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

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

Although we try to keep this blog focused on interesting or thought-provoking items impacting the Knowledge Management space, every once in a while we all need to toot our own horn, and this time I’ll do it because of how proud we are that Factiva.com has won the 2010 CODiE Award for Best Content Aggregation Service for the 2nd year in a row! Another DJ product, Dow Jones Investment Banker, also won for Best Online Professional Financial Information Service. It’s a big accomplishment for us, and we’re proud because it’s validation of the hard work we keep putting into making this the world’s best business news and reseach solution.

More importantly, however, it’s the continual feedback, inspiration and general prodding from our thousands of customers and million+ users that keeps us on the right track. Among the enhancements we’ve put into Factiva.com, just in the last year, include our new Concept Explorer, Discovery in Factiva Alerts, Dow Jones Idea Share, Factiva Workspaces, Factiva content podcasting, and automated translation for many sources (English to Spanish, French, Italian, German, Russian, Chinese–and those languages back to English).

It’s also a good reminder that, even though we have a lot of exciting new initiatives that have recently or soon will be coming down the pike, solutions like Factiva.com still play an important role in the knowledge management landscape.

Thanks again to all of our users!

- Ryan

As I mentioned previously, Twitter is becoming a more relevant source for competitive intelligence. Not necessarily as a standalone source, but a nice complement to traditional sources. One of the great things about Twitter is the number of third party tools that have been developed to help you get the most out of the service. In this post, I wanted to share some thoughts on how I use TweetDeck, one of my personal favorites, for CI.

Just to be clear, I’m not trying to give an all encompassing tutorial of TweetDeck. If you’d like one of those, there are plenty of good ones out there. What I am trying to do is give some insight on how the tool can help you filter the huge amount of content flowing through the Twitter service to get information that is relevant for your competitive intelligence purposes.

There are a couple of basics when it comes to using TweetDeck. First is the concept of columns. Columns are a way to get different views of the the information streaming from Twitter. There are a lot of ways to filter a TweetDeck column. As in my last post, I’ll break it down by three different categories: People, Companies, Topics/Products.

I’ll start with people. Following people on Twitter recently got easier with the advent of Lists. You can create a list in Twitter of the people that you want to follow. These of course can include executives from a company you’re tracking, people who often comment on a company or topic your tracking, etc. Once your Twitter lists are created, TweetDeck can quickly create a column based on one of them. You can also create a column in TweetDeck based on a search. With respect to people, you can simply search for the @ mention of the user (for example @marcbenioff). This will allow you to see the things people are saying to a particular person on Twitter, and a great way to understand what topics a person is discussing or directed towards that person by the masses on Twitter.

For companies the process is much the same as people. You can create a list in Twitter that follows the people, products, and company feeds associated with a particular company. For example a Twitter list for SalesForce might include @marcbenioff, @salesforce, @joywang (social media analyst that often comments on salesforces adoption of social media). You may also want to create a column that is based on a search, again using Salesforce as an example you may want to create a column based on hashtags and or keywords (“#salesforce OR salesforce”). This will get you all the other mentions of a company name.

The same process used for companies can be followed for products or topics. Find the people that often talk about a particular product or topic, as well as create a search for mentions of the product name or topic.

Once you have your columns created in TweetDeck, you can now start using some of the powerful tools and analytics that that are part of the solution. At the bottom of each column in TweetDeck there is a row of buttons. One of my favorites is the “Cloud” button. By clicking this, you can quickly get a cloud tag of the most popular things being mentioned in that column. That includes keywords, links, twitter usernames, and hashtags. Great way to do some high level analytics and get a quick picture of what you need to know about what is happening right now.

Next is the “Filter” tag. This will allow you to filter a column by text, time, source, or name. For example, we could filter the SalesForce product column by the word “performance”, allowing you to see anything related salesforce.com performance.

There are also options to mark everything in the column as seen, thereby cleaning up the column entirely, or just cleaning up the entries you have actually seen.

These are just some of the ways TweetDeck can help Twitter become a more useful tool for competitive intelligence. Just to reiterate, I think Twitter is a great part of any CI monitoring strategy. Especially with respect to the conversation that is currently happening around the people, companies, and products or topics you are following.

If you have any other helpful hints with respect to TweetDeck, please do share!

- Ken

The analyst firm Outsell published an interesting report (you’ll find it here. Sorry about the paywall, but we in the premium content biz have to hang together …  ) this week on the narrowing of the technological generation gap in the enterprise. Interesting, because it indicates that the three generational groups we now see coexisting in the workplace (Millennials, Generation X & Baby Boomers) are now converging in their use of technology and level of information savvy. As the report notes, “It is [now] not safe to generalize about younger people vs. older people when it comes to information habits and preferences.”  Their analysis concludes, in other words, that most workers—regardless of age—are using capabilities like Web searching, information alerting, email and mobile solutions in about the same way.

