Abstract
Information managers are now bombarded with information from multiple sources: traditional media, the Internet and more recently social media. The demand for fast insight from this data is becoming the primary challenge for those tasked with managing information for business advantage. This article explores how the consumption, analysis and delivery of insight from content are changing and how this will impact information managers in the future.
Keywords
Introduction
There has never been more information available to professionals who are tasked with using it to generate competitive business advantage. The digital age has transformed both the volume and the velocity of data available to corporations.
As recently as the late 1990s, a company looking to do business with another might need to place a telephone call to the company to obtain a copy of the printed annual report in order to understand more about the nature and scope of the business performance and key markets. Yet, within 10 years, this information is now not only freely available online but also enhanced with commentary, opinion and analysis.
Information professionals might be forgiven for thinking that this is an age of content nirvana. Yet new sources of information bring new challenges – and these are significant. LexisNexis recently surveyed 500 people working in information management services. The survey found that information managers were overwhelmed with the volume of information available to them and were struggling to keep up with the speed at which it was being produced. They were also increasingly pressured to deliver more insight from more information in less time. The obvious issue is the effect this has on the quality of insight delivered and the potential impact on the role of the researcher. For information managers at least, more is not necessarily better.
The rise of social
The digital revolution has been followed by a huge growth in social content. People are no longer just consumers of content, but they are also publishers. More than 6 billion hours of video are watched every month on YouTube, with more than 100 hours of video uploaded every single minute (source: YouTube). Five hundred million Tweets are sent per day (Source: Twitter https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/en-GB/statistics.html). Interestingly, 40 per cent of Twitter users worldwide simply use the service as a ‘curated news feed of updates that reflect their passions’ (Source: Twitter https://about.twitter.com/company).
It is unsurprising that there is considerable discussion between academics and researchers about the opportunities and challenges of using online and social media content for research. Traditionally, of course, this content has not always formed an integral part of business information research, but can this content, written by anyone and everyone, actually be usable and trusted?
Certainly, Andrew Grill, IBM Global Partner for Social Business, thinks so. In a recent interview with The Drum, Grill (2014) commented that: If I’m in a meeting with an organization, I don’t use the word social. I use the terms market research and customer satisfaction. I use the language that clients understand because my peers and I have done the world a disservice. They’ve talked about social media so much they think that’s all social is.
Social media platforms offer rich, naturally occurring data, and researchers can gain exclusive insight and opinion by using this content to support their investigations. In traditional research, often what is missing from the conversation is the views of users. Social media content can bridge this gap.
It’s content … but not as we know it
One challenge here is that the content created for websites or on social media platforms is not produced with the business information researcher in mind. The chances are that the writers of this content never even considered that their thoughts could be of any interest or value for these purposes. Instead this is content produced for a wealth of different reasons: social interaction, marketing, spleen venting and opinion seeking. The common factor in its production is that someone somewhere thinks it is something that they want to share. When others agree, viral sensations are born.
Authors are as varied as the content itself, with thoughts being shared by individuals, businesses, publishers, governments or non-governmental organizations. This is content where the value is in the immediacy and interaction. It is not produced to directly drive revenue.
The business information manager cannot choose to ignore these huge, diverse and rich streams of information. By including the complexity of people’s lives and what they are thinking about, a powerful and influential stream of content is easily – and freely – available.
Changes in the news cycle
The impact of the digital age and social media has been felt significantly in the traditional print industry, which has yet to really formulate a winning response to the challenge posed by digital. Historically, news was produced by one group of people – journalists and publishers – and consumed by another – the public. Digital has had a profound impact on this in several ways:
Traditionally news was consumed at specific times – when someone purchased and read a newspaper or when the news was on television or radio. The Internet has made this news cycle redundant. News breaks as and when it happens and consumption of it is no longer in the hands of the news producers. Whilst digital has had the largest impact on this cycle, this has also been influenced by the evolution of 24-hour news television and radio. The effect of this is that being first with the news has become more important than ever.
The growth in social media and the ubiquity of smartphones have blurred the lines between news producer and consumer. Anyone anywhere can have a recording device with them in the form of a smartphone. This empowers everyone with the ability to generate news content. Traditional news outlets are relying more than ever on social media to identify and report on news stories as they happen; in short, news breaks first on social networks.
Brands are now able to compete with traditional publishers. For example, major sports brands now make all their announcements first via their social channels and websites. This makes it much harder for the traditional media to carry exclusive stories or content. In the digital age, every brand is a publisher.
