DataJoe launches its National Marketplace!

A dream has come true for us at DataJoe.

We’ve long been wanting the opportunity to truly showcase our clients’ hard work – to give their products a chance to really shine. DataJoe’s Sales Manager Johnny Levy first wrote about the great potential for regional products to be national, and now that chance is here.

To check it out for yourself, head to www.datajoe.com. Here you’ll find an online listing of the best business lists and rankings available; a mega-store of high quality data offerings produced by some of the most prestigious publishers of data products in the world. Purchase local business rankings and directories for sales leads, industry research, mail merges and key personnel contact lists on a national level.

DataJoe clients with products already available on the Marketplace include Crain Communications Inc., Dolan Media Company, Florida Trend, and Journal Publications Inc.

“We have wanted to create a portal like this for a long, long time,” said Dan Feiveson, DataJoe co-founder and president. “Our business has always been to help data publishers make the most of their research products. It’s high time we assisted our clients more directly on the monetization side, not just the research side, of their business.”

The National Marketplace’s intuitive user interface will help customers find products by region, category or list type and quickly purchase multiple products in a single transaction.

“Our clients focus on business news and data within highly specific markets and offer exceptional data products tailored to their brand,” Feiveson said. “Our National Marketplace offers an outlet they can’t provide for themselves — and an opportunity to connect with a brand of customers entirely distinct from their own.”

For more information on DataJoe or to explore the National Marketplace, visit www.datajoe.com or e-mail support@datajoe.com.

Release Notes 1.26.09

Attention DataJoe Clients –

We’ve pushed a release to the system with a new functionality to the ranking feature in layout.  Please see below for details on this new feature.

Rank Start Number -

You can now determine a new start rank number for your lists by going into Project Setup–>Optional–>Style Adjustments.  At the bottom left of Style Adjustments you will see the option for “rank start #”.

By setting a different start number, this will force the first record on the list to automatically be ranked with the start number specified.  This will help with exporting multiple pages of your lists at a time.  Therefore, if you need to export records 25-50, for example, you can change the rank start number to correspond with the ranking that record 25 should be placed as and the following records will follow suit.

As always, if you have any questions on this new feature, please direct those to support@datajoe.com.

At your service,

The DataJoe Team

Join the 2010 BOL exchange through our community forum

Happy 2010!

With the new year comes a new chance for you to promote your publication and learn from others!

If you’d like to participate in a Book of Lists exchange with other DataJoe clients, head on over to our community forum at datajoe.com/forum and supply your name and address to participate.

To gain access to the forum, you need to be a registered user on the site. To do so, just click on the “New Member” link on the right-hand side of the screen and await your account confirmation. For existing users who may have lost or forgotten your account info, you can use the “Lost Account Info?” link or contact DataJoe at support@datajoe.com. We’re here to help!

We hope this exchange can provide valuable resources to you in planning and preparing for this year’s lists, directories, projects and next year’s Book of Lists!

Keep in mind, you can utilize this forum for interaction among your peer DataJoe researchers at any time if you’d like to learn more from them about their processes, projects they are working on or any other topics you’d like to discuss.

Here’s to a great 2010!

DataJoe National Marketplace: Can Local Go National?

National Potential.
In 2008, publishers using DataJoe for the whole year generated a combined total of around $1 million from the sales of their digital book of lists, directories, and other data. This reflects the efforts of 32 business publications across the United States, and their research departments, typically consisting of one full-time employee.

If we imagined all of these individual publishers as one, unified company, we’d be talking about a business with 32 employees that generated around a million dollars in data sales in 2008.

Compare that to InfoGroup (a.k.a. InfoUSA), a company with 4,771 employees which generated $738.3 million in net sales in 2008.

What does InfoUSA have that a local business journals don’t? Resources, employees, volume of data, and a national focus. The major difference, in a nutshell, is scale. InfoUSA is a nationally marketed and nationally recognized brand, with a nationally relevant product.

Although DataJoe clients are often the number one source of business information in their sorted regions, none of them alone would be able to single-handedly become relevant to a national marketplace.

But, what if all of these prestigious, regionally recognized business publishers, were able to join forces and leverage their data assets to become relevant to a national marketplace?