I agree with Leigh Watson, the report’s author, that this is good news for enterprises, as it means that we can ease up on some of the handwringing we’ve all been going through lately about how to reconcile these seemingly disparate information technology users internally, and how those of us in the information solutions business can create products to meet all their needs. As the report concludes, the problem seems to be taking care of itself. Right?

Well, maybe partially, but I think there’s an aspect of this gap that still exists, and is even more important for us close, and that’s the different ways in which Millennials (who, as Brigitte noted a couple of weeks ago, are newly entering the workforce today) approach knowledge sharing as an integral part of both their personal and professional lives. Speaking broadly, this generation of users has tightly integrated social networks into their daily lives, and they’re often using those networks not only to socialize, but to gather knowledge. They do it through peer-to-peer sharing via a community rather than through a solo hunting and gathering activity—which can mean a diminished reliance on traditional research tools. Ken referred to this as ‘Social Intelligence’ when he wrote about it back in April.

It‘s an example of The Strength of Weak Ties, and how finding connections outside your own area best stimulates innovation. Leveraging large social networks of weak ties to share and collect information changes the way people gain knowledge. Rather than finding and synthesizing vast amounts of information, they collaborate with subject matter experts, and then validate and extend what they have already learned. This has profound implications for us information providers, who will need to find ways to integrate with and into the social networks, or perhaps more importantly, to leverage the underlying capabilities and standards developed by the networks, to maintain their presence in front of potential users.

It could also indicates a perhaps more profound change under way in user behavior that is an outcome of both the social networking and self-serve information markets. That is: a move away from the notion that research is an activity that is best built on lessons of the past, toward more of an in-the-moment activity that looks for similar experiences. With the immediacy of the internet to connect people who share similar questions or concerns, we could see researchers move away from the notion of finding someone who previously answered the question and instead finding someone who is also asking the same question. If this change takes hold and sticks around, research tools will be less valued than community tools, and will have to evolve themselves to support this need.

And that brings us back around to the technological generation gap. Although use of social networks by Baby Boomers has increased significantly in recent years, young people still have significantly higher rates of use. But even more important than the tool that social networks are, is the different way of managing information that they represent. Even if older generations of users like the Gen Xers (such as me) and Baby Boomers are closing the gap on the use of electronic information tools, it will be more interesting to see if we can close the gap in leveraging the actual networks behind those tools and make those weak ties work to our advantage in the enterprise.

I’m interested to hear your thoughts, so let me know if you’re seeing examples of how people are beginning to use those networks of weak ties in their business lives (the use of networks like LinkedIn to prospect for jobs during the downturn is one obvious example).

-Ryan

Using Twitter as a research tool for competitive intelligence has already become credible, and it is rapidly becoming crucial. Twitter is a great place to find unfiltered, unembargoed competitive intelligence. When I think about CI using Twitter, there are a three key areas to think about:

• People: Often you can find mid to senior level people from your competitors on twitter. You’d be amazed at some of the things they may tweet about their company or its products & services.
• Products: Great place to find information about weaknesses, strengths, potential new releases and features, etc.
• Companies: A lot of information on Twitter about companies in general. Watch for tweets about company direction and focus, customer service attitude, etc. A companies presence (or lack thereof) on Twitter will also often be an indicator of how they may be trying to use Social Media as part of their strategy overall.

There are actually quite a few tools that have been launched to help you monitor and analyze the twitter conversation around these things. I’ll actually try and list some of those in a separate blog post. In this post I will just focus on using the twitter.com interface to do that.

The Twitter Search functionality is the place to start. Here you can search the twitter stream for people, products, companies, or references to a specific topic. There are options to restrict your searches to those containing links, or those that have a positive or negative attitude. The hashtag concept is particularly powerful when following a particular product or topic. Simply put a ‘#’ symbol in front of the product name you are interested in. You can also save these searches for quick reference in the future. For example, I have a saved search for #factiva that I check daily, just to see what people are saying about one of Dow Jones’ products.

Once you’ve run a twitter search, you can start examining the results. You should start by checking the profiles of some of the people that have posted relevant results. You can find a lot of valuable information from these profile pages. First, you can get an indicator of credibility by the number of people following that individual. Second, you can see how much information you are likely to get by following that person, based on the number of tweets they have posted, as well as a quick scan of their recent posts for quality and relevance. You can also take a look at who that person is following. This may help you find other subject matter experts on a particular topic/product. Twitter has released a new feature called ‘Lists’ that makes this even easier. Twitter allows people to create lists of people they follow, thus creating a categorization mechanism. Check these lists to see if they have already done the hard work of identifying other relevant individuals to follow.

