Comment of the Day: Semantic Marketing
Today's winning comment comes from Alex Iskold's must-read post Semantic Web Patterns: A Guide to Semantic Technologies. In the post Alex identifies the patterns that are beginning to emerge in the Semantic Web, classifies the different trends, and examines what the future holds. One of the comments to the post introduced us to the term "semantic marketing". Scott Brinker is curious about "how marketing will evolve to take advantage of the semantic web, whether it's in consumer or B2B plays."
Scott lists 7 possible missions for semantic marketing, leading with: "Marketing becomes the champion of generating the underlying data." (hmmm, that's similar to the issue of content management on corporate Intranets!). Here is Scott's full list of suggestions for semantic marketing, which you can also read here:
For participating in the discussion, Scott you've won a $30 Amazon voucher - courtesy of our competition sponsors AdaptiveBlue and their Netflix Queue Widget.
Great post.
One of the questions I find most fascinating is how marketing will evolve to take advantage of the semantic web, whether it's in consumer or B2B plays. I think this is more than a linear extension of how marketers have been optimizing the web today, but something qualitatively different. I suggest that SEO + Semantic Web = SEO++ (after all, it is sort of an object-oriented paradigm shift).
Here are 7 possible missions for "semantic marketing":
1. Marketing becomes the champion of generating the underlying data.
2. Marketing views categorization, metadata, RDF graphs, relevant microformats, etc., as a new kind of market positioning and placement -- "semantic branding", if you will.
3. Marketing takes a much broader view of distribution and promotion of its semantic web data in search engines and vertical networks (SEO++), including the sponsorship or creation of new niche semantic networks.
4. Marketing comes up with new ways to incentivize the conversion of semantic web interactions in real business objectives.
5. Marketing will have a real challenge with tracking and attributing distributed data in the semantic web to measure its impact -- from multi-touch marketing to micro-touch marketing. Hard problem but entrepreneurial ingenuity will prevail.
6. Marketing will want to leverage other people's data in their own value-add mash-ups (interesting "joint venture" semantic data partnerships), as well as for internal-only apps focused on market research and competitive intelligence.
7. Marketing will need to be concerned with brand protection in the semantic web: quality control to watch for bad data, conflicting data, competitive misuse, etc.If you're interested, http://www.chiefmartec.com/2008/03/marketing-in-th.html is the full post. Would love feedback from other marketers and semantic web afficionados.
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I read this post and some of the links contained in it and I don't really have a clue as to what semantic marketing is.
The good news is that if you ask 10 people what semantic marketing is you will get 10 differenct answers. So I'm not as dumb as I look after all.
Although I'm not an expert by any stretch of the imagination, I do think the conversation is a bit more complex than it needs to be.
The Masked Millionaire
@Richard -- thanks for selecting my remark as the comment of the day. Appreciate the link (and the $30 gift certificate).
@MaskedMillionare, I've been talking with folks about "semantic marketing" for the past month or so, and I agree with you: 10 different people, 10 different answers. Take everything with a grain of salt and healthy skepticism: we're all still feeling around the edges of something that's not in focus yet.
I think the non-complex answer is merely this: semantic marketing is whatever marketers will do to take advantage of semantic web "stuff". Initially, it probably will be pretty straightforward -- e.g., add some microformats to your pages to take advantage of pretty new listings in Yahoo!. Where and how it goes from there depends on incentives and imagination. Maybe it's a ways off, maybe not, but significant changes could happen pretty quickly.
I continue to be impressed with how much creative thought and effort goes into really good SEO work today. It's a very simple concept -- structure your pages a certain way, provide "good" content, and win "good" links. But when you really dig into the work to optimize it, there's a lot of variance in execution, quality, results. And it can get pretty complex.
To me, adding semantic web layers into this will, at the very least, increase the number of dimensions in which SEO-like marketing happens. If you just stop there and say that is semantic marketing, you've still increased the possibilities exponentially. That's why I've started to refer to that as SEO++.
But I suspect it will go a lot further than that...
Seems like everyone today is talking about SEO. While I certainly won't deny it's importance. Many sites have people leaving just as quickly as they came. My company www.TheMediaZoo.com creates Fun, Effective videos for companies that Grab attention and give instruction. Check us out, you'll see we are highly rated in the SEO catagory, but what seperates us is our ability to engage the person landing on our page in the first few seconds.
www.TheMediaZoo.com
My name is Josh
JoshD@themediazoo.com if you have additional questions.
It seems we just keep adding more layers to the SEO marketing onion. I can't help thinking more thought and effort goes into generating content for SEO than for any other purpose. A shame really.