Let’s Talk Knowledge

Today Factiva announced some exciting enhancements to our business research and current awareness platform. For a quick overview, you can take a peak at the video below. In addition, I wanted to take a minute and give you some insight into the changes.

If you look at the changes, the focus was on helping people get more value out of information. There is no doubting that we live in an information economy today. The ability identify risk early, spot opportunities first, and run an efficient business in general depends very much on an organizations ability to access and manage information. But at a time when business intelligence built on information has become increasingly important, the challenges surrounding information are changing.

In the years since Factiva was launched, there has been a tremendous change in the information landscape. We’ve gone from a time of relative scarcity, where information was either hard to find, or hard to access, to a time of information abundance. Today, finding information isn’t the problem. Today information challenges have evolved, and become much more complex.

Instead of access to information, today the first challenge is getting just the information you need. With all of the content out there, finding signal in the noise can be difficult at times. Many of the enhancements we’ve made will help alleviate this problem. If you look at the snapshot feature, it’s about personalizing information to your needs. We’ve combined the power of our technology, with our industry expertise regarding information, to allow the information you need to monitor your business to be pushed to you. Whether it is hand selected content, or relevant information surfaced through our queries, hand crafted with love and years of experience, the Snapshot provides an always on view of your area of interest.

A second change, and one a result of the overabundance of information, is how we discover and navigate information. As we’ve seen from the evolution of the Facebook and Twitter news feed, people are relying less and less on search to discover information, and more and more on experts. Call it the Social effect if you want, I’ve discussed this before at SLA and other conferences. With our new Snapshot feature, we are giving users the ability to create and share Snapshots. This is actually a really big deal.

For information professionals, we’ve just given you an incredibly powerful way to help you keep your users informed. Until today, you were either limited to using email alerts/newsletters, or publishing widgets to your own portal site. Now, your users can consume these snapshots, which are powerful dashboards with visual and analytic tools and capabilities. Also, shortly after the launch of the Snapshot feature, we will be launching the companion iPad app. All of a sudden, you’ve got a complete mobile strategy for filtering and pushing information to your users.

For end users, the ability to create and share these snapshots with fellow users will promote a community of knowledge and information sharing, not unlike they experience in the Social world at places like Facebook and Twitter. Except with Factiva Snapshots, it is in an enterprise environment with trusted and authoritative content.

There are many other enhancements we are rolling out, in addition to the Snapshot feature and iPad app. An update to the UI of Factiva.com, will provide a fresh clean interface, placing the most important tools front and center for information professionals. Our commitment to the global information landscape continues, with additional Arabic content, and an Arabic interface. So, just to quickly summarize our upcoming enhancements are giving Factiva users benefits in a few key areas:

• Business intelligence and monitoring solution. A powerful dashboard to get the information you need, and the tools to analyze it, to help you make informed business decisions faster.
• A community platform for information exchange. Create and share dashboards with peers and colleagues, allowing an organization to take full advantage of the pockets of expertise and knowledge found throughout it’s structure.
• A mobile strategy.  An iPad app (in 9 languages!) that allows you access to just the information you need, where you need it, and when you need it.
• A comprehensive information distribution platform. For information professionals, we’ve just made it much easier for users throughout your organization to benefit from your expertise and talents, even when they are on the go.

We certainly not going to stop here. We have many more enhancements planned for the remainder of 2011. And probably the most important thing I’ve not mentioned yet, is that all of these enhancements are a result of your input and feedback. We’ve had untold numbers of customer conversations, focus groups, and analyst interviews in the past twelve months to get here. So a big Thank You!

Take a minute and check out the video, and get to know Factiva Today.

- Ken

Third in my Factiva how to series today focuses on how to help your company manage risk with Factiva. Risk management is something that there is no shortage of need or tools for. From credit and financial risks, to regulatory concerns, to managing a compliance program. All of these have very powerful platforms and solutions (some from Dow Jones, such as our Risk and Compliance solutions) that companies have deployed. Like many of the focuses in my How To series, Factiva is an incredibly important companion to these other platforms and solutions. In many ways, Factiva is a solution that not only provides a direct ROI, but can actually enhance the value of your investment in these other platform as well.