Competition for advertising revenues is fiercer. The traditional media companies are having to share revenues with new advertisers, brands and social channels. The drive for ‘eyeballs’ on stories, which in turn drives advertising revenues, can have an effect on which stories are published and when.
Traditional media brands are now global entities. It is as easy for someone in Australia to read the New York Times as it is for them to read their local newspaper.
The social media revolution has challenged and will continue to challenge journalism and news organizations. Newspapers already facing their own commercial challenges now face a new threat which, in many ways, is a direct result of the emergence of websites and social media platforms. The effects are cuts in editorial staff, editorial budgets, investigative journalism and geographic coverage. The subsequent impact is that newspapers increasingly rely on agency copy, press releases or syndicated news content, further commoditizing their product. For the researcher, searching across an aggregated news database will often reveal almost identical stories across the range of competing newspapers.
What changes is this driving in traditional news?
At the most basic level, there is now hardly a newspaper without some form of Web presence, usually aligned with some basic user interaction or discussion forum. News articles are frequently shared over social media and are a driver of Web searches. They are also driving interesting interactions between online media types. An item may first be identified in social media, become redistributed to wider audiences, be picked up in a Web article and subsequently make it to a newspaper with full journalistic coverage. From the newspaper it may then gain wider presence on social media types and be further distributed again.
This drives changes in editorial processes and the nature of information gathering. It also changes where customers go for news. According to Mediapost Communications’ Research Editor, Jack Loechner, ‘Newspapers have a legacy of breaking news and uncovering stories of historic proportion, yet they are losing ground to a generation of consumers embracing digital and mobile alternatives’ (Loechner, 2009).
As journalist Geneva Overholser notes: It strikes me that most people don’t care as much about who publishes news (or what are often rumours) first these days as they do about whether the sites they rely on have it when they want it. Now, as we all know, news and information need to be on the platform we’re checking, wherever we are. (Overholser, 2009)
But the volume of reportable news has not grown. Instead opinion, rumour, conjecture, discussion and opinion have exploded to fill the 24-hour news schedules, Internet chat rooms and comments sections.
The immediacy of social media has driven user expectations around timeliness of news stories. There is also an expectation for information to be brief and easily digested, particularly on mobile devices. Increasingly, readers receive visualization as a means of digesting, interpreting and identifying information from sources, hence the rise and popularity of infographics. With each development, another rich source of content emerges that could be of benefit to a researcher.
As a highly open forum, business information professionals are increasingly going to web and social media to complement the information received from traditional sources and to place it in context, particularly to understand interactions and relationships in the wider market, and how the wider market reacts to news and information.
The issue of trust
The fundamental issue with using social media as a research tool is based on trust. Historically, sources such as the British Broadcasting Corporation, national newspapers and newswires have been the trusted sources for researchers. Traditionally, journalists were trained to find two independent sources that verify information before writing a story. In the information age, this becomes far more difficult. Because content is repurposed and reused across the Web, finding the original source of information is extremely challenging. Rumour and conjecture are treated as fact. The recent landmark European Court ruling around the right to be forgotten further muddies the waters – people now have the right to request that outdated or irrelevant data can be erased on request. In the future, using the public Web as a source of data for research could be incomplete.
Traditional perceptions of trust are becoming confused. New brands such as MSN and Huffington Post are delivering content with the aim of becoming destination sites on the Internet. The most popular news website in the world is now mailonline.co.uk – the Daily Mail’s website – which responded to the challenge of the digital age by including global celebrity content on its website to drive eyeballs. The traditional editorial values that were associated with trusted news outlets are changing, driven by the need to generate advertising from content.
What does this all mean for the information professional?
In LexisNexis’ survey of 500 information managers, several key issues were identified as challenges for the future of information management.
First, information managers were pressed for time, both by the increased volume and velocity of sources and sheer quantity of data available and by increased demands from the businesses that they work in. The three primary reasons for feeling this time pressure were too much to do, too much information and too many sources to monitor. Jos Leensen, Insights Consultant at Hill & Knowlton Strategies, summed this up neatly, ‘Today a response is expected within an hour – and in the future it will be expected within five minutes (Leenson, 2014: p. 79, in ‘The Past, Present and Future of Information Management Report from LexisNexis’. Second, researchers also expressed concerns about maintaining professional standards in the face of such time pressures. The open Internet has enabled non-researcher colleagues to conduct their own research but with scant regard for the quality or reliability of the source or whether conflicting information was more relevant.
