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InfoCommerce 2005: Connecting Quality
Content with Today's Professionals |
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14 November 2005 |
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Database and directory publishers assembled at this year's
InfoCommerce 2005 conference to trade insights on how to
create quality content, an objective that is taking on new
meaning in an era of user-driven content products. Today's
content quality is as much about being able to respond to
client needs uniquely and responsively as it is about I.T.-driven
process controls. Users are in the driver's seat for
defining what really makes a content service successful, a
fact that forces publishers to reach out to their audiences
in new and sophisticated ways. Today's content quality may
be in the hands of the user, but it beats spending tons on
second-guessing their needs. |
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This year's edition of the
InfoCommerce conference in Philadelphia, PA drew over
200 executives to hear many of the leading voices in database
and directory publishing. While printed content is still a
factor for the crowd that comes to this venue, it was present
this year mostly as a service springing out of businesses that
are learning how to survive and thrive in a world of Web-first
content. Online delivery is clearly both the present and
the future for database and directory publishers' profitability
worldwide. As a result content quality is becoming a much
broader and multidimensional characteristic of these services,
moving beyond traditional print-oriented quality control
processes. Content mined from Web pages is becoming more
mainstream as an important source of business information,
validated by users who are able to contribute significantly to
both the perception and the creation of content quality. Users
themselves increasingly contribute online to the core
content that provides the edge in creating a successful content
product. The connection between content quality and quality
audiences is tighter than ever as a result.
It's this ever-tighter connection between database suppliers
and audiences that is driving the success of both new and
established innovators in database publishing. Listening to
your customers used to mean focus groups, usability studies and
carefully cloaking new product releases before springing them
in big product launches. While these are still important
methods for database product development it is increasingly
important for database publishers to be able to move quickly
and incrementally to address content quality in response to
real-time analysis of Web site user statistics and direct
feedback from clients offered up online. The concept of
listening to customers with online ears is not new, but Web
technologies require database publishers to move from being
developers of content repositories to facilitators of their
value in response to very precise knowledge of what individual
users require to get value out of that content.
Looming over this shift to user responsiveness is the
enormous presence of Google and the emerging influence of
weblogs, which constantly invite users to consider new
alternatives to established relationships with publishers. Even
the most user-engaged content sources are challenged to keep up
with their competition in this content shopper's paradise,
increasing the need for content quality that can engage
audiences quickly and lastingly. In today's publishing the
perceived quality of your content is only as good as your last
click: after that, all bets are off.
On these themes the presenters at InfoCommerce offered some
key insights on building user-centric content quality. Here are
a few of the highlights from these presentations:
- Build your brand quality one user at a time.
Panelists from Hoover's, Factiva and Reed Business
Information highlighted the importance of building content
brands that are highly responsive to users who know they have
compelling alternatives from other sources on the Web for
business information. For Hoover's this means deep and
extensive investigation of what clients thought of their
brand and repositioning content in its free and subscriptions
services to emphasize the value of its original content
through a more focused user experience. For Factiva it's
about integrating your product into users' workflows on PCs
and Blackberries to get users business intelligence when and
where they need it in easily tailored forms. For Reed
Business information it's using search engines and other
online channels to draw people to their advertising that
complements breaking news, weblogs and community content
well-suited for building online relationships with readers.
In all these instances the brand is not just a marque at the
top of the page but a personal and intuitive relationship
that unfolds through the content itself.
- Enhance your users' own publishing. Content
contributed from professional users is turning out to be a
bonanza for publishers who can find the right business
models.
Jigsaw.com has built a rapidly growing database of more
than 1.7 million complete business contact records submitted
by users who are willing to input information in exchange for
access to the database. Users can earn access "points" by
successfully challenging the accuracy of an item, providing a
motivated front-line quality control. This is supplemented
with their own database QA efforts to ensure that users will
continue to be motivated by access to high-quality data. It's
not that old techniques for establishing data quality have
disappeared: they're simply in a new context, supporting
users who are increasingly motivated to be effective
publishers of quality content in their own right.
- Acknowledge the quality of user-driven search engine
traffic. Directory publishers oftentimes disparage the
quality of click-through advertising provided by search
engines, especially when they can provide a wider array of
advertising models such as pay-per-call to match the quality
of leads to sales activity. But as pointed out by David Jung
of
B2Blog.com in his conference presentation, when Google
can provide 27 times the traffic of
IQS
Directories and
ThomasNet
combined (7 percent of which is ad traffic) to an industrial
products site, it takes a lot of quality clicks to make up
the difference. Would that all of the clicks from directories
were so great: many wind up leaving users on home pages
rather than product pages and having to work their way
through oftentimes sub-par site navigation. Tack on Google's
recent addition of
analytics that allow AdWords advertisers to track the
correlation between visits and sales and the wake-up call to
directories providers is loud and clear: the days of
directories that aren't designed to deliver the highest
quality audience to the most effective sales processes are
numbered.
If quality is better than quantity, a great quantity of
quality is turning out to be the differentiator for database
and directory publishers who can leverage the scale and scope
of the Web's potential on a one-to-one basis with sophisticated
users. Those who can leverage users' self-interests and
propensity to publish are reaping some of the greatest rewards
from this user-driven quality drive. The database and directory
industry is being reborn in a newly cast image of
sophistication and responsiveness in the process of meeting
these challenges.
-
John Blossom
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