InfoInnovation

Using Social Media to Increase [B2B] Revenues

 

If you’re interested in social media in a business and professional context (and you must be since you’re reading this blog) then it’s probably worth your time to watch this recorded video of last week’s SIIA Brown Bag session on the business drivers of social networking. 

A good cross-section of perspectives was represented,: AOL’s Platform A, incorporating social media into a broad online advertising mix; IT Toolbox, an established and profitable B2B social media provider recently by Corporate Executive Board (as noted here); Spiceworks, a new company serving IT needs in small and medium businesses; and McGraw-Hill’s Construction Information Group, experimenting successfully with social media as an extension of its traditional industry publishing roles.

While all of the panelists had valuable things to say, to me the most interesting remarks were those of Jay Hallberg, co-founder of Spiceworks.  Originally launched in 2006, Spiceworks IT Desktop and Community is a free, advertising supported set of tools for managing IT assets (What do I have? Is it working? How do I fix it?”) and a robust content-generating community (much like IT Toolbox but for smaller shops) that started out as a “feature” and has become a core element (“Which tools? Who is an expert? What information do I need and where can I find it?  What products should I buy?”).  

Spiceworks seems to be evolving as a network management dog that is increasingly wagged by its B2B social media tail. And it is already partnering globally with some of the biggest names in IT media.  This can serve as an inspiration to B2B and professional publishers, but also a warning: content providers are not the only players who can aggregate and foster valuable online communities.  With the applications software industry (including Google Apps and much more to come from Microsoft and many others) showing that SaaS can work on an advertising model, the business media and information space is going to become a lot more crowded.

The best of the rest from Infocommerce 2007

A selection of other noteworthy presentations from last week’s conference:

An impressive presentation was given by Robert Battista of Doctor Evidence, a new healthcare publisher focused on making medical evidence more accessible to both consumers and professionals. From a library of full text and abstracts describing 4000 clinical studies on the top 300 drugs, it extracts key data elements in order to populate tabular reports comparing the relative effectiveness of alternative drugs for specific conditions. The data can be “drilled down” to the source studies, and is also “distilled” into a summary of effectiveness. Revenue channels being developed include doctor portals, OTC portals, a TV show being developed with WB, industry/manufacturer portals (e.g. GlaxoSmithKline), direct to consumer portals, payor portals, and health software companies.

Mailpound.com has become the highest ranked travel-trade website (with 2.3M pageviews/month). It serves travel agents and tour operators with information on travel offers, and has also developed an online, custom-publishing application for travel brochures. An excellent example of a content workflow solution: it provides direct to consumer delivery of personalized print and electronic brochures, with targeted marketing messages. President Bob Maier noted that the e-brochures have an especially robust value proposition, enabling reduced supplier costs, dynamic pricing of travel offers, targeted marketing by travel agencies, results tracking, and enhanced probability of online booking.

Those of us who may have been skeptical of the premise behind Jigsaw – that businesspeople and professionals would share their business cards, and that the resulting pool of information would be of sufficient value to compete with other “people” databases – have to acknowledge that the company seems to have won its bet. According to CEO Jim Fowler, it now has 6.8 million contacts in its database, growing by 10,000 per day. Members gain credits for correcting errors as well as sharing new contacts. Two differentiators from other people-finding services: much deeper mid-level contacts; and 55% of the contacts include a direct phone number. Jigsaw introduced two new services at the conference – an offering for corporate accounts (Jigsaw team), and a data cleansing service (Jigsaw Clean).

Another people-finder story, ZoomInfo, had $12M in sales last year, mostly from 2500 subscription customers. It is just now beginning to monetize traffic to the site, with 35M pageviews/month (and the fastest growing network in the US with 276% annual growth in traffic according to Nielsen Netratings). COO Bryan Burdick described how a premature jump from recruiting to sales intelligence applications created some missteps, but a re-launch should yield $2M in sales this year, helped by a relationship with Salesforce.com via the latter’s AppExchange program. Next stop: a vertical search model a la Business.com.

Judy Luther of Informed Strategies provided an update on Project Counter, the initiative to bring cross-publisher consistency to the measurement of online information usage in the STM academic and corporate marketplaces. After five years, there are now 10,000 journals from 70 vendors participating. Librarians are beginning to derive cost-per-use metrics, and relying upon usage data to drive renewal decisions; and publishers such as ACS, IEEE, and Project MUSE are developing usage-based pricing models. And, perhaps most interestingly, there is growing support for the concept of a “usage factor” based on usage behavior, as a complement to the “impact factor” measuring author (and journal) influence in the scientific community, as pioneered by Thomson’s ISI. A full report on this initiative is here.

