THE goals of informal websites like LinkedIn and serious financial information portals may seem worlds apart, but a senior Dow Jones executive appears to have found a way to join the dots to her firm's benefit.

As the president of the company's enterprise media group, Clare Hart has a first-hand account of the impact of Web 2.0 applications like blogs, search tools and social networking sites on traditional information providers like Dow Jones.

Dow Jones is the company behind The Wall Street Journal, Barons and dozens of smaller newspapers in the United States, but the unit which Ms Hart heads is responsible for driving so-called business-to-business subscription revenue.

It covers offerings like Dow Jones' newswire services and Factiva, a digital information bank boasting pinpoint searches of company, industry and executive news across nearly 10,000 publications and millions of online sources.

On the one hand, the firm, like most paid information providers, has to distinguish its content and services from the sea of free news available on Web pages through search tools like Google.

On the other, the proliferation of new media like blogs and user-generated online videos means that products like Factiva need to keep pace with the information onslaught. But Dow Jones appears to have emerged with triumphant battle scars.

"Our pro forma revenue in 2006 was US$675 million," Ms Hart told BizIT in an interview earlier this week. The Asia-Pacific region accounted for nearly 5 per cent of the firm's sales, with the lion's share coming from Dow Jones' stronghold in North America. "We have grown our business while Google is out there. Before that, it was Yahoo! and Alta Vista," she said.

Ms Hart credits the results to the firm's willingness to embrace Web 2.0 technologies to its advantage and Dow Jones' ability to develop niche products.

As an example, the company now offers various Factiva packages tailored to different job functions. Instead of trawling through voluminous archives of news and feature articles at one go, these role-based products aggregate content that is relevant to specific user groups.

"Factiva Salesworks is designed for sales professionals while Factiva Insights is designed for marketing professionals," Ms Hart explained. For added convenience, the company has also incorporated visual tools like charts and graphs to help users navigate the mountains of information available through its database

"The same old way of presenting stuff like giving a list of headlines doesn't work any more. One size doesn't fit all," she stressed. "You have to wrap smart technology and services around it (content)."

The company is even using the popularity of business networking sites like LinkedIn to complement Factiva, she added. While searching for a company's credentials in Factiva Salesworks, users can now click on the LinkedIn profiles of the firm's head honchos.

"Imagine how useful it would be for a sales person to know how many degrees of separation he is from, say, a CEO," Ms Hart explained, adding that the sales professional can then work towards making the necessary introductions to get to the prospective customer.

In addition, Factiva has also expanded its information sources to include over 10 million blogs and websites.

"For years people would use our service for mainstream media sources. That is no longer sufficient. As the press evolves to Websites and blogs, we've had to expand our coverage," Ms Hart stressed.

Later this month, Dow Jones will even include video searches in its Factiva database through a tie-up with audio and video search engine EveryZing, she added.

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