A third challenge was the need for information professionals to present results in a way that could be quickly and easily digested by the organization, particularly with the growing tendency for email to be consumed on tablets and smartphones. It seems that, in the information age, the way in which research is presented is as important as the research itself, meaning that information professionals need to develop new communication and presentation skills.
How has the industry responded?
To gain the competitive edge for their organization, information managers need to:
validate information from more sources more quickly and effectively;
identify relevant information, particularly in reference to business objectives;
provide access to state-of-the-art tools and training to automate aspects of the role and continue to develop them; and
deliver information in new ways to capture the attention of time-poor executives
Suppliers to the business information research space are responding to these challenges in several ways by integrating social and Web media or related capabilities into existing products and solutions, by using technology to do daily and more mundane tasks and by delivering more effective ways to visualize data graphically.
More information, more sources, easier to manage
Tools are evolving in parallel to the enrichment of data through indexing and taxonomy investments around traditional media. Whilst indexing and taxonomies were primarily developed to find specific articles or pieces of information – the needle in the haystack – the tools were largely conceived with the idea of understanding the value in the mass of information, providing broad analysis, interpretation and causality of media events. Integrating social into existing products and solutions brings another layer of insight and can take several forms.
There is exceptional value when combining media types to provide cross-platform and cross-media answers to research questions; where social and Web media can blend with traditional news, magazine and business publications, newswires and company information. This can be achieved by building separate products, integrating in search results, licensing Web content or incorporating technology providers.
Automating daily tasks
Facing increasing time pressures means using technology to automate as many tasks as possible, freeing information professionals to focus on delivering insight. Automating daily tasks – through alerts and reports – enables the information manager to have more time for analysing data and delivering competitive advantage.
Tools that enable researchers to receive regular updates in real time bring the immediacy of breaking news to the desktop. The ability to easily create alerts from searches removes the need to carry out repetitive tasks on a daily basis. Searches (and alerts) across traditional media, social media or any blend of the two enable researchers to create very specific search and alert criteria once and then be alerted to any new results as and when they happen.
New ways to present information
Responding to the challenge of presenting information in an easily digestible format requires skill. Information professionals need to ensure that the research undertaken is presented in an effective format without oversimplifying the insight.
Suppliers to business information researchers are now providing graphical ways to present information. One such solution is from LexisNexis is Nexis Analyser which creates easy-to-read summary graphs and charts from research data. The ability to customize analysis, easily assess trends and apply advanced filters to improve results makes these tools very effective in delivering presentations and insight.
Delivering the right user experience
Additional functionality to address the current and future needs of researchers needs to be intuitive and simple to grasp. Adding social media content, for example, can only be effective if it enhances traditional research rather than drowning it out. Time-pressed information professionals need to quickly grasp how new functionality works, adopt it and integrate it into their working lives. The importance of an intuitive user experience cannot be overestimated. Neither can easily access support from the supplier. Continual investment and improvement is required to deliver a more intuitive and effective user experience, particularly in an era where people expect software to work right away and time for training is limited. Researchers need to focus on solving complex problems not using complex software.
The wide adoption of smartphones and tablets, as well as home working or working from satellite offices, also changes when and where researchers need access to information. Cloud-based software programmes, available wherever an Internet connection is available, have become the norm for suppliers to the business information industry. The emergence of apps for smartphones and tablets is also taking place but needs to be carefully planned – the experience on an app has to be as intuitive as on a laptop in order to provide researchers with the tools required to do their jobs quickly and effectively.
Conclusion
More information, more sources, more demands; the 21st-century information manager faces significant challenges as the role has rapidly morphed from the traditional role of playing detective with physical reference data. Today’s researchers need to manage and analyse millions of items of content from thousands of sources, analysing which are relevant and to what extent. This trend is unlikely to reverse. Just as Web information and social media have increased the volume and velocity of information available to researchers, so will smartphone adoption and the increased sharing of content continue to impact on research.
Information companies that supply researchers with access to content will need to continue to respond to this changing landscape – not only by integrating additional relevant sources of information into the researcher’s arsenal but, more importantly, by recognizing the needs and challenges of information managers and responding to these with meaningful, easy to use and intuitive services that help to build business advantage. Businesses will continue to demand more from researchers, and the information industry can continue to expect researchers to demand more from those who provide the tools to access information.