Social Revolution

Sure, social media is the hype machine's flavor of the moment. But let's face it: A lot of Web 2.0 applications just aren't scalable for effective business-to-business demand generation.

Most B-to-B marketers are on the hook to deliver a steady stream of qualified leads to field sales forces and channel partners. Reliable workhorse media that produces a predictable lead flow is essential to help salespeople make quotas and get shareholders expected returns.

For the most part, the new media are still behaving like PR tools — there's high potential for building awareness and some spinoff lead generation on the side, but when it comes to delivering volume they're just not ready for prime time.

Experiments are great. Give Web 2.0 a shot, and if that viral video campaign on Facebook gets business buyers' attention, continue in that direction. Right now, though, proven, reliable media are needed to get the job done.

However, one aspect of social media does have immediate potential. Web sites are creating entirely new data sources for B-to-B marketers, based on the consumer-generated media concept popularized by Web 2.0. Here's a sampling of these new resources.

JIGSAW

Originally organized as an online business-card swapping tool for salespeople, this prospecting site has moved to challenge established business-intelligence sources like Hoover's and mailing-list data compilers such as InfoUSA.

You might say Jigsaw is the Wikipedia of B-to-B data. It works like this: Its nearly 500,000 users upload information from their Rolodexes. To qualify, a record must be “complete,” meaning it includes company and contact names, Web site and e-mail addresses, and telephone/fax numbers. Jigsaw then confirms that the listing represents a real business with a message to the company's Web site. (Only records with corporate e-mail domain names are allowed, so legitimate businesspeople who happen to use AOL or Earthlink won't make the cut.) Jigsaw reportedly is growing by 20,000 new records daily.

When they upload information, users are awarded Jigsaw points which they can spend to download new contacts and create prospect lists. Users also get points for updating Jigsaw records with correct information — and lose points if someone else makes a later correction to “their” record. “We have half a million people doing our data hygiene for us daily,” says founder Jim Fowler.

Jigsaw also offers company-level information, which it compiles from public sources, partners and users. The data on public firms is validated by the site, and information on private businesses is added and updated by the user community.

Marketers have access to two key services from Jigsaw — fresh data for outbound campaigns and database hygiene. Unlike traditional list rental, when you download data from Jigsaw you own it. The information can be imported into your database, and names can be contacted as often as you like, through any medium.

The site stands to make money from the second service, hygiene and appending. In a recent example, a midsized professional services and training company sent in 51,620 names from its marketing database. Jigsaw's team was able to complete contact-level information for 3,473 records (6.7%) and update old data on 14,254 records using an appending process. On the hygiene front, 23,985 of the names were flagged as “dead” (46.5%) and 623 as duplicates.

ZOOMINFO

Another competitor to Hoover's and InfoUSA has emerged — PowerSell. It's a service of ZoomInfo, a business information search engine. Unlike Jigsaw's consumer-generated approach, ZoomInfo's strategy involves automated scanning of the Internet for business data, then merge/purging the data into a gigantic list of companies and contacts for use by marketers and salespeople.

President Bryan Burdick says ZoomInfo lists 42 million contacts, nearly 4 million companies, and uses “semantic search technology, which identifies useful information, tags it and matches it successfully to other pieces of information.”

In addition to searching names based on typical B-to-B criteria like company size, industry, and title or job function, targets also can be selected based on variables like press releases about new hires. Financial planners, brokers and insurance salespeople, for example, certainly would be interested in identifying a list of CEOs whose stock options recently vested.

“The first thing a company does when an executive leaves is update its Web site,” notes Chip Terry, vice president of the sales intelligence business unit. “We compare the information to the firm's previous list of executives, and if someone is suddenly missing, we can infer that the person has changed jobs. Our system is updating 30 million profiles a day.” Registered ZoomInfo users also voluntarily update another 10,000 of their own profiles every week.

ZoomInfo recently made a deal that allows users of Salesforce.com software to search and pull in PowerSell data for cold calling or account penetration.

LINKEDIN

This is arguably the “granddaddy” of B-to-B social media sites, with 20 million registered contacts. It's a good resource for finding people in targeted companies.

But as a data resource for marketing campaigns, LinkedIn data probably never will be available. Why? LinkedIn doesn't own the information, and thus can't make it available in bulk to marketers. According to senior director of business development Scott Roberts, “We want people to use their networks in a positive way. Our model is based on business etiquette and privacy protection. If you want to reach LinkedIn members in a one-to-many way, then targeted display advertising on our site is the solution.”

This isn't much help for direct marketing. But there are indications that B-to-B DMers are seeking to make creative use of LinkedIn's database. OneSource, a high-end global business data supplier owned by InfoGroup, recently added a widget to its global business browser to allow clients looking at a targeted company on OneSource's database to instantly view the target's employees that are already in the client's LinkedIn network.

“With LinkedIn's three degrees of separation, a small number of contacts can represent a million-name network,” says OneSource CMO Sham R. Sao. “Users now have the option of approaching their targets through personal LinkedIn introductions instead of cold calling.”

DEMANDBASE

Most B-to-B marketers usually gather campaign data through brokers, or when using online data sources, from subscription-based services like SalesGenie and Hoover's.

Like many compilers, Demandbase aggregates business data from multiple sources, among them D&B and LexisNexis. They then extract the “best” element from each source, using a proprietary algorithm that compares duplicates and identifies the one to keep.

The user experience is what's different. It feels like an e-tailer, with a shopping cart and the kind of functionality you'll find at Amazon or Apple. Your cart's content is priced by the item, so DMers with very narrowly targeted campaigns — which happens all the time in B-to-B — can order as few or as many names as needed.

“We think we're selling to a ‘business consumer,’ ” says founder and CEO Chris Golec. “Many business marketers simply can't use 5,000-name minimum orders.”

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RUTH P. STEVENS (ruth@ruthstevens.com) consults on customer acquisition and retention, and teaches marketing to graduate students at Columbia Business School. She is the author of “The DMA Lead Generation Handbook” and “Trade Show and Event Marketing.”