As with all of the How To series, I’m going to focus on the marketing department for this post. One of the things all marketing departments are concerned with is the reputation of the company and brand. In fact many companies today are using Factiva to help them monitor their brand today. But what about the suppliers and partners that your company does business with? As we have seen, a negative perception of a key supplier can have a tremendous risk to a companies reputation. See the example of Nestle from last year.

You can use Factiva to look for this type of potential risk, in much the same way you manage your brand today. It’s simply extending the line of sight of your monitoring. This can be a daunting task without the right tools, but luckily Factiva eases the burden.

The process is fairly simple, and straightforward. Set up a company list of your suppliers, and key business partners. You can then create a query that searches for news on these companies, and relevant risk related topics. For the uninitiated, Factiva processes every piece of content, and tags it with a code that describes what companies the content is about, and the subject matter of the content. This makes it easy to get only highly relevant, targeted results. There are several subject codes that you’ll want to be aware of as a marketer. Corporate Social Responsibility,  Risk News, Environmental News, Labor/Personnel issues are a few key ones. Of course depending on your industry, there will be other subjet codes and keywords that you’ll want to leverage as part of your query strategy.

The end result however, will be a highly targeted alert that will give you broader insight to the risks to your company’s reputation and brand. By the way, this is of course a great time to reach out to your colleagues in Supply Chain/Procurement and Partners/Alliances. In fact, they’d probably like to get the alerts too. Then you can be a hero for making them Factiva Smart.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Dow Jones offers another solution for this. If you want advance beyond the basic monitoring of reputation and brand risk, Dow Jones Insight offers a platform for in-depth analytics as well.

- K

I’ve decided to do a little how to series on Factiva. In all my conversations with our customers, I’ve come to realize while so many of you are experts, and probably know how the product works better than I do, there are a lot of ways to get ebenfit that companies are not taking advantage of. Today I want to talk about professional development.

As individuals, we spend so much time sifting through information to do our jobs better, sometimes we lose track of how to improve our professional skills along the way. Factiva is actually a great resource for this. Factiva is all about finding signal in the noise, and can help you get the information you need to improve your professional skills, with a minimal time investment.

‘m going to use a marketing professional in this scenario. Social is something that is changing the marketing profession. From the new social media sources you need to be aware of, to changing information consumption and discovery habits being adopted from the use of social networks, change is everywhere. For marketers, understanding social media, and how to get the most out of it, is a real challenge. Let’s take branding as a real concrete example, how does social media impact management of your brand? What are some of the techniques being successfullly used? Who are the companies that are doing it well.

In other words, as a marketer you want to understand what are the best practices for branding in the world of social media. Tough to get your arms around right? Well, maybe not with Factiva. As you hopefully know, we code every single piece of content that comes into our vast archive. These codes allow you to know precisely what an article is about. Some of the codes we have in Factiva that are relevant here: Branding and Best Practices. A really quick search using these codes, and the keywords “Social Media” will yield you about 5-6 articles per week (I know, I have one set up).

Set up an alert for these articles, log in and check them on Friday mornings, read one or two, and in about 15 minutes a week, you’re going to see a dramatic improvement of your knowledge in the area of Social Media Branding. Professional development is something many people I talk to feel is highly important, but daunting to do because of the time investment. Factiva can help you do it well, with a minimal amount of time.

Happy learning all!

- K

If you are in field marketing or sales ops, I’m willing to bet at least a dollar you’ve had a conversation with sales management this year about “Quality of leads.” Nothing seems to frustrate sales more than getting leads that end up taking up a fair amount of their time to follow up on, but ultimately lead nowhere. And you can’t blame them really, they get paid for what they sell, so poor quality in leads actually has a direct impact on their ability to earn a living.

There are plenty of systems out there to find leads today. Contact databases, mailing lists, company screening tools, low-wage interns, and so on. So finding a company or contact, while not as easy as it could be, really isn’t the problem. The problem is knowing if that prospect is going to be interested in your product or service. Really, the problem isn’t as much who today, but when? When is that prospect going to be interested in your service, and why? This is where the traditional mechanisms for lead generation tend to fall short.

