Striking It Rich With Rich Data

In 1859, in sleepy farm country near Titusville, Pa., a group of New York investors dug the world’s first oil well. Locals had known about the sticky black stuff for hundreds of years, occasionally using it to patch leaks or lubricate farm machinery, but mostly considering it a nuisance. Sometimes, when digging for water, they would strike oil instead—and promptly abandon the site.Like those farmers of old, there are publishers today who are sitting on a valuable, little-used asset, not considering that a little extra digging could yield enormous dividends. The product is accumulated information, which smart companies are repackaging and making available in new and creative formats. With an eye toward its usability by a target audience, raw information can be refined into that valuable commodity known as rich data.“The goal of any publisher is to leverage the content they already have in new ways. That’s really the definition of rich data,” says Barry Bealer, president and CEO of Philadelphia-based publishing consultancy Really Strategies.While fairly easy to grasp, the idea can be a challenge to implement. Publishers need to recognize the latent potential of the data they own and figure out how to use it well––finding the “killer app,” in techie-speak––before embarking on any major drilling project. “The biggest barrier to rich data application is a lack of understanding of what the real needs and interests of a particular audience are,” notes John Blossom, president and senior analyst at Shore Communications, a Westport, Conn.-based consulting firm.With oil, it wasn’t the substance that mattered as much as the realization that it could be used in new ways to solve new problems. Information providers today must do the same thing, or––as proven again and again in a world where becoming a publisher is as easy as registering a URL––someone will do it for them. “As more enterprise content gets more sophisticated about solving problems, as opposed to just presenting information, publishers need to become more capable of being problem-solvers as well, either in the context of their own online publication or by providing information that can be used by other publications or in other problem-solving contexts,” Blossom says.This means thinking primarily in terms of how people are using data in their workflow. For Reed Construction Data—part of Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier—the challenge was to tailor information to meet the day-to-day needs of the construction industry.“The traditional market for this kind of information was contractors who wanted to know what was available to bid on,” says Jim Haughey, chief economist at Reed Business Information. “We reposition this information, providing examples of how to use it for everyone from facility planners all the way through to real estate brokers.“The biggest piece is still people who want to know what jobs will be bid next week …,” continues Haughey, “but some people want to track the tenor of the market, and they don’t care about particular projects, so we summarize some of the … data.”Haughey says the information can be customized geographically to the county level, and it includes data on bids, the planning or construction phase of individual projects, and cost data on materials and labor. The information is mostly made available by subscription and can be delivered automatically to clients’ in-boxes. “You can buy a custom slice of that data or have access to a national database,” according to Donna Cahan, Web manager at Reed Elsevier.Bealer points to Editorial Products in Education, a nonprofit trade publisher, which has found success in packaging its data graphically by using state test data to create interactive maps on its Web site. Users can run selective searches customized to the type of data they’re seeking, and a new mapping tool allows users to compare graduation rates of every school district in the United States. Traditional editorial content is not necessarily lost in the flurry of all this electronic data. Haughey, who still writes articles for print and online publication, notes that rich data applications provide a way to enhance Reed Construction Data’s editorial material posted online. “Good content design is as important as the data itself,” notes Blossom. “Is it integrated into the editorial product so people will recognize it and use it as part of the editorial experience, or is it a bucket off to the side that people never … use?”Blossom cites Aviation Week, published by the Aerospace and Defense Division of The McGraw-Hill Cos., as a particularly good example of editorial-data integration. The rich data included on the Aviation Week Web site, on industry manufacturers and products, “creates a different sort of relationship with your audience, where it goes beyond the pure editorial product online and can become part of an enterprise workflow.” “Companies like McGraw-Hill and Reed Business Information have the resources and management outlook to dig deeply into rich data and enable as many publications as possible,” he observes. “The publishers that seem to benefit the most from it are the ones that have a broad enough infrastructure