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.