Again, if you’re in marketing, you’ve got some sort of lead nurturing process to help you identify how interested a prospect may or may not be. But this takes a lot of time, and money, and is really hit or miss. Just because I work at Dow Jones, doesn’t mean I’m interested in any sort of content management system built for journalists for example.

This is where Factiva can become a powerful tool in the marketers lead generation toolbox. Factiva analyses it’s vast array of content to understand what every article is about, as well as what companies and people the article is about. This really unlocks the value of the information in the content, and allows you to identify the WHEN with respect to your prospects.

Let me explain. Let’s say you have a targeted list of companies in the Telecom space you want to sell your newest widget to. For arguments sake, let’s say your widget is a critical part of the infrastructure of a telecom company’s data center. Now, you can send emails, personalized mails, and make phone calls all day long to the companies on your list, but if they aren’t in the process of building a new data center, they are not a good lead.

Using Factiva, you can actually set up an alert, based on those companies, and be *notified* when they will be opening a new data center. All of a sudden, your lead has become highly qualified. Not only that, you’ll more than likely be able to determine when and why they will be opening the data center. This will allow your sales team to have a highly relevant, and engaging discussion with the prospect.

I think it goes without saying that the chances of success in this scenario, are much greater than the chances of a random phone call to a CIO at a telecom company, just because you have his contact info. Again, the WHEN is just as important, if not more, than the WHO when it comes to lead generation.

If you’d like more details on how to do this in Factiva, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me.

- K

I sit here at Louie Armstrong International airport, waiting for my flight back from SLA 2010. It was a great conference this year, and there seemed to be a lot of energy and enthusiasm, perhaps more so than last year. It’s possible this could have been a direct result of the Dow Jones Factini happy hours, but it is more likely from a sense of optimism the crowd had about what’s ahead.

From my perspective I did a few sessions this year on using Social Media for business research. I’d like to thank those in attendance (especially the brave souls who stood in the hall, or sat on the floor for my last session!). I had a lot of great conversations, and learned much from you all.

I wanted to quickly summarize the three key things that information professionals should be thinking about with respect to social media and social technologies in general.

1. Social as a research tool. A few key ways social can be used as a serious tool in your research toolbox:

• • There is a lot of great information in social media about companies, people, products, and industry topics.
  • Social is also a great way to find new sources, especially for niche topics, and private company info.

2. Social as a way to build your expert network. Social networks are about easily connecting people. Take advantage of the fact you have unprecedented access to expertise that previously you may not have even known existed, let alone had a way to connect with.

3. Social as a mechanism for customer communication. People are rapidly becoming accustomed to having content pushed to them, and curated for them by experts. Information professionals are uniquely positioned to help (and shine) in this model.

Remember that as a source of information, social media should be considered as just another source. Information that you find should be verified and validated, just as you would information from mainstream media. As far as social technologies go, don’t wait to long to embrace them.  Social is rapidly causing a fundamental shift in the way we communicate and share knowledge, and discover and navigate information. The sooner you begin to build your network, and communicate with your customers, the better off you will be positioned as adoption and usage of these technologies and networks continues to explode.

- Ken

A couple weeks ago I participated on a panel at the 2010 Buying & Selling eContent conference in Scottsdale, AZ. First, let me send my compliments to the organizers of this great conference. It was a really interesting and engaging single-stream program, and a great reminder of the value in getting out of the office once in while and connecting with smart people who think passionately about your business and industry.

The theme of the conference was “Reigniting the Content Economy”, and as you can see from the conference program, there were a lot of great sessions on how to develop content that engages your users and deal with the changing forces in our industry. Unsurprisingly, then, there seemed to be a pervasive theme running across all of the sessions around the question of how users will react to the attempts of a number of publishers to erect or reinstate paywalls around content.

My own panel session was called “Whose Eyeballs Are They Anyway?”, and was a lively discussion between myself, Patrick Spain and Mark Walker around the tension between content creation, content aggregation, the link economy, and where the value lies for endusers. Charlie Terry did a great job moderating the discussion. And although we tried to focus the conversation on the issues around the link economy and free news aggregation, the questions about the economic value of news itself, and whether news organizations who are trying to extract direct revenue for their products are foolhardy to do so, kept creeping in.