and management outlook that they are willing and able to invest in the infrastructure and acquisitions necessary to provide this depth of data.” None of which is to say that publishers of all types cannot benefit from rich data applications. Adaptability is key, according to Linda McCutcheon, senior vice president of e-media strategy and technology at Nielsen Business Media (formerly VNU Business Media), part of The Nielsen Co. Nielsen, owner of well-known entertainment-industry brands Backstage and Billboard, faced unexpected competition when new Web sites began capturing some of the online community looking for theater buzz, online forums and job postings. The company responded by building its Backstage.com Web site into a comprehensive resource for news, reviews, blogs, career advice, casting information and job postings.Such innovation often is inspired by those outside traditional publishing.“It may or may not be the person who manages the print product that can think of that new product idea,” Bealer points out. “People not as close to the data come up with a great idea because they’re the ones thinking outside the box.”New Web sites that pop up pioneering new ways to repackage data “often act as probably the best market research you can do,” McCutcheon says. “As their mission usually is ‘we’re going to give you a product or service that you probably didn’t realize you want,’ it’s always very instructive, and part of the Webisphere early-warning system. We watch these noble experiments with great interest.”Nielsen needed little outside prodding to recognize the potential of the vast amount of music data it possessed. “Our archives are rich beyond belief,” notes McCutcheon. Tapping into the enthusiasm of music lovers interested in song and artist rankings, industry news, history and trivia, the Billboard.com Web site combines multimedia entertainment, easy-to-use music searches and downloads. A sister site, Billboard.biz, offers subscription-based customized data packages and information delivery services for music-industry professionals. Utilizing the userWith its enthusiastic adoption of blogs and discussion boards, Backstage.com illustrates one of the more fascinating (and democratic) developments in rich data—the use of user-generated content that has its origin in “social media” such as blogs, online communities and wikis.“That type of content generated by a publication’s audience can turn into rich data,” Blossom confirms. He cites as his favorite example VerdictSearch.com (an American Lawyer Media product), which allows attorneys to post case and settlement information available to people looking for lawyers or firms involved in a particular type of litigation. “This idea that the audience can create rich data is a very powerful concept that is only beginning to be exploited effectively by many b-to-b publications,” he says.Another example is found at The Motley Fool Web site (Fool.com). The investor-information company set up a rich data service called CAPS, which Technical Lead Mark Kennedy calls a “community stock intelligence tool.” Web site users pick stocks, and the system aggregates the data into a stock-ratings system. The system tracks better-performing pickers, whose choices are given more weight. “By mining the knowledge and opinion of a large group of users, the good stocks bubble to the top,” he says. For obvious reasons, the service drives audience loyalty and enthusiasm (“It’s kind of a game,” Kennedy notes), while also generating a useful product that no other financial Web site has.In order to effectively monetize user-generated content, publishers must keep an eye on quality and find ways to integrate this information with other elements, McCutcheon says.“It will become a strata of digital product,” she says of user-generated content, “but it will be difficult to build a sustainable product (solely) on bass fisherman talking to other bass fisherman about the best places to catch large-mouthed bass.” Multi-dimensionality is key, stresses Blossom.“You need to recognize the different types of information that people in your community might be interested in, and not be afraid to pull in resources either on a license basis or an acquisitions basis,” he says.According to Blossom, it comes down to understanding the purpose of a publication in an electronic environment, which is to satisfy your audience. “Technology allows people to be satisfied in different types of modes,” he notes. “When they go from browsing mode to research mode, that’s one of the key points at which you need to be able to capture them with rich data.“The key is to ensure that the mind frame that brought you to the search engine keeps you at the site,” he says. “If rich data is there to explore, they will stay in that problem-solving frame of mind.” If you’re successful, you can create that ever-sought-after quality every Web publisher desires: stickiness. “If it becomes a habit, that’s a good rich data product,” Bealer says. James Sturdivant is an award-winning journalist and freelance writer based in Philadelphia.

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Striking It Rich With Rich Data

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