Is it possible business journals could start getting a piece of a much larger, multi-billion dollar pie?

InfoUSA is one of a multitude of national data providers who get their data a multitude of ways. The industry is huge. And as marketers, we know that nationally harvested data often lacks LOCAL PRECISION AND ACCURACY. Herein lies the revolutionary strength of the local business journal, and the secret value of the data it provides. Business journals touch businesses in their regions on a frequent, ongoing basis, through one-to-one survey contact. The relationship is cooperative, not one-sided. The business journal needs the data in order to produce compelling products, and the businesses that participate need the prestige, recognition, and FREE exposure they get from being ranked on a list. Consider the last time you got a call from a national data provider’s call center. What value was there for you in answering their questions? I can tell you from my own experience: NONE. I blew them off because I had NO incentive to tell them anything.

Businesses “opt in” to give business journals their data because they want to participate in the lists and get their proper due for their achievements in a forum of their peers. Therefore the editorial quality of business journal data is head and shoulders above what is commercially available from national data marketers, who, in contrast, rely on brute force cold calling, Internet harvesting, and a variety of other tactics to wrestle information from a reluctant audience  with little incentive to participate.

I believe it’s time to explore the national potential of regional data, harvested organically as a byproduct of mutual relationship. United together in a common purpose, regional business journals can become nationally relevant as rich data providers. That’s what I think.

With the GREAT POWER comes great responsibility!

One of my favorite things about FireFox is it’s ability to seamlessly handle all sorts of add-ons. This means that you can EASILY add features like, the ability to keep tabs on your email, ability to see the IP address of every website you visit, ability to debug HTML, CSS, and even JavaScript directly from your browser… I’ve even seen a add-on that helps you order pizza!

The very thing that makes FireFox stand head-and-shoulders above the rest, can also make it a big headache. Over the past few months, I have seen two separate circumstances in which a program or add-on has cause DataJoe to just not work. By sharing this information with our Community, I hope to help save others from the same kind of headache.

The two programs we have specifically seen cause problems with DataJoe are an Add-on called “Adblock Plus” and the Internet Firewall made by CA.

Basically, both programs were designed with measures to try and prevent JavaScript generated Pop-ups. What neither vendors considered is that the specific code they are using has the tenancy to throw JavaScript errors in some situations. When this happens, all things JavaScript stop.  In both cases, while DataJoe began loading, it was abruptly stopped at some point before the Login screen was displayed.

The solution in both situations? Disable or uninstall the offending software while using DataJoe.

So, if you are having problems with DataJoe… or any site really… loading or working properly, the first thing I would suggest is disabling all of your FireFox Add-ons. You can do this by clicking “Tools” in the menu, followed by “Add-ons”. This will open the “Add-ons” window. Precede by clicking on each item listed in the content area and selecting “Disable”. Once you are finished, you will need to restart FireFox. If you are still having an issue with DataJoe after this, give us a call and we’d be happy to help you find a solution! If this fixes it, try adding your Add-ons back one or two at a time… this way you can use the process of elimination to determine which of the Add-ons are not compatible with DataJoe.  If you do find an offending program or Add-on, let us know!

Release Notes 11.10.09

Hello DataJoe Clients:

We’ve pushed a release last night with a new functionality feature for Layout and BlueLines, as well as a new feature in the Reporter Module. Please see below for details regarding this update.

Sum and Count fields:

Layout now includes the ability to add a count for every association zone field as well as a sum field for every association field that is a numeric, percent, or currency field. These special fields can be placed into your layout to show a row that totals or counts the values within a particular association zone.

For example, if you had an association zone for subsidiaries and asked for the annual revenue for each subsidiary. In layout you could just show the # of subsidiaries (COUNT:: subsidiary name) and the total revenues (SUM :: subsidiary revenue).

Archiving in Reporter:

The Reporter Module now has an independent section for housing archived submissions. As in the Researcher Module, this feature can be found under Advanced Tools, and Archived Submissions.

Please be advised that this feature is only accessible to users with the Reporter Module add on.

As always, please contact us for any questions regarding this release.