Obviously, at News Corp. we’ve been out front in the idea that good journalism should often be paid journalism (this is probably a good place to note that I am here offering my own opinions, and not representing any official position of either News Corp., or my employer, Dow Jones), and we’ve taken a lot of heat for it. With some suggesting that we’re challenging the very values of Journalism itself.  Perhaps I don’t understand the premise behind the notion that putting our content behind pay walls somehow challenges the values of Journalism or, worse still, leads to the end of Journalism as we know it.

To my mind, our experience of the last decade–in which it became conventional wisdom that all information wants to be free and that nobody would ever be willing to pay for content again–was the anomoly that challenged the values of journalism, not the other way around. Sure, the world of journalism today has changed (e.g., the emergence of freemium, niche microsites, content linking and free news aggregation) , but that’s not to say the model we currently have is sustainable.

Prior to the advent of the Web, traditional journalism has always existed with a paywall, even if that was the newstand or home-delivery price of your favorite newspaper, magazine, journal or newsletter. And people have always been willing to pay for quality content, even when free alternatives existed. Even in the recent past, just because you could hear or see news on your radio or television for free (albeit subsidized by advertising), you wouldn’t necessarily cancel your various paid content-subscriptions. If you valued specific content because it provided you unique value in either quality, form or channel, you were willing to pay for it.

Of course, none of this means that our media andscape hasn’t dramatically changed. And of course, many of these changes have been for the better. The advent of real-time news through channels like Twitter, the expansion of community-generated content via the blogosphere, and the lowering of the overall cost of entry in our industry have made things richer and more dynamic for all of us. These innovations have further democratized the publishing space and often with dramatic consequences, as we witnessed in the Iranian elections. We should be be embracing these changes whole-heartedly, as both publishers and consumers of news (and at Dow Jones, I think we’ve done a pretty good job of doing so).

But these changes have also greatly increased noise for news consumers and challenged the economics of our business. As online advertising revenue alone has proved to be unable to support the high cost of rich news generation activities and the death of print classifed advertising drained newspapers of some of their most important revenue, many newspapers have been unable to survive. In addition, the rush by many news organizations to feature their otherwise paid content for free on the Web created a false economy. The perception that quality, reported news was a cheap commodity spread, even as the producers of that content were going broke providing it. A push to move to an entirely free news model, or one mostly driven by community-generated content and citizen journalists, would lead to the eventual loss of things I believe most news consumers take for granted and rely upon: foreign bureaus reporting on high-level government sources, extended development and reporting on important long form stories, source cultivation, fact checking, etc. All these are a by-product of professional journalism with an adequately resourced news organization standing behind it.

Some have argued that the emergence of a highly linked content world has dramatically changed how we practice journalism, and I would agree with that. However, the existence of our highly linked content environment isn’t threatened any more by the existence of paywalls around some content then it will be by the eventual financial collapse of many of the major news providers if a partial paid-content model can’t be made to work.

So how do we adapt to this environment? Actually, I think we at Dow Jones & News Corp. are a pretty good model for how to do so: (1) ensure that the content you provide provides real and unique value to your users, and then (2) steer the commercial model for news production back to an economically sustainable model–which means a mix of free, advertising supported and paid-content. None of this is to say that all content providers will or should demand a paywall system for their content. Each publisher will have to decide if their content provides enough unique and demonstrable value that users will then be willing to pull out their wallets and pay up.

Either way, companies like News Corp. are challenging accepted wisdom around things like whether giving all your content to Google is necessary for survival or that all content should be free. This kind of experimentation is good for all of us in the publishing industry, and as Richard Hull, President of Blowtorch Media & Entertainment, noted in one of the early sessions at BSeC10, what’s too often missing in traditional print media is a willingness to experiment.

Our Factiva aggregation business is another model that’s been both historically successful and we think still has a strong future. A paid aggregator like Factiva helps publishers monetize their content and reinforces the value of the content being licensed, while also providing real value to the user by helping them cut through the noise of the Web and search or track news against a sub-set of higher-quality, trusted sources. In the end, a paid aggregation model like Factiva, or some other way of connecting the paywalls of multiple, competing publishers will probably required in order to maintain the kind of dynamic, linked content environment we’ve all come to value.

