Strategic Uses for Federated Search, Part 1

Last quarter, I wrote about federated search, questioning whether it was a nice-to-have or a must-have. In that article, I concluded that federated search is a must have, and promised to further explain practical uses that make federated search strategic.

Project Glean

After a month or so of starting at Deep Web Technologies, I took over the sales and marketing departments. I had a problem to solve: How do you get more sales leads in the door? This is an easy question when you have lots of cash or a decent-sized marketing budget. This isn’t so easy when your company is small and you lack the ability to significantly increase your sales and marketing budgets.

So, the question morphed into: What can we do to improve the effectiveness of our marketing to generate more sales leads, without spending more money? After some brainstorming, we realized a few things.

(1) Ad Hoc Marketing versus Integrated Marketing. For the longest time, we were very reactive in our marketing efforts. Plan for a conference here. Send out a press release there. Work on collateral pieces in an emergency. The end result was that marketing was working very hard, and not enjoying the sense of accomplishment in “making headway.” Instead, once one problem was solved, it was time to move on to the next problem.

I call this “ad hoc marketing.” It’s costly and not very effective. It’s difficult to plan long-term initiatives, and it’s difficult to muster up a budget for some marketing campaign that seems expensive (i.e. you have little idea of the ROI, and therefore you loath to spend the funds). When you do decide to pay for something, it’s invariably last-minute and you end up paying “rush order fees” or overnight shipping.

So, the first thing we did was switch to a form of integrated marketing. In our approach, we created calendar with all the important dates for our company: Key conferences, key release dates for new functionality, and key launch dates for larger client implementations. With these dates on a calendar, we then proceeded to pre-plan our public releases. We arranged for speaking events, with key themes revolving around our key release dates and conference topics. We consolidated our brand, filled in the gaps related to missing collateral pieces, and leveraged our marketing dollars by complimenting our efforts according to our marketing calendar.

(2) Getting the word out. Once we began to execute around our marketing calendar and the integrated marketing approach, we began to leverage the new media opportunities afforded us through social networks and the Internet. We created a twitter account under the name “DeepWebTech.” We began our own corporate blog (you’re reading it now!). We began to experiment with advertising (see our ad at FreePint – you might need to refresh your screen a couple of times).

(3) Active, online participation. We realized, in our activities, that there is much discussion (and confusion) about the deep web, federated search and even the deep web portals we’ve helped to create. Then it struck us: We need to federate those resources on the Internet that are key to our business. We need our own technology — federated search technology — to monitor for business opportunities, RFP’s, RFI’s and our brand.

Project Glean was born.

Project Glean uses our federated search technology to scour the Internet for search terms involving (1) our brand or the deep web portals we’ve helped to create, (2) our competitors, (3) topics relevant to “enterprise search,” and (4) topics relevant to “federated search.” Glean then uses our Alerts functionality to indicate when we have something new to read and/or respond to.

The results have been quite dramatic. The biggest benefit to our Project Glean, is getting the word out regarding our name, deep web portals we’ve helped to create, and educate the public about the power of federated search and the deep web. When someone out on the Internet asks, “Does anyone have suggestions on how to consolidate disparate 3rd party databases under one search?” We hear about it and respond.

Also, incoming inquires have increased as a result of Project Glean.

And, we have a real-world litmus test on the effectiveness of our sales and marketing efforts. When we send out PR releases, we not only measure incoming inquires as a component of ROI, we measure how frequently our name is mentioned as part of Internet discourse. As web blogs, the press, and social networks see our PR, attend conferences where we speak, and/or see our ads, they talk about us. And, we participate.

Finally, as an ancillary benefit, we track the number of “mentions” we receive on the Internet versus our competition. We therefore track, if you will, the marketing successes of our competition — in that we know how effective their marketing campaigns are. This provides wonderful feedback, when we see our competitors’ efforts, and wonder how much traction they gain from doing one form of marketing activity versus another.

In Summary

Federated Search, through our internal Project Glean effort, has help us maximize the effectiveness of our marketing dollars, and provide valuable feedback in the process. This is one example, where federated search provides a strategic advantage for business.

Stay tuned for more strategic uses for federated search …