Thank you,

The DataJoe Team

DataJoe’s 2009 MEGA Researcher Conference Resources Now Available

DataJoe’s third annual MEGA Researcher Conference provided our clients with the opportunity to access and share information about researching and the DataJoe system among peer researchers and DataJoe team members. Held in October, this year’s Webinar Edition allowed clients to come together without the expense of travel costs.

In the Social Network Your Data, Turning Site Metrics into Revenue and Scouting Out Data 2.0 sessions, attendees gained insight into tools and sources used by peer researchers. The ever popular Best Ideas Roundtable session allowed all attendees to share highlights from the year on great products they’ve put together or new policies and procedures they’ve implemented in the researching process. In the New Functionalities session, attendees heard about new and upcoming features to the system as well as a few “quick hits” of helpful searching tools such as wild card searching and the prospect flag search.

Two presentations – Nominations: A Researcher’s Experience and 20,000 Records in A Single Project allowed for in-depth looks into the projects of Virginia Business and Sports Business Journal, respectively. This year we also added Clarification Stations – where DataJoe team members lead instructional-based sessions on different aspects of the system such as explaining the difference between sub-projects and inner projects, detailing the different ways to associate products on e-commerce pages and how to create a search page through your e-commerce portal.

The Webinar format also provided for the opportunity to showcase the DataJoe Award winners in their own sessions and allowed them to present on the products or processes for which they received awards.

Those who attended the conference can now access videos, PowerPoint presentations, handouts and more when logged in to our Web site at http://software.datajoe.com/conference/index.php.

These resource are available for attendees to review what you learned in the sessions or to view sessions for the first time if you weren’t able to attend at certain times throughout the week of the conference.

As you obtain more information from the sessions we held a few weeks ago, please feel free to visit the DataJoe Notes community forum at www.datajoe.com/forum and add your questions or comments to the discussion board. We believe that the best ideas can come from collaboration, including sharing ideas among peer researchers, and the discussion board is the best place for you to do that.

If you have any remaining questions about the conference or the sessions that we held, please contact conference@datajoe.com.

Release Notes 9.04.09

Hello DataJoe Clients:

We’ve pushed a release this week with updates to the download for CSV files. Please see below for details regarding this update.

CSV download:

CSV files now include the project title and subtitle in the first two lines like it did in DJ3. The download also includes updated representation of footnotes both within data and project footnotes. Footnotes are represented with parenthesis to distinguish the footnote from the data.

For questions on this release please contact support@dataJoe.com.

Thanks,

The DataJoe Team

Release Notes 8.14.09

We’ve pushed another release with updates to Layout, the Project Package Tool and Searching.  Please see below for details regarding the new functionality.

PDF Generator:
Sometimes PDF’s simply do not export.  The most common reasons for this are due to improperly structured HTML tags in your lists layout or weird characters on the list, which is a result of copy/pasting data from the Web.  To help you determine why your PDF’s are not generating we have developed a PDF generator catch that identifies where the problem spot lies in your data, so you can fix.
Here’s a screen shot of the PDF generator that has identified where the data is that’s causing the error:

This shows you that the highlighted in yellow text is the problem spot, which will need to be edited on your end.  The text in red tells you what’s wrong with this data to give you an idea of how to edit it, so the PDF will generate.

Project Package Tool — E-mails in Contact File:
There is now a toggle in project packages to “Include e-mail address in contacts file.”  With this toggled, and after you Save/Cache your project package, there is a new column in the “Contacts” file of the download, which is for the personal e-mail field of person records.  If the personal e-mail is populated for records then it will list this in the contacts file.

Wildcard Searching:
You now have the ability to do searches for a record with a specific word in it or starting with a particular letter. To do these searches you will add in a percentage sign (%).
For example, you could do a search for “Big%t” which would yield a search for records that started with Big and had the letter “t” somewhere else in the name.
You can also do a search for T%, which will give you a result of all records starting with the letter “T”.

As always, please contact us for any questions regarding this release.

Thank you,

The DataJoe Team

Release Notes 7/30/09:

We’ve pushed a substantial release this week which includes updates to existing DataJoe processes and additions of new functionality to many areas of the system.   Please see below for a list of all the items included in this release.