Most of these aren’t new questions, or new tradeoffs, just new inputs and a new framework in which to operate. Paid content has always been a part of the traditional journalism, and I think a critical part of keeping the world of journalism both vibrant and healthy.

Ryan (@ryanpwarren)

There has been an extremely interesting, yet nascent, trend in the information industry over the past 12 months. It’s a trend that’s been enabled by new technologies, forward thinking, and good old fashioned common sense. There has been a lot of effort put forth to combine the tools and platforms that help users analyze and discover data from internal systems, with those that access content from outside the firewall.

The combination of course make sense. Probably the best way of explaining what I mean is by example. For the last decade companies have been investing in Business Intelligence platforms that help them analyze information from their internal ERP/CRM systems and the like. This allows, for example, someone to get analysis on a customer, how much they spend with a company annually, and how often they may call customer service for product support. Sophisticated BI tools can even begin to draw correlations between the number of calls in a given period, and the increase or decrease in spend from that customer, based on previous patterns.

Now, the ERP/CRM/BI vendors are looking to add more value (and grab more share of wallet) to the reports and analysis by integrating information from outside the enterprise. So in the previous example step one may be as simple as adding current news about a customer to the analysis. More sophisticated platforms are looking at using external data, such as stock price or EPS, as part of the equation when predicting future spend.

From an end user perspective this is extremely powerful. It really does allow someone to look at their customer with a holistic viewpoint. Internal data alone can never tell a complete story. External news and information fails to take your relationship with the customer into account. Bringing them together provides a powerful context.

There are a few implications of this trend. First, a new eye is going to be turned towards the analysis of unstructured data. The large vendors have gotten very adept at analyzing structured data from a database. But few companies have exceled at doing true analysis on data in a variety of formats, from a variety of sources.

The second implication is how external information will be sourced by organizations. Today external information purchasing is generally the purview of the corporate library or knowledge management center. As these new platforms emerge, IT will begin to identify, and drive, more and more of the purchasing of external content. Their requirements for purchasing will be different than today as well. More attention will be paid to delivery format and data quality than will be paid to the accessibility of the information. IT will need to get content in standard, easy to parse and consume formats, and since the information will be put in from of much larger parts of the enterprise, information quality will get more scrutiny.

One of the challenges that will present itself will be the discovery of the appropriate sources of external content. While Librarians are very well aware of the most reliable, accurate, and timely sources of information for an industry or topic, IT professionals are not. Publishers that can understand how their content can be consumed in the context of existing ERP/CRM/BI platforms will have an advantage as they can market themselves appropriately.

There have been many recent announcements from major players like IBM, Oracle, and SAS. Another interesting development has been the emergence of Data as a Service. Solutions like Microsoft’s Dallas are making it easy for developers to discover, subscribe, and integrate content from premium (AP, Infogroup) and free (Data.gov, undata) sources.

I think it is an exciting and rapidly blossoming opportunity to provide business intelligence in context to users throughout the enterprise. If executed well, it can all be done within the context of the user’s existing workflow which bodes well for user adoption. Now, when you combine this trend with the collaboration and communication possibilities provided by Social Networking, you can begin to see the knowledge worker of the future will have insight into business decisions that we only dream of today.

- Ken

A lot has been happening recently in the realm of Social. Major announcements from Twitter and Facebook over the past two weeks are sure to have implications beyond what we can conceive right now. The popularity of the two sites alone are growing in unheard of percentages with a combined user base of over 500 million.

One of the most interesting things that is happening as a result of this is how traffic is being directed on the web. More and more these social networking sights are actually driving traffic to major web properties. In the case of USA Today for example, social networking sites are in fact driving 6X more traffic than Google (full report from Gigya can be found here http://bit.ly/c8HLDA – free registration required).

I think this is actually a beginning of a fundamental shift in the way people discover and navigate information. Rather than relying on an empty search box to direct you, people are relying on their friends, colleagues, and other experts to guide them. This really shouldn’t be surprising. Before Google convinced us all that search was the best way to get to the information you need, we all relied on our networks much more heavily in order to gather and analyze information. If you were looking for competitive intelligence, the first thing you’d do is pick up the phone and talk to a sales rep, or a customer, or an industry analyst (not saying you CI professionals don’t still do this btw!).

