A Goldmine for D&B: User-Generated Content

D&B spends lots of money gathering information from millions of sources. While artificial intelligence, especially Natural Language Processing, is making data capture much more scalable and affordable, that kind of data is not as lucrative as user-generated content. The two giants in this emerging field of user-generated content are Facebook and Google. Facebook convinces 2.8B people to share what and who they like. From this vast database, Facebook has created a powerful advertising platform ($86B in revenue and $33B in operating income). Google Search (which generates the most valuable form of intent data) convinces about 4B people to share what they want to know. Today, Facebook is the fourth most valuable company, in terms of market capitalization. Google (i.e., Alphabet: $137B in revenue and $31B in operating income) is first (if you combine the class A and class C stocks).

In this regard, Google is especially clever. Not only do billions of people freely search for information on Google, but an unpaid army of millions do whatever they can to make the information users want easily discoverable by Google search bots. Think of all the third-party search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing professionals working hard to make Google Search more effective. Google doesn’t have them on the payroll. They work for marketing agencies and companies that want to generate traffic to websites. For Google, that massive labor pool costs nothing.

How sweet is that?

To be fair, D&B has had user-generated content forever with its impressive and valuable trade reference data collection. With this effort, companies share with D&B how business customers pay their bills. Currently, D&B captures 2B such trade experiences annually in 170 countries and creates its highly successful PAYDEX product that predicts, among other things, the likelihood of a vendor to pay its bills on time or at all. While capturing 2B trade references per year sounds impressive, it’s a half-measure. Why not 100B? Expanding participation in vendor payments reporting, if more pervasively captured, would extend the PAYDEX score to many more small businesses and make the score more and more accurate.

Moreover, these trade references, at scale, would tell you who the vendor’s customers are, how much a customer spends, and whether the relationship is growing or declining. The vendor will never tell you that kind of information about its customers, but the business customers of that vendor can and do. Such insights, even at a macro level, are tantalizing, and that’s just one area of potential for user-generated content. There are many.

To create shareholder value, D&B will need to connect its D-U-N-S number to far more information than it does today. To do so, business professionals need a reason to give D&B information and update that information. D&B already has a global directory of most of the businesses in the world and significant IP to consolidate business data. That directory consists of highly commoditized data that D&B could use to generate massive volumes of traffic, traffic D&B could monetize by selling digital advertising and individual subscriptions. Imagine if LinkedIn, Indeed.com, Angi (formerly Angie’s List), Yelp, G2.com, or any of the user user-generated platforms had started with such an advantage.

Creating freemium services that attract market segments to share and update business and professional data will enable D&B to increase the value of its data and create new classes of subscribers, including individual professionals, a la LinkedIn. Most importantly, instead of selling data, D&B can auction highly valuable digital advertising.

Here are some of the possibilities against a web-based global business directory:

• Org charts
• Employee reviews of the company and its leadership
• HR verified dates of employment, location(s), and title(s) of current and past employees
• Reviews of products and services the company sells
• Job postings
• Product announcements and other press releases
• Benchmarks (e.g., lead-to-sales conversion rates, open rates of emails, etc.)

Of course, there are thousands of such examples from which D&B can choose. Within this online directory, social networks could form around departments or other niche areas of interest, local communities (like local businesses, the way Yelp, Houzz, and Angi have done), and industries. All the while, the data asset gets bigger and more valuable.

To be sure, user-generated content will increasingly require a company like D&B to let businesses provide data in audio and video formats, the next huge frontier of B2B data.

Note: this article is an excerpt of "The Astonishing Upside of Dun & Bradstreet"

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/astonishing-upside-dun-bradstreet-db-j-david-green/