When you think about it, your contact list contains a tremendous amount of useful business information. If you need to find somebody at a certain company, don't you check both your contact list and your incoming emails for likely people to know?
What about doing this on an enterprise-wide scale? What if the company needed to find a contact at a large prospect? The Wall Street Journal reports....
Financial information giants Thomson Corp. and Dun & Bradstreet Corp. each recently bought small software companies that make products for this purpose. Thomson, of Toronto, bought Contact Networks Inc. in January, while D&B, of Short Hills, N.J., acquired Visible Path Inc., both for undisclosed terms. The software is supposed to help companies drum up business by allowing employees to make use of each others' contacts. For example, salespeople can pitch to a co-worker's contacts, while corporate recruiters could use the program to target employees' friends and acquaintances.
The products work by examining the contact lists on employees' email programs, as well as other information such as lawyers' billing records or contacts stored on special programs for managing customer relationships. Then it checks how often individuals email the contacts and whether they have appointments for face-to-face meetings or phone calls on their calendars. The software uses that information to determine how strong a relationship a person has with the contact. For example, individual emails that get replies rank higher than a blast email sent to many people.
Of course, this raises all sorts of privacy and account management concerns. What if that person you know at General Electric was your ex-spouse? And, how do you prevent somebody from calling that contact that asked you to leave them alone?
Still, it sounds like these issues can be resolved with clever software checks and balances. It would be a new way to get value from email.
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