But Search seemed so convenient. It was always there, and easy to use. People could be more self-reliant. In some ways, Search was an improvement. But the reality is that Search is also very inefficient. Depending on the research you look at, we see that people using web search engines fail to find what they are looking for anywhere from one-third to one-half of the time. But as the amount of information online became more and more vast, it seemed like Search was the only solution. The reality is we search because we have to, not because we want to.

Until the rise of the social networks. Easy to use and prolific, these sites are helping turn the web from a network of documents, to a platform that connects people. And a platform that not only connects people, but removes the friction involved with communication between people.

Now we are starting to see the beginning of how these social networks can be so much more than Search. Need to find something, as your network. Chances are someone you know has had the same or similar question and can guide you to their research or even analysis. Not sure what you are looking for, let your trusted network of experts tell you what is important around any given topic. This is why these sites are beginning to overtake Search when it comes to directing traffic online.

There is a lot more to discuss and understand about this topic. This post could get very lengthy if I tried to even scratch the surface. I’ll leave you with this thought though. Search will have a place for many years to come of course. However sooner rather than later, our ability to find the information we need will be more influenced by the power and reach of our networks, than our ability to craft elegant queries for the big white search box.

My advice to anyone today is to begin to understand these new tools and platforms. And to more importantly begin to build your networks on them. The investment you make today will be well rewarded in the near future. IMHO

- Ken

Trade shows have always played an important role for businesses looking to showcase new products, stay current on industry trends, and meet other professionals in their field.  As a tool for business development, trade shows are indispensable for generating leads, developing brand awareness, and networking.   For many reasons, trade shows seemed an almost irreplaceable aspect of the business world.

That is, until now.  “Virtual Trade Shows” are the online equivalent of an industry conference.  These events mimic the look and feel of being at an event in person, by giving users an interactive virtual world to participate in.  Some virtual conferences even provide attendees with an online avatar that can be navigated from booth to booth using the mouse and arrow keys on a keyboard, similar to a video game.  The event organizers have the flexibility to “host” the conference in (presumably) any venue they see fit, giving participants the perception that they are in a traditional convention center, on the top floor of a swanky hotel, or perhaps even on the beach in Barbados.  At each virtual booth, representatives from an organization communicate with attendees via video conference or chat rooms, run product demos, and share files with guests, all in real-time.  At the conclusion of the event, a log of attendee information is sent to the booth sponsor, detailing participants’ activities, downloads, and most importantly, their contact information.

These virtual trade shows have increased in popularity dramatically in the last few years, and for good reason.  With the economic downturn, corporations have seen travel and advertising budgets cut drastically.  The total cost (in both time and money) of sending employees to a trade show is quite high, and a virtual event can make a great low-cost alternative.  For similar reasons, virtual trade shows have a large appeal to small and medium size companies.  Traditional trade shows, and especially high profile ones, have a very high barrier to entry.  The costs of sponsoring and manning a booth at a leading industry trade show could easily run an organization tens of thousands of dollars.  A booth at a virtual trade show generally costs only a few thousand, and admission for participants is usually free.  Many companies have even begun to tout the environmental benefits of virtual events, stating the adverse affects of lengthy travel, keeping the lights on in large conference rooms, and waste reduction as reasons to consider a virtual event.

After taking a look at demos from a few of the companies (ie ON24 and GoExhibit), I must say I am very impressed.  What really grabbed my attention first were the lengths that some of these companies had gone to in order to make the event seem realistic and “in-person”.  The events were visually appealing, and made you feel as if you were at a bustling event, replete with the noises of busy crowds and visual representations of company representatives.  Webcasts and presentations were hosted in a theatre-style environment, where presenters could take questions from the audience in real-time, and follow up with participants afterwards in chat rooms.  Some of the most interesting features about company booths were the ability to upload documents, brochures, and contact information that booth-goers could review, and then download to take with them.  There seemed to be a lot of value in having presentations and handouts available for immediate download, as well as sharing LinkedIn profiles in place of business cards.

