Follow your customers on LinkedIn, Twitter & Facebook

The business world has rapidly embraced much of the consumer social web, with LinkedIn leading the charge. But don’t overlook Twitter and Facebook – many businesses have invested in these outlets as well. The combination of all three social networks give you the ability to not only know what your customers are saying, but also know what your customers’ customers are saying. LinkedIn recently added an expanded companies feature that has a wealth of statistics that can give you a feel for whether a business is expanding or contracting. By following a business on LinkedIn you can see recent hiring, departures, promotions and openings – all clues about the company’s existing financial health as well as potential future growth plans.

View your customers business location on Google StreetView or Microsoft Bing Maps 3D

I’m sure you’ve used Google or Bing Maps to get directions to a customer location, but one feature that’s often overlooked is Google Street View or Maps 3D. (See my office here) Google and Bing have amassed a massive collection of street level and bird’s eye view pictures and allow you to pan in different directions to get a complete feel of the surroundings. From a business perspective this extra level of information helps tell you whether your customer is in an office park, industrial complex, renting space above a restaurant or even working out of their house—all of which can help provide you with more insight as to the financial strength of your customer.

Monitor your customers’ social channels with TweetDeck, Seesmic, HootSuite, or CoTweet

There are a variety of tools that allow you to follow companies and track specific keywords across the major social networks. Tools like TweetDeck, HootSuite, Seesmic and CoTweet provide both desktop, web and mobile clients to help you manage the flow of information. All offer free versions and some offer premium offerings. You’ll find a broader range of features for the paid versions. Not only can you track your own brand, but you can search and monitor your customers.

Create alerts with SocialMention, Google and Yahoo

Obviously you can’t be in front of your computer all the time, so alerts are a great way to stay up to date. On this front you have a few options that range from free to paid monthly subscriptions—for these it depends on the type of information being monitored to determine cost. For public companies there is a wealth of free information from Google, Yahoo, MarketWatch and others – all enable you to build a portfolio of public companies and trigger alerts for free. For private companies Google and Yahoo will generally pick up web, larger media news sources and blog information, but for more in-depth information you’ll need to use a paid service. I’m obviously biased, but in the spirit of nearly free, Cortera offers a daily customer alerting service for only $99/month that focuses on payment risk, regional and industry news and growth opportunities. Recently called the “biggest ‘bang for my buck’ of any source that I have ever used“, Cortera can spot the downside and upside in your customer portfolio – all for thousands less than other solutions on the market. Another free service called SocialMention enables you to both set alerts and search in real-time across the major social networks, web and blogs.

Checkout the review sites like Yelp, Kudzu, TripAdvisor, CitySearch, InsiderPages and others

Rating and review websites have become a major intersection of consumers with local businesses. Instead of a professional critic rating a service, business or restaurant- – these communities enable members to provide their own commentary and ratings. The number of outlets grows every day along with the wealth of information provided on these sites. If you are interacting with smaller, local business, websites like Yelp, Kudzu, TripAdvisor, CitySearch, and InsiderPages are worth a search. You’ll definitely get a feel for what your customers’ customers are saying. On payment risk side we have the Cortera Credit Exchange which provides members with free access to ratings and reviews of how companies pay their bills. If you operate in specific industry, we also have groups or what we call Circles that you can join – you’ll receive alerts on how businesses are paying their bills from other users in the same industry.

All of these tools will help you become smarter about yours customer and will likely win you a few points as are able to easily converse about their current needs.

Have a website or source I missed? Please send them along for the group.

Number one on the trade debt claim front (sixth largest creditor overall) was Starcom Mediavest Group which is owned by Publicis Groupe SA and their $121.54 million in exposure. With S&P now looking to potentially downgrade Publicis’ credit rating because of their exposure to GM, it is fair to question the impact on others listed by GM. Publicis makes the list twice with its own claim of $25.2 million, bringing their family exposure total to $146.8 million. Please find the complete list below.

