Content Matters

John Blossom served as moderator of the first panel of the day, focusing on Traditional Content vs. User-Generated Content.
Panelists included Dan Morrison, CEO of ITToolbox, Jigsaw CEO Jim Fowler and Jeff Guilot, EVP, Product & Technology at Hoovers.

John Blossom began with an overview of where social media plays in the area of
mission-critical business information.  Today, social media plays in the areas of Expert Insights, Business Intelligence, Business Development, Hiring, Public Relations, Collaboration and Research.

Social media is now gaining attention of professionals; for example, LinkedIn has moved into the top 200 websites this year according to Alexa.
Social media enables new types of structured insights:

• Tagging
• Linking
• Endorsing (voting)
• Six Degrees

Dan Morrison, CEO of ITToolbox (competitor to KnowledgeStorm, TechTrends) discussed user-generated content as a model for business information.

ITToolbox is an Online community for IT Knowledge sharing:

• 1.2M pages of user generated content
• 1.5M unique monthly visitors
• 740 advertising customers
• Up to $120 CPM

Their premise:
Media & Technology industries are merging.  New media models are coming from technology - user-generated content (community-powered models) will lead some segments.

Is this a disruptive opportunity?
- How will media consumption be distributed?
- How will ad perfomance compare?

User-generated content is quite different than traditional content.  They see community-powered information as a utility:
- Share knowledge, discuss trends, solve probelms, review products and services - all to increase productivity and efficiency.
-online communities on desktop throughout day
- Communications and content merge - communication as media

Advertising performance:
Performance improves as targeting and context improve
- Communities=high volume content, granular topics
- participation = active interest in topic
- Ad performance improves by targeting this granular level and active context.

They believe a disruptive opportunity exists if they can deliver a higher consumption of information and better performance for customers.

Next up was Jim Fowler, founder of Jigsaw Data.
Jigsaw, one of our "50 Content Companies that Matter" is an online business directory allowing users to buy and trade business cards.  Their users build and maintain the database. 
Today, they have more than 5.2 million contacts, with, for example, 49,000 contacts at Deloitte.  Their goal is to map (and keep updated) every business organization on the planet, leveraging the user community to do so.  Their position is to be to the information content what Wikipedia is to Encyclopedia Britanica.

Jim talked about the risks of user-generated content:
1. It's the wild west.  Wikipedia has constant battles between users trying to manipulate the data.
2. Managing a community: must make all product decisions by involving the community.
3. It's a new business model; for Jigsaw, the individual users are the ones who build and maintain the database, but their revenues come largely from large corporate sales.  Interestingly, Jigsaw is now seeing revenues from data cleaning (for client's CRM systems) starting to rival their revenues on the sales and marketing side.

The third panelist was Jeff Guillot, EVP, Product & Technology at Hoovers.
Jeff discussed how a traditional content provider sees user-generated content affecting their business.

Hoovers has launched four products in the user-generated content space:
Bizmology Blog: daily postings by editors
Hoovers business tool for publishers: Improved tools to allow publishers to integrate Hoovers content into their products.
Integration of Hoovers Insight into the Salesforce.com platform.
Relationship Mining (Hoovers Connect) - in limited beta: free service for users - a visual tool to link your existing network to Hoovers content (a la LinkedIn).

Today, Hoovers uses these tools to drive traffic in a brand-relevant way by combining Hoovers editorial expertise with user-generated content.

While user-generated content is still in its early stages, it's clear that companies like ITToolbox, Jigsaw and LinkedIn are seeing real revenues in this space.