Many of your individual contacts will be affiliated to one or more institutions. Identifying these ‘related contacts’ in your data can be a challenge, but this information is a valuable component of a ‘single view’ of your institutional customers or prospects, and it can be really valuable in targeting your marketing more effectively.
1. Inferring affiliation. When individuals register for one of your services (eg. to submit a paper, or sign up for alerts), they may enter their institution name and email address as part of the process. Using automated matching, it’s often possible to link individuals to known institutions via the institution names given, although such names can at times be incomplete, misleading, or – worse still – junk. Email domain matching is usually more successful (eg. linking people with ‘ox.ac.uk’ emails to University of Oxford), although this technique requires a reference resource of institutional email domains from the publisher or a third party such as Ringgold.
2. Related contact ‘headlines’. With connections inferred, counts of related individuals by type can be listed for each of your institutions: how many affiliated pay-per-view purchasers, alert recipients, authors, and online registrants? In this way, the ‘headlines’ for a given institution can be made visible in a compact format, and it’s possible to search for institutions of interest based on this data: find institutions with >10 online registrants, or >50 alert sign-ups, and so on.
3. Activity summaries. When individuals are linked to a specific institution, relevant data from their own activity can be ‘rolled up’ into a summary that appears against the institution. A powerful example of this idea is a ‘Journal Papers Summary’, where counts of submitted and published articles grouped by title, drawn from affiliated author profiles, can be displayed and searched. This makes it easy to identify institutions without a subscription to a specific title but with relevant author activity, or – by contrast – to find institutions with a subscription to a title but few author submissions to date. Similar title-specific summaries might be useful for other activity from affiliated individuals, such as pay-per-view transactions or alert sign-ups.
4. Key organisational contacts. Of course, in identifying institutional sales targets, you need to know who to approach with your promotional campaign. The means to identify key contacts for an organisation by role (library acquisitions, site contact, director, etc.) from within your source data is important. You can then easily locate the right individuals when you need their contact details.
Companies are always keen to look at systems and processes to improve productivity, but often ‘the little things’ relating to personal productivity can be equally important. Here we list our top 5 tips for working more effectively:
Good quality information is essential for decision-making, yet publishing staff may sometimes lack easy access to the right facts and figures. A dashboard combines related charts and metrics into a concise one-page view, which can then be tracked consistently over time. Often dashboards are seen as the preserve of senior management teams, but they can provide an excellent way for every department to see the ‘big picture’.
Passwords have become a fact of online life: the chances are you’ve entered several and perhaps created (or even forgotten) one or more already today. With such widespread use, it can be easy to view them as a minor annoyance, and overlook the importance of password security. Here we list five best practice tips for both web services and their users:
The term ‘data visualisation’ is often associated with unusual or complex (and often artistic) visual representations of data. It’s easy to be drawn to these images, and to overlook the value of more traditional and familiar techniques which offer tried-and-tested ways to spot trends and patterns in your data. If your aim is insight rather than art, simple and familiar visuals work best:
For any business-critical system, resilience is important: the ability to maintain an acceptable level of service in the face of faults. When you hear about aircraft flying on after the failure of one engine, that’s resilience. For your business systems, if you wish to minimise down-time and disruption, then simply taking regular backups is not enough…
In this month’s feature, we list our pick of the topics tipped to dominate online technology news in 2010. All of these predicted trends point to an interesting and innovative year ahead for web based services.
CRM (‘Customer Relationship Management’) is a broad term which can mean different things depending on who you ask and the context in which it is used. Systems described as ‘CRM solutions’ typically reflect this by addressing one or more of the areas listed below rather than all of them. When evaluating this type of software, it is therefore important to understand what you mean by ‘CRM’, and exactly what you want to get out of it.
Online security has again been in the news recently with reports that thousands of logins for webmail services such as Hotmail, Yahoo, and Gmail have been compromised and details posted online. Here we list some key areas that both web service providers and internet users should always keep in mind to help protect themselves on the web: