Let’s Talk Knowledge

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

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