A presentation by Fred Dixon of Toronto-based Serence provided an appropriately B2B / enterprise desktop view of widget technology and applications, with an emphasis on widgets as self-installing, branded desktop applications, and client examples including Reed Business, Wolters Kluwer, and Staples. The value proposition in this context: easier access to data users care about, in order to differentiate services based on ease of use and timeliness of delivery; driving more traffic back to the destination site/portal; enabling users to customize content applications to their workflow.

Hugh Owen, president of Owen Media Partners, provided a fairly stunning example of turning around a small, old-school publisher of business and industrial directories (e.g. McCrae’s Blue Book). In three years the company has gone from 1M to 100M page views, and 100,000 users to 50 million users, with a 20-fold increase in online revenues, a two-fold increase in offline revenue, and 400% overall revenue growth. How? 1) Leverage assets to work together in “clickstream continuity” by removing registration barriers, removing brochureware, making databases browseable, and leveraging brands via link partnerships to drive Google rankings; 2) Focus on the user experience and let Google do the marketing; 3) Set realistic traffic goals for each brand and monetize with premium display ads, Adsense, ad networks (including GlobalSpec and the new Reed Partner Network), and introduce new subscription products.

Two workflow integration stories from different perspectives, both involved partnering with Salesforce.com: Dow Jones Wealth Manager, an impressive investment advisor workflow integration of Dow Jones news resources (another instance of AppExchange, or, alternatively a web service to internal platforms); and Verticals on Demand, a “new kind of CRM business,” based on enabling CRM products that are loaded with complete, accurate contact data from day one. In the initial vertical, it is providing accurate data on doctors, drug performance, shipment data, formularies, payors for use by Pharma sales teams – reselling Salesforce.com as part of the service.

Thanks to Russell, Megan, and Roxanne at Infocommerce Group for another successful and highly informative conference!

 

Business-to-Business User-Generated Content

My friend Joachim Bartels asked me to contribute regularly to the monthly newsletter of the new, global trade association he's successfully launched, the BIIA.  Last month, I skimmed the surface of the B2B media / business information "convergence."  This time, prompted by some recent conversations, a really useful recent SIIA Brown Bag session, and observations from two somewhat-related recent engagements, I offered the following:

B2B Social Media and User-Generated Content: How Will It Be Monetized?

As a central element of glamorous consumer-focused social media like MySpace, Facebook, and Second Life -  and probably the most readily identifiable Web 2.0 attribute - user-generated content (UGC) is getting a lot of attention in B2B media and information services. The excitement is contagious and understandable. Still, there are reasons to question social media's value and importance for providers of more professionally-produced and consequential content to businesspeople and professionals. On the media side, do advertisers want to pay for visibility on UGC pages, with their (typically) more untrammeled opinions? The potential for unfortunate juxtapositions (the chief limitation, within the B2B world, of Google Adsense and similar search-enabled advertising networks) could be great. And do the customers and users of subscription-based information services want to see un-edited and/or –verified material adjacent to, or integrated with, premium content? In my view, the answers are “yes,” and “yes.”  Social media, defined as the sum of the ends and means of blogs, wikis, matching, tagging, polling, conferencing, collaborative search, and virtual worlds, is going to be a very big deal in B2B.

Attention is the trump card in 21^st century media, and the attention of the business reader/user will be drawn increasingly to existing and new social networks (of peers, partners, customers, experts, suppliers and the like) as critical and "always-on" information sources. There are early examples, like IT Toolbox, of very profitable, online advertising-supported aggregators of user-to-user advice and comment. Many established trade publishers are successfully monetizing UGC-based traffic.  This is compelling, even at run-of-site rates, given that most B2B trade publishers’ online revenue growth is at present limited only by the amount of inventory (i.e., traffic quantity and quality) available to sell.  Advertisers and media measurement providers are also recognizing how UGC contributes to important audience-engagement metrics like session length, frequency of visits, and depth of content interaction.

Among the chief publisher challenges will be the ability to maintain a high quality media environment by nurturing community - while policing the merit, relevance, and appropriateness of users’ contributions.  In the subscription world, the smartest, most capable publishers will deploy specialized approaches to organizing “raw” UGC (following pioneers like Nielsen Buzzmetrics and Newstex Blogs-on-Demand) to create must-have information for industry audiences both broad and narrow.  Social media extensions of more traditional sources of business information and intelligence (e.g., the Hoovers “Connect” Service with social networking partner Visible Path; and Generate, Inc., a start-up that Red Herring described as “LinkedIn meets Factiva meets Hoovers”) provide another promising model.  Social media-intensive special interest areas show potential to generate uniquely credible quantitative data on product awareness, interest, ownership, and sentiment.

From SIGs to listservs to Web 2.0, The Well to AOL to Amazon, online communities and user-generated content have always provided much of the information liquidity needed for successful online destinations.  The emerging “Web 2.0” business models for monetizing community content and connections represent a fresh opportunity for B2B media and information providers to capture a greater share of new value creation in digital information.

What do you think?