GM’s Suppliers are Paying Their Suppliers Slower

A quick analysis using Cortera’s database of business payment experience shows that with an average payment risk score for this group of companies of 441, this group is already paying their suppliers slower. More than half the list fall into our “Consistently Higher Risk” Category and additional five suppliers fall into our “Higher Risk, Trending Down” category meaning that they are paying very slowly and in a downward trend over the last 3 months. Interestingly, based on the information reported to us, American Axle’s average Days Beyond Terms (DBT) is 7 days versus the industry average for auto parts suppliers of 9.16 days. Similarly, TRW Automotive is also below the industry average. On the other hand, other auto parts suppliers, including number two on the list below, Delphi, has an average DBT of 21 days–well above the industry average.

General Motors (GM) Suppliers with over $10 million in Trade Debt Claims

Are you a supplier to GM or one of their suppliers? How are you handling the bankruptcy?

Drop us a note.

Knol versus Wikipedia.

Before you confuse Knol with a small natural hill or a large furniture company and answer unequivocally ‘Wikipedia,’ I’m going to break this one down for you.

In one corner, we have 6-year-old Wikipedia encyclopedia – one of the largest reference Web sites that attracts over 684 million visitors yearly, and has more than 75,000 active contributors working on more than 10 million articles in over 250 languages.   If you search nearly any keyword using Google, 9 times out of 10, a Wikipedia listing is on the first page.

In the other corner, with a public life span of one week, is Knol.  Knol “A Unit of Knowledge” is a searchable online resource with a variety of authoritative user-written articles about specific topics that the writers are experts in.   I recently wrote 3 articles, called “knols,” about Company Information, Business Directories, and How to Gain A Competitive Advantage in Business.  Unlike Wikipedia, Knol authors stand behind their published names and credentials.  Each knol is written by an individual, but can be edited by readers through a feature called “moderated collaboration.”  This allows the author of the knol to accept, reject or modify suggested changes before they are visible to the public.

Knol’s stats are nowhere close to being as impressive as Wikipedia’s (it opened in beta with a few hundred articles, predominantly in the health and medical field).  However, Knol is a strong underdog with great potential.   A ‘unit of knowledge’ worth recognizing is that Knol is a Google project that was invented by Udi Manber of Google.  If anyone can challenge Wikipedia as a top online reference resource, it’s a Google creation.   While Wikipedia has already established itself as one of the top 10 most visited sites on the internet, Knol holds the “Google Card” as its potential ace in the hole.  Search engines continue to be the primary tool used for searching the Web, and as of November, Google controlled nearly 70% of the search market share.

This raises another hot issue concerning the new Google Knol.  There have been serious debates as to whether it’s possible for Google to remain unbiased as it expands from information gatherer to information provider.  As it stands, Google plays a major role in the Web sites we view and those lost in cyberspace.   Although Google is reassuring users that they will rank their knols objectively and “appropriately,” debate is already emerging about whether Google has a possible or potential conflict of interest – especially in light of Google’s  advertising-driven model.   Those expressing unease include Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan.  In a recent blog post, Sullivan writes,

“I remain concerned that by hosting this content, it plays too much in the content owner space when its core business is supposed to be driving traffic outbound to others. Hosting content sets up inherent conflicts that over time start to erode the trust people have in Google, I feel.”

Trust is hard to gain, but easily lost.  Will even the slightest possibility of Google manipulating their position in the natural listings in order to make their pages easier to find begin to diminish your trust in the search engine?   Or, does Google have good intentions of closing an information hole that was left open in order to further assist searchers of knowledge?

Whether you’re a supporter or a challenger, Google Knol will remain in the rankings.  So, the biggest question still left to answer is whether Google Knol will knock Wikipedia off its proverbial pedestal for the number one spot in the competitive online reference world.  I suppose we’ll all have to wait for the photo finish, but one thing’s for certain – with their impressive track record, I would seriously think twice before betting against Google.

Like Wikipedia and Knol, Cortera provides quality, user-contributed information that we incorporate into our Free Company Profiles.  However, Cortera’s business information differs greatly from other user-contributed information providers in that all knowledge featured on our Website must first pass a rigorous screening process to ensure its authenticity.