Once you have found the right people to follow, you can create your own lists, and start monitoring the tweets for relevant information. While Twitter may not be the most relevant source of CI, especially depending on the industry your in, it can be a great way to get otherwise hard to find nuggets of information. It certainly is one of the best ways to understand the conversation around your competition as well. I’ll try to write some posts in the future about the tools that are out there, which can greatly streamline the process of using Twitter for CI.

How are you using Twitter for CI? Any tips or best practices you’d like to share?

- Ken

As I mentioned in my previous post, there have been two observations I wanted to share with you based on the research I’ve been doing as of late. The first was the power of context. The second is the impact time has on the value of information. Perhaps more accurately stated, the impact time has on who gets value from information.

At Dow Jones we see this across our lines of business. Our ultra low latency products power machine based trading, our real time newswires power investors decision, our daily newsletters inform decision makers, and our 30+ year archive fuels business research. The same piece of content, based on its age, finds value in different places across the enterprise.

Based on what I’ve been seeing as of late, there is an opportunity to understand what types and sources of information are getting value “early” in your enterprise. In many cases, this same content will continue to have value over time throughout the rest of your business, even as the information becomes vintage. So in your next review of content needs in your company, try starting with the people who need information first, and let me know how similar you find the needs of the rest of the company.

- Ken

As you can see I haven’t been busy blogging as of late – that’s the bad news (if you like my posts that is). The good news is I have been busy researching and talking to researchers and knowledge workers around the globe. There have been a couple of trends I’ve seen across these conversations, and one of them is the power of context.

While their is no refuting the power of aggregating information, it really is just the start. Of course you have to be able to find the most relevant information, when you need it, and be able to get to it when you need it. But just having the information really isn’t enough. That information becomes valuable when it is put in context for the user.

Understanding the user’s workflow, and what they will be doing with it when they get it can unlock the real value. Let’s look at the example of a Partner at a consulting firm to explain what I mean. We can use information about the revenue performance of one of the Partner’s customers as an example. Having access to recent financial statements and articles regarding the revenue performance over the customer over the last three quarters is good. Having the actual numbers extracted from that content is even better. But then what? How will the Partner use that information?

If he or she is trying to close new business with the customer, they may also need to see how expenses have fared over the same time period, in order to understand if current financial performance may lessen the likelihood or size of any potential opportunity. If he or she is preparing a report or making a recommendation, they may need access to performance from the peers of their customer for comparison purposes.

Two activities focused on the same piece of information, but both with very different needs for the context around that information. So while understanding the Partner in the consulting firm often needs access to revenue information regarding their customers is valuable, understanding how they will use that information is priceless.

In my next post I’ll talk about the other trend that I have seen in my conversations – the effect time has on the value of information.

- Ken

I have been doing a lot of market research and customer interviews as of late. Most of the work has been focused on providing role based information management tools for information consumers. There has been one common thread to the conversation: Simplicity.

I think there is a tendency on the behalf of people that design information solutions to try and jam as much relevant data as you can into the users workflow. I’m not sure why that is, maybe because we are accustomed to processing large volumes of data, maybe a desire to ensure we have a complete picture, maybe simply because we can. But it is clearly not what information consumers want. All they are looking for is *the* relevant data, not *all* of the relevant data.

I think it is easy for information professionals to lose sight of the importance of this subtle distinction. Information is our jobs, it’s what we do. But for end users it really is just a small (albeit incredibly important) part of their job. Probably one of the most valuable things we can do as information professionals is understand what the real needs of the end user are. This of course is easier said than done, because often users have difficulty describing their needs. In some cases they will also have trouble in defining them, and often cast too wide a net. Of course then after being given what they asked for, they will be overwhelmed, and in turn unsatisfied.

The best way for us to understand the information needs of users is to understand their role, their objective, and how it supports the operation of the company as a whole. Don’t ask “What information do you need?’, instead ask “Can you describe a typical day? What are the 3 primary objectives in your role? What are your top 3 challenges in meeting those objectives? What happens if you don’t get the information you need? “. Taking this sort of consultative approach will help you identify what an end user really needs, as opposed to what they ask for. It also has the benefit of helping you determine the value of the solution, and perhaps more importantly it can help the end user understand that as well. In many cases, it will also help you determine what sort of analysis that you can do on the users behalf (this is incredibly value because of the time savings you can provide).

Ultimately, once you identify the information needs, avoid the temptation to over-deliver. Deliver only what the user absolutely needs. Anything more will simply be a distraction.

- Ken