Scoble Interviews Dow Jones/Factiva’s Clare Hart

For those interested in the enterprise search and monitoring market, Robert Scoble’s Podtech interview with Clare Hart of Dow Jones is a must watch.  As President of the Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group and former CEO of Factiva, she certainly knows this market from the perspective of the large enterprise.  The interview focuses on Factiva and she does an excellent job of explaining what they are doing with regard to blog monitoring, sentiment analysis, and other topics. 

In some segments of the marketplace, CustomScoop does compete with Factiva, though they are fundamentally different products.  In any event, as Clare says in the video, “competition is healthy.”  I believe we all can learn a lot from each other if we’re willing to listen and engage in conversation. 

Certainly Factiva seems to “get it” more than the other major enterprise research tool, Lexis Nexis.  I have accounts on both systems that I use for research (CustomScoop is designed for monitoring, not historical research) which I believe is the greatest strength of both of those systems.  But Factiva seems to be more actively engaging in the field of monitoring and it will be interesting to see how that evolves over time.

Scoble does a good job of being relatively unobtrusive which is one of the reasons I generally enjoy watching his videos.  He doesn’t attempt to become part of the story like some other interviewers do.  He clearly asks questions out of curiosity and not simply in an effort to elicit information he already knows.

Clare has a great presence and it is an interesting interview that I encourage anyone in the field (or who have an interest in it) to watch.