In the context of business information, we’ve talked lately about how information wants to be free, yet structured, but what about doing that for all content?  Google immediately comes to mind. Google created the ultimate database based on the simplest of missions: “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful“.  One of the things that makes Google so ubiquitous is their ability to insulate the user from such a complex task, yet, even Google, has not delivered a way to assemble all of those pieces of information so that they can be consumed by other applications.  Over the last several months I have been watching as a new service by MetaWeb called Freebase, has evolved around their mission to build an “open database of the world’s information.”   What makes their approach interesting is their openness (data is freely available to anyone under an open license) and that it provides structure and context to each piece of information forming a web of interconnected relationships.  Freebase is enabling their users upload content and then to create their own data types and categories much like many Web 2.0 applications allow content tagging.  The Freebase “types” enable developers to link content across many topics to provide context for various queries in an effort to get the user exactly what they are hoping to find.  For example you could enter “U2″ into a search engine in an attempt to find  the Irish rock band U2 and get back U2 the band, U2 the spy plane or U2 a German submarine and thousands of other  (likely irrelevant) results.  The example below shows the semantic relationships around a single Musical Artist.  Each type has many properties to help describe a particular artist-all of which can be used to more efficiently and precisely deliver search results.

However, the ideal of a semantic web still has a long way to go.  There are still plenty of issues and challenges associated with this effort.  One recently uploaded list to Freebase is called “Female CEOs of public companies in order of Market Cap“.  At first glance the list seems solid and accurate; however after some quick research it is easy to see that two of the first five entries are out of date (Meg Whitman is no longer CEO of eBay and Nance Dicciani is also not the CEO of Honeywell).  It will be interesting to watch and see if this information set and others can truly self-heal via a community like Freebase.

Whether you call it a folksonomy or social tagging or Web 3.0, adding the flexibility and insight of these new connections not typically found in traditional relational databases will enable a wealth of new applications to be built around Freebase.  Developers are already drawn to the lack of licensing traditionally found with large masses of information and as a result new applications are being added daily.

Let us know your thoughts on free information services like Freebase and what applications you’d like to see built using semantic technology.

These are some of the crucial questions that companies struggle with every day. To analyze large companies, especially public ones, it’s relatively easy to acquire current and accurate answers to these questions. There’s one big problem, though. The vast majority of companies we interact with are small and private. Finding information and making decisions about them is far more difficult.

Google and other “free Internet” data sources have unleashed incredible breakthroughs in the availability of information. They have broken many old school philosophies and reminded us once again that convenience and accessibility are what the information age is all about. Tons of information is now available to the masses for free at the click of a Search button.

Taking the time to sift through the free Internet is often tolerable for consumers but businesses normally need a higher level of structure and distillation of information to fully support high-volume, time-sensitive business processes. Manually searching and analyzing a pile of data doesn’t scale well.

To address this issue of quality and structure, companies have typically turned to traditional business information providers. The problem is that these providers continue to treat information like a scarce resource and demand high prices for access to it. They aren’t keeping up with the explosion of data availability or the flexible new technologies for accessing that data. People looking for information are increasingly accustomed to getting what they want for free or nearly free. They want more of the right information for less, not the other way around. The days of “I have the data and you must pay me a lot to see it” are going fast.

Information wants to be free. The good stuff – the dirt, skinny, scoop, lowdown and what’s what – always finds a way to make the rounds. Sometimes it’s readily available but most times the valuable insights are found within obscured information such as trends, events and interactions. And new data sources are emerging at a rapid pace. There is more data available electronically every day. Computers are getting faster every day. Storage is cheaper every day. With all this innovation in the air, you should be able to get the skinny on businesses fast, cheap and right when you need it.

Cortera’s mission is to bring the power of new data and technologies to find answers to the questions businesses face in new and better ways and at compelling prices. That means more information, better organized information, analytics to pull the value from the ever-growing gobs of data and great applications to improve your business processes.

That’s what Cortera is all about. We look forward to changing the world with you.