There are some potential downsides as well.  It appears at first glance that there is no real way to distinguish your booth from next, something that any trade show regular could tell you is a critical component in driving traffic to your booth.  In most of the demos that I tried, booths tended to have a generic look and feel, the only differences appearing to be the company logo on the outside, and of course the materials being shared on the inside.  I also feel that in a virtual environment, it may be difficult to qualify the attendees to an event as well.  Whereas an organization might find the budget to send a handful of business development or sales representatives to an in-person event, virtual events might not have such strict standards, and be open to anyone with an internet connection. Booth owners could potentially find themselves spending a lot of time speaking with half-interested parties, missing out on the chance to talk to senior level attendees and sending their sales teams bad leads after the event.  Finally, although it may seem like a small grievance, the absence of crowded auditoriums, keynote speakers, and even giveaway promotional items can make you leave the event feeling as if you have had a less tangible experience.

I doubt that these Virtual Events will ever fully replace traditional face to face events in the future, no matter how sophisticated they become.  Although I believe these events can be very beneficial to vendors and participants alike, there is simply no substitute for the power of face to face communication.  As one executive described to USA Today about his recent virtual trade show networking experience: “There were no virtual free drinks. There is some truth that you want people to be in close proximity.”

Have you been to any of these events? Let me know about your experience!

-RJ

Today,  April 1, 2010, is a big day in the United States (and although I am not referring to April Fools’ Day, it still remains one of my favorite holidays).  Today is, of course, “Census Day”, the official kick-off date of the 2010 United States Census project.  The 2010 Census is one of the largest primary research projects ever undertaken, and is likely the most extensive measure of a population to date.  Largely administered via mail surveys and individual interviews, the census takes place every 10 years to measure different aspects of the US population, and is used to help determine everything from municipal budgets to the number of seats a state occupies in the United States House of Representatives.

The US Census Bureau estimates that the total cost of the 2010 Census, including materials, staffing, and administration, will come close to approximately $14.5 billion, over 3 times the cost of the previous census that took place in 2000.   Of course, this increase in price is directly related to the dramatic growth in the population of the US, but I am willing to bet that an increased technology and advertising budget might have something to do with it as well.

With the large changes in population and demographics over the last 10 years came another noticeable trend in the US population as well.  The number of internet users in America has nearly tripled since the date of the last census, and with that, the Census Bureau has been quick to adopt new technologies and communication strategies.  Most notably, the US Census Bureau has developed a fairly large social media marketing campaign to promote this year’s census.  Their Youtube Channel hosts promotional and educational videos (some are actually quite entertaining), describing the value of the census, and answers to frequently asked questions.  The Director’s Blog is written by the Census Bureau Director, Robert Groves, and discusses upcoming events, important announcements, and tries to add a personal touch to the large organization.  Moderators of the blog also respond comments on the posts, and provide answers to questions that readers may have.  Of course, no modern advertising campaign could exist without a Facebook Page or Twitter Account, and the Census Bureau is no exception.

Despite the various Web 2.0 updates to a process that is over 200 years old (the first US census was administered by Thomas Jefferson in 1790), perhaps the biggest changes in this year’s census are happening to the internal systems of the Census Bureau and the ways in which they are using modern technologies to keep track of the US population.  Prior to the distribution of this year’s census, census employees used mobile GPS devices to mark every single household in the country (as described in this video).  The specific coordinates of each location are stored in a centralized system and are used to track household responses, assign staff to specific locations, and keep track of surveys that have not been submitted.  More interestingly, these devices will play an important role in team communication and information sharing during the lengthy data collection process that is about to begin.  Census managers will able to get real-time updates on the progress of their employees, track employee hours on the field, and communicate quickly with their teams.  The mobile devices will also be utilized by census staff to share information about their progress with each other so that they are not duplicating efforts, and provide them with access to internal systems and resources while they are on the field.

I am looking forward to seeing the results of the 2010 Census, and I have to say that I am really impressed with the government’s adoption of new technologies and communication channels.  Maybe in 2020, census surveys will finally be available online!

-RJ