Last week we saw two great cases at IEI where “data exhaust” — data created incidentally as part of a particular data management process — turned out to hold great value for our customers. In both cases we took simple telephone verification processes designed just to confirm that an executive’s contact information was still correct (in one case their email address, in the other their direct dial telephone number) and we re-engineered them. After doing so, we were able to identify substantial amounts of new contact information, dead URLs, changed job titles, defunct businesses, new business names, name changes, and deceased or changed contacts. And the beautiful part of the gold hidden in this data exhaust? It was all virtually free. We delivered the same core information to the customer at the same cost, and our customers got a wealth of additional valuable information to boot.
In speaking to folks at Infochimps, EDR, and Databridge about these experiences I realized that we aren’t the only ones gleaning through data “slag” in order to find gold. Metadata generated from various data processing routines and simply from usage patterns is being used by data analysts everywhere to make information services more valuable and even to drive completely new sets of valuable information.
Of course, turning data analysis into improved functionality has actually gone on for quite some time. A few of the more prominent examples are:
- NewsEdge’s customer-generated list of misspelled company name variants: This was used to direct users to the correct information even when they couldn’t spell a company’s name correctly. A lot better than a “404 – No Info Found” error and all for the cost of a little elbow grease.
- Google’s “popularity engine”: Request frequency data was just ancillary info until it was used to prioritize search results.
- Hoover’s took search popularity data and used it to drive the update frequency for the profiles of popular companies. “Not found” results also drove the creation of new profiles as well.
If your firm isn’t wading through your data effluvium looking for value, maybe you should be! One process’s garbage can easily be another’s titanium.
posted by Shyamali Ghosh on January 23, 2012
Connotate, Inc., the leading provider of solutions that help organizations monitor and collect data and content from the Web, today announced a strategic services partnership with Information Evolution, Inc. (IEI). The alliance will help small- to medium-sized businesses take advantage of the benefits of Big Data without devoting extensive human capital or technological investments. IEI customers can keep their databases updated with information from web sources leveraging Connotate’s Agent Community data extraction and monitoring solution and IEI’s services team.
“The SMB market has the same amount of pressure to deliver high-quality products to their clientele with a fraction of the resources of larger companies,” IEI President Matt Manning said. “This partnership helps round out our suite of offerings that take the burden of monitoring and extracting Web information from our clients so they can better allocate their resources. Innovative small firms can now level the playing field by using Connotate’s world-class solution to keep their data updated in real-time just like the multinational players they are competing against.”
“With one customer, IEI helped automate custom data collection feeds from a 4,000 web sources in 30 days for executive profile generation. The customer needed to collect detailed information on corporate executives with a higher accuracy rate than previous manual efforts. With the data feeds that IEI set up using Connotate’s solution, this data can now be monitored with high accuracy for any changes and collected any time. This allows the customer to provide the most timely and accurate information on the set of corporate executives they monitor.
IEI is working with Connotate to build, execute and maintain the information-gathering process which includes the delivery of ready-to-use data sets in an agreed-upon format. Data set options are endless and can be delivered in a variety of formats including XML, Excel and email.
“Big Data solutions are moving from novelty to necessity and the SMB community should not be deprived of the business insights and competitive advantages their larger competitors are privy to,” Matt Jacobson, Senior Vice President of Channels and Operations, Connotate, stated. “IEI makes for an excellent addition to Connotate’s innovative partner network. The channel is slated to be a major area of growth and strategic focus for Connotate this year and we are excited to enlist a cutting-edge company who shares the philosophy that Big Data benefits companies of all shapes and sizes.”
For more information, visit connotate.com
posted by Shyamali Ghosh on January 18, 2012
