination of data, tools, and analytics can deliver power to those who are seeking the truth.
  • InfoArmy revolutionizes how a content company is built by marshaling two of the industry’s most powerful trends: crowdsourcing and community. Success is participatory, self-managed and self-re-enforcing. InfoArmy is a true example of content unbound – non-bureaucratic, collaborative and exponential.
  • Reachable does amazing things with graph technology and mashups of various contact lists enabling what it calls “social proximity selling,” where sales people can use identified “connection paths” to reach specific prospects. It is particularly powerful for larger organizations as a tool for co-workers to leverage each other’s connections. Reachable is a very distinctive offering with its own specialized functionality and value proposition.
  • Speakerfile transforms the way companies connect their experts to the global market by combining a marketplace model with a dynamic visual search experience, as well as strong content management and workflow functionality. The expert visibility platform helps thousands of event organizers, media, and potential customers discover, evaluate, and connect with thought leaders around the world. Speakerfile has created a useful, high-value service for organizations to help achieve or maintain eminence in their industries.
  • RedBeacon has reset the bar on lead generation by investing lots of effort to customize the negotiating and selecting experience, providing a highly-secure bid process, and even accommodating non-standard service requests. The real product RedBeacon has produced is trust, and they reap the rewards by keeping themselves firmly in the middle of all transactions.

Don’t miss the Models of Excellence Dinner, and the complete DataContent conference. Register now to join us as we explore the intersection of Data, Communities, and Markets. (You’ll save with early-bird rates, but only through Monday, September 10.)

Meet data publisher, Sharon Gillenwater.

Meet an iconoclastic data publisher, Sharon Gillenwater.

Sharon Gillenwater, Principal and Founder, Boardroom Insiders

Sharon will be speaking at DataContent, and her mission is to tell us why scale does not matter, at least for her business, Boardroom Insiders. Her willingness to challenge conventional wisdom is why we named her a Model of Excellence for her start-up, Boardroom Insiders, in 2009. Back then we wrote, “In terms of the depth of its data and its hand-tooled creation, you might think of a “Hoover’s for executives.” In terms of its deep mining of the web for background information, you might think of ZoomInfo, but with researchers, not machines, building the profiles.”

Three years on, Sharon is satisfied that she has proven that customers want – and will pay for – quality. In her session, Excellence Revisited, she’ll make clear that her “think different” strategy was based on a deep understanding of the market, not just a bold attempt to be contrarian. In fact, Sharon is an expert in marketing strategy, account-based marketing and CXO programs. For more than a decade she operated her own consulting firm, San Francisco Group, creating marketing strategies and programs for Fortune 100 technology companies. In response to her clients’ increased focus on CXO engagement, she founded Boardroom Insiders to provide the most in-depth executive profiles on the market today, and now counts Dell, Accenture, UPS, McKinsey, Juniper, Cisco, Avaya and ConAgra among its many clients.

While so many companies were chasing company data, Sharon will tell us how Boardroom Insiders staked out a claim to high‐end executive data, a market where the need is large, the pockets are deep, and selling is based on relationships, not software.

Ten lessons I have learned since 2009:

  1. There are no silver bullets–for anything
  2. Business model/pricing is the biggest challenge and needs constant tweaking.
  3. Failure is not bad–it just means you can cross that tactic off your list and stop wondering “What If?”
  4. SEO is the smartest marketing investment you can make.
  5. Google AdWords is a waste of money for B2B publishers with limited budget.
  6. The best editorial model is offshore researchers + onshore analysts/editors + automated tools.
  7. Best business model is subscription plus custom…but keep the custom simple and for subscribers.
  8. Keep your product and offer simple. Complexity = sales obstacles.
  9. Own your customer relationships. Channel partners (content aggregators) are nice to haves–not must haves.
  10. Scale doesn’t matter. Customers are discovering that quality trumps quantity.

Join Sharon 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.

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
Registration
Conference Program
Networking Opportunities
Speakers
Sponsors
Venue

 

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
Registration
Conference Program
Networking Opportunities
Speakers
Sponsors
Venue

 

Measured Progress

 We are excited about our partnership with the InfoCommerce Group to produce DataContent 2012, coming up October 9-11 in Philadephia. Below is a blog post by Russ Perkins the founder of InfoCommerce Group. 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!

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

Monitoring what’s going on with online start-ups is not only a great way for me to identify interesting new data-driven products and new market opportunities, it’s also a touchstone for assessing how the publishing industry is doing relative to the best and brightest online innovators. Here are just three recent examples, each interesting to me in a different way. Read more

Meet DataContent 2012 Speaker Gordon Anderson

Gordon Anderson

Gordon Anderson, VP, Content, InsideView

Meet a very well-connected data publisher, Gordon Anderson of InsideView.

Gordon will be speaking at DataContent and his mission there will be to show you how to turn data into intelligence. He’ll also explain how making your customers smarter can really pay off.

In the Knowing What You Don’t Know session, Gordon will explain how InsideView is turning the tsunami of online data into analysis that salespeople use to identify and connect to the most relevant prospects at the precise moment when their product or service is needed.

We’ve asked Gordon to be sure to explain how 25,000 different content sources, including social media and traditional editorial sources, are turned into real-time intelligent data that makes salespeople look – and work – a lot smarter.

“The opportunities presented by the rise of Big Data are both vast and inexorable. But for all the chatter about zettabytes and petabytes, Hadoop and Hive, an obvious fact is often overlooked: Bad data doesn’t become good just by becoming Big. As processing information becomes easier and cheaper, data accuracy will become more difficult and more valuable.

In fact, the same factors that have led to the rise of Big Data are also accelerating the pace of data decay. As the capacity of systems to process data expands, the range of data that is processed will grow in lockstep. At every point in that cycle, errors in the underlying content sets will be magnified.

The challenge of Big Data, then, is not just to harness greater processing power, but also to address the limitations and deficiencies of content creation and maintenance. The challenge of Big Data, in other words, is a question of Right and Wrong.”

Join Gordon 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
Registration
Conference Program
Networking Opportunities
Speakers
Sponsors
Venue

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…

______________________________________________________________________________________

This post was written by Nancy Ciliberti.

Google: Free Here, Paid There

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!

Google: Free Here, Paid There

Google may be a lot of things, but it’s certainly not boring. Just this week in fact, it did several interesting revenue model back-flips, changing one product to free and making another one paid. Read more.

——————————————————————————–

Russell Perkins is Founder & Managing Director, InfoCommerce Group Inc. Russell has over 20 years experience in all facets of the database publishing industry. He is the author of Directory Publishing: A Practical Guide, which is now in its fifth edition, and InfoCommerce: Internet Strategies for Database Publishers.