Let’s Talk Knowledge

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 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

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 had a few interesting conversation with customers in the past few days. I’ve spent some time with a wide variety of users, from professional researchers, content purchasers, information consumers, and a lot of roles in between. Some things I was reminded of in these conversations that are worth sharing, even if nothing new and earth shattering was uncovered.

First, ease of use can definitely beat out superior quality. A great research platform, with unmatched content and tools, will sit unused if the learning curve is to steep. This of course is a reason it can be hard to break knowledge workers of the often unproductive GYM (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo) habit.

Second, there is no one source for information. Information sources vary greatly from enterprise to enterprise, and just as widely from user to user within an enterprise.

Third, mobile, mobile, mobile. A lot of people seem concerned with mobile access to business research tools, but not sure what the specific requirements are beyond that. Clearly mobile is young and evolving, but important.

Fourth, value must be readily apparent. Whether this comes from some sort of hard ROI like time-savings, or as part of a larger initiative, value of research solutions must be established early, and demonstrated often.

Fifth, workflow tools are the flavor of the day. This probably has a lot to do with the preceding point – it is easier to establish value with targeted solutions, than general purpose tools.

Finally, there is a need for a business research platform to help bring all of these things together. A platform that can add value to content, regardless of origin. A platform that can support the entire process of business research, for every type of user. That is a scalable platform that provides basic services like search and alert for all users, but that can be configured and molded to support the specific workflow needs of research and information intensive roles. A platform with an interface that is effortless. A platform that allows intelligence to be created in a collaborative manner, shared, and distributed through many different channels (print, digital, web, and mobile). A platform that easily allows the information professional to demonstrate the value, both of the platform and the information professional managing it.

In short, a comprehensive business research platform is the only way I see to manage all of the concerns facing informational professionals today. Imagine if an informational professional has a business research platform that brings together all of the necessary capabilities and content to support their enterprise, and that platform can be engaged with little or no training. Then they can spend their time creating and adding value to the business instead of administrating a plethora of independent tools and content sources.

If anyone has any stories to share on the power an effective business research platform can provide, please do share!

- Ken

I promise, this is not another post about Bing, and everything it may or may not do to change the consumer search engine landscape, and related advertising industry. If you are looking for that, take a look at a very concise and relevant Forrester blog post here. I do want to talk about one of the principles that Bing is focusing on in an attempt to differentiate.

You can find it in the url of the introductory video for Bing: http://www.decisionengine.com/. Decision Engine. The point being that search is not an objective, it is a task that is employed by most people in an effort to make a decision. That is a bit of a no brainer, but a really important distinction (and I think MS is going to spend close to 100M in advertising to bring that to light). As a technology community we have just been to in love with making search better in the past 10 years. We need to change the focus to improving our efficiency in making decisions. Again, I know it sounds like a subtle distinction, but it is anything but subtle.

For example, if I am focused on making search better, I look at things like relevance of results to the keyword in use, speed of results, breadth of coverage,  autocomplete, etc. If I think about improving the decision making process, I try to understand what decisions are being made, why, and when? What data elements and information is required to make that decision, what is the best resource to get that information, who is the best person to talk to? Really, a very different viewpoint from a requirements perspective.

I often refer to the process to support decision making in business as business research (of which search is one of the tasks in that process of course, among others like analysis). So for people interested in business research Bing is important. First, even if only because of the huge advertising budget MS has, it will help shift the technology communities focus from search, to research. Second, I think it will help validate the importance of the decision making tools – something that can sometimes be hard to do believe it or not (how many of you have management or users that think your existing decision making tools like Factiva are nothing more than a search box and bunch of articles?). Last, because of the importance based on Social Intelligence (Bing organizes content based on what other users have found to be important). 

So while it remains to be seen whether it is a good tool or not, whether it will help MS gain some share in the consumer “search” market, and if it will bring a shift from keyword to display advertising, Bing is important – thanks Microsoft.

- Ken

I’ve been playing around with Kosmix.com this morning to do some research for work. Of course I know Factiva is the ultimate online research tool for knowledge workers like myself (that is probably as far as anyone from Dow Jones will read, so I’ll be objective from now on). However, I wanted to try an actual project with Kosmix to put it through its paces.

My overall impression of the site is pretty favorable. I like the layout of the site, and the natural grouping of different content types. I especially like the inclusion of social media, and even found some of the most useful information, or links to it in that section of the search results (social intelligence anyone?).  The site did an ok job at clustering and establishing some basic relationships for some, but not all of my searches (this seemed to happen when my query was very specific, so I imagine there was not enough volume of results to do so). I was disappointed by the lack of any extraction capabilities (identifying companies, or products, or people for example) and visualizations.

Kosmix did a fair job of helping guide me through my research, I didn’t have to run more searches to navigate to related information. Though I did not try Right Health, a vertical search portal built on the Kosmix platform, I can see where the platform would be well suited for that.

However navigation and understanding is where I think all of our interfaces for research can improve, and certainly Kosmix has a fair way to go here. I mentioned the lack of entity extraction earlier, and that is really a pre-requisite for the ability to do this well. For example I was researching a particular category of software tools, and while company names appeared in many of the results and categories, they were never identified as a company, and linked to any relevant company information (fundamentals, business events, etc) and this caused more searching and extra time on my part to get these details.

Finally while the site was visually pleasing, there were no visualizations that really helped me understand the information. Again this is an area where many of our research tools can improve, and an area I think we have the technology and resource to invest in but I’m just not seeing a great deal of it.

Ok, now back to Factiva to finish my research (in case someone from DJ did actually read this far..).

- Ken