Text next to the “Update your Data” button:

You are now able to edit the text next to the “Update your Data” button found on the cover letter of an e-mail blast.  This is a feature that can be changed on a project-by-project basis.  To do this, go to the project you would like to edit this text on.  Once in Project Setup, go to Optional.  In Optional–>Survey Settings, there is now an option for “Click-through HTML”.  If you click onto this text you can change the wording.   After changing the wording make sure to send yourself a test e-mail to review your new wording.

Improved Vertical Spacing Tool in Pre-Press:

We’ve made some improvements to the vertical spacing tool in pre-press.  You are now able to adjust the vertical spacer by using any of the following options:

• moving the purple bar up or down
• while clicked onto the bar, use the up or down arrows on your keyboard
• by typing into the “vertical” text box.

See below for the new look of this tool.

Sub-project previous ranking/Sub-project Footnotes:

You now have the ability to use previous rankings and project footnotes within sub-projects.  To enable this, you will need to go to the Sub-projects Optional settings under Style Adjustments.  In Optional–>Style Adjustments; there is now a toggle for “Sub-project prev. rank overrides.”

With this option checked off, within the sub-projects advanced details of a record, you can chose the option to “Edit sub-project” to edit the sub-projects previous ranking and project footnote.  You will find this option at the bottom of the sub-projects advanced details.

After adding in the previous ranking and footnote, you can view this in bluelines or pre-press, just like in any other project.  And, you still have the ability to do a permanent edit-text of the previous ranking and a temporary cosmetic-edit (right clicking) of the footnotes, while in pre-press.

Icon for word/text docs on E-commerce:

Now on your E-commerce site if you have a .txt or .doc file uploaded as a static product you will see an icon next to those products for the corresponding product type.

For .txt files you will see: 

For .doc files you will see:

CAPACHE added to contact page of E-commerce:

We’ve added a CAPTCHA for the default contact page in your E-commerce site.  For any client who’s using the “Contact” tab on E-commerce, and you are using our default DataJoe contact page, you will now have a CAPTCHA which helps to prevent Web crawlers from sending e-mails to the contact.  To view this, go to your E-commerce site and click on your Contact page. You will now see the below:

Back button on Track Transactions:

There is now a way to get back to the Track Transactions page when review an order detail.  If you are in Track Transactions and click onto a person’s name to review their order details you will now see a  “< Return” hypertext at the bottom of the details page.  If you click onto Return it will take you back to the Track Transactions page.

Hierarchy flag field/value list:

You now have the ability to add hierarchies to flag field/value lists.  Hierarchies give order to value lists by grouping the flags into sub-categories. To create a hierarchy flag field go to your flag manager and switch the flag type to Hierarchy and click the create button to create a new Hierarchy flag. You’ll then be taken to the Hierarchy creation area, which will look like this:

.

From this area you can load in flags and form sub-categories of flags by using the arrow buttons.  To load in a flag, click on the green “Load” button.  To unload a flag, click on the green “Unload” button.  After loading in all the necessary flags you can move the flags into the necessary order by using the up and down arrows.

To create the sub-categories click onto the flag you wish to create the sub-category for and then click on the down & right arrow-button .  To remove a sub-category use the down & left arrow-button .  Once a sub-category has been created it will be indented (see below).

After you have finished creating the Hierarchy flag group; click save.  Note that it might take a few minutes to build the flag after saving.  Then, just like any other flag field, you will want to create the value list field (in the survey setup of your project), which the hierarchy group flag is built from.  To do this go to your survey setup and create a new field type for value list.  After naming the field hit “next” and chose the hierarchy field you just created from the “build from flag group” drop-down option.  Check if you want to “allow multiple selections” or not and save and load the field onto your survey setup.

Now, what will the field look like on the survey? See example below…

The main flags for “Real Estate” and “Home Builder” are purple.  Once the survey recipient checks off either option—it will open up the sub-categories for the survey recipient to chose from.  Each sub-category the recipient checks off will be calculated next to the main flag (just like the Home Builder flag is showing the number one next to it because “commercial construction project” is selected.)