B2B 101 - All Comments

re: Government backs opt-out, for your organs.

Hugh Bessant — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 17:40:44 GMT

Lee, I respect your feelings for your friend, but they aren't different. It is about appearing on a database, whatever it is for. Opt out is a fine system if everyone knows about their rights to opt out...it will work equally well for both.

re: Government backs opt-out, for your organs.

Tom Baker — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 12:53:21 GMT

A comparison between potentially saving someone's life, and getting the old bit of dm is unfair. They are completely different and should be treated so.

re: Government backs opt-out, for your organs.

Don Macinnes — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 16:00:31 GMT

Sad news about your friend Lee; however, there is a certain irony that the government won’t let you communicate with someone without their express permission at the same time as trying to push through legislation allowing them to chop you up and give your body parts to complete strangers without the smallest of indications of your willingness to allow them to do so.

Perhaps they’ll be some sort of Privacy Policy on all new birth certificates opting us into being chopped up and redistributed upon death.

re: Government backs opt-out, for your organs.

Hugh Bessant — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 15:55:26 GMT

Lee, I have no problem with it either, I was just making the comparison with their attitude to DM.

re: Government backs opt-out, for your organs.

Lee Robinson — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 10:55:16 GMT

I'm on the donor list myself and have to say I can't see the problem with this. I have a friend who's been on the transplant list for nearly 3 years waiting for a kidney. If we had an opt out policy, he may well have had a new kidney by now.

Moreofthesame.com | Email Marketing Tool

Moreofthesame.com | Email Marketing Tool — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 03:34:31 GMT

Pingback from Moreofthesame.com | Email Marketing Tool

re: Moreofthesame.com

Hugh Bessant — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 18:09:45 GMT

Well said Andy, and I would love to meet up sometime to see your operation...maybe Brand Republic can turn it into a feature?

I do welcome a new entrant, especially if the data is of excellent quality, but I feel I must defend my smoke and mirrors position here. And to show I am not having a pop at Infouk, I'll have a pop at everyone else as well.

The Premier division data suppliers have all failed to invest in the quality of their data sufficiently for many years. When you scratch beneath the service (IE use it) you soon find out that there is a lot of dross in there. Contacts are out of date or plain wrong and recency is...let's just say poor. The smoke and mirrors I mean is the spiel they give customers about data quality without ever telling anyone exactly what they do.

You speak with confidence about your double opt in, and let me just ask you a few questions which will allow you to show your wares in a good light.

1) Is the double out in with the individual concerned, or it the address confirmed with whoever answers the phone to your researcher?

2) How is the email securing the double opt in worded?

3) How are you protecting your email list from overuse and therefore increased unsubscribes?

4) How many research phone calls are you making a year? How many times do you have to call each company to get a reasonable set of contacts?

I ask these questions because they are crucial to data quality. I know from experience how much it costs to research a data set. I even did a blog about it when your first press release hit the streets. To keep it recent you have to keep investing in research, and if you are doing that you should shout it from the rooftops and encourage the likes of D&B to tell the market what they do.

We all know that double opt-in is not a legal requirement for business email. If you are talking to the individual and then getting a robust, honest double opt-in electronically, the list is gold dust, and you should promote that too, because no one else will be able to match you in the B2B market.

If you answer all those questions positively, then good luck to you, Infouk will have an excellent product and you deserve to capture market share at a rate of knots. I still doubt that it is possible to make a profit on DM sales alone, because the research costs will run into millions, but I would be your loudest supporter.

My problem with the data market is that every supplier tries to hide behind marketing gobbldygook. No one will say I get my data like this... , it is strong in these areas because..., but personally, I have always tried too. That is why I have problems with 'fresh' data. The only possible data that can be fresh, or new to use another word, is the emails. Every other business appears somewhere, and you know it. And your universe is not complete unless best part of a million businesses have gone bust, unless you mean complete in the terms of having all the businesses anyone is interested in buying...which may well be true.

If you want to read more about my thoughts on the universe, how it is researched and what people do with it, scan back through some of my old blogs, especially the ones called data and the dark arts. I might even repeat them over the next few days for fun...if the BBC can do it, so can I!!!

re: Moreofthesame.com

Andrew Taylor — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 10:58:01 GMT

It is, of course, good to receive feedback from one of the industry's leading lights, but your commentary on this occasion seems to have little bearing on the real situation here at InfoUK and I thought it important to respond to the issues that were raised and hopefully provide a clearer picture.

Whilst it's good to know that you're not disappointed with our launch - and

yes the product does work just fine - it is disappointing that you hadn't

taken the time to look at the website in more depth. If you had, you would

have realised that it is far more than an online counting tool.

We have worked on the product for the past 8 months - with a significant development and marketing team. We were keen to develop something that had an appeal to the seasoned marketing professional, and to the inexperienced user. So yes there is an online count tool in there, but there is also a subscription led company lookup, a profiling tool and a more complex search engine that has been designed for the marketing professionals. All of this is backed up by our team, providing support and advice. They are certainly not hidden behind the website.

The product has, you will notice, been launched in beta, and we are actively

encouraging all of our users to give us feedback on the additional

functionality that they would like to see developed.

This version of the website that you are apparently dismissing is simply the start point for InfoUK. The additional features that we are bringing to market in the coming months will deliver unique and more importantly NEW functionality.

In addition, our marketing activity is utilising the latest integrated

techniques in order to promote marketing good practice to parts of the

business universe that may not have previously had exposure to the use of

marketing data.

I also wanted to give you (and your readers) the true picture of the InfoUK universe, we do have the details of 2.3 million businesses in the UK, although we chose to make available those records that were verified and opted in by our in house tele-research team. Our universe is complete, and our differentiation is the opted in nature of our data online and offline.

I would be happy to chat through the real story with you Hugh and dispel the

"smoke and mirrors", but would ask that in this time of market volatility and

uncertainty, that you may want to look at the positive things that a new

market entrant brings such as healthy competition, a new way of looking at

the market and fresh, quality data.

Please give me a shout if you would like to meet up with the team here at

InfoUK and I would be happy to show you why we are different and discuss the next steps for our products and the business.

re: Moreofthesame.com

Hugh Bessant — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 18:32:38 GMT

Thank you Andrew. One small typo and my usual complete failure to understand when or when not to use an apostrophe. Many apologies.

re: Moreofthesame.com

Andrew Dempster — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 14:59:55 GMT

"Smoke" and "trees" - thank you.

re: Hunker down, it's going to be a bumpy ride

Hugh Bessant — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 21:13:58 GMT

Usually I would agree with you Martin, but this is the real thing.

re: Hunker down, it's going to be a bumpy ride

Martin Corcoran — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 12:15:22 GMT

We need to careful that we don't talk ourselves into a crisis. Business is getting tight but it's not so bad yet unless we keep willing even worse things to happen.

re: Golden Brown can't promise to keep our data safe

Hugh Bessant — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 21:30:20 GMT

I go with the second option!

re: Golden Brown can't promise to keep our data safe

Stephen McNamara — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 13:45:26 GMT

If Gordie cannot keep our data safe he should do two things:

1. Scrap Identity Cards

2. Resign

re: British Gas are a disgrace

Gordon Macmillan — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 11:46:46 GMT

It's the stone cold intransigence that really gets you. British Gas sucks at customer service so badly.