Chief Marketing Technologist by Scott Brinker

BrandTags.Net -- A Great Experiment

Noah Brier put together a fantastic little web application, BrandTags.net.

The site shows you brand logos and invites you to respond with a one-word or one-phrase "tag" that pops into your mind when you see it. After you submit your tag, you can then see how other people have responded by viewing a "tag cloud" that shows all the words and phrases that other people have submitted, where the size is larger the more people who submitted the same thing.

So, for example, you might see the CNN logo. I entered "larry king" as my phrase. When you drill down to the tag cloud, not many people have answered Larry King, as it's very small. The word "news" is humongous. "Biased", "liberal", "lies", "propaganda", and "tv" are also rather large. Well, two out of five ain't bad.

As Noah remarks in his introduction, "The basic idea of this site is that a brand exists entirely in people's heads. Therefore, whatever it is they say a brand is, is what it is." Somewhere out there, a CNN brand manager is spitting up blood.

Obviously, there's sampling bias and probably more than a few people who have maliciously spammed this experiment by now, so it's taken with a grain of salt. But it's fascinating nonetheless. Breathes new life into the tag metaphor, as an easy way for people to categorize and remark on things — even subtle and complex things — in a way that can then be collectively culled for insight.

Marketing in the cloud

Marketers should have their heads in the cloud.

If you haven't read The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr yet, you need to add it to your list. Cloud computing — that is, computing infrastructure that is based somewhere out on the Internet, rather than installed on hardware locked in your company's IT center — is becoming real. Fast.

Combined with the maturity of web-based software-as-a-service offerings, the strong gravitational pull of social media sites where marketers now work beyond the borders of their company's sandbox, and the widespread proliferation of web services and mash-up APIs, the cloud has become marketing's new IT platform.

For marketers, this is a terrific opportunity (a) to re-calibrate the relationship between marketing and technology and (b) to expand your capabilities in the "new marketing" environment, where the pace of innovation in online marketing channels and methods continues to accelerate.

I think of "computing in the cloud" for marketing in fairly broad terms — more broadly than the technical definition of cloud computing — and divide it into four buckets:

1. Web sites where you are a participant or sponsor, particularly social media communities. These are sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Xing, MySpace, Yahoo! Groups, Digg, del.icio.us, Twine, etc. This isn't what most tech people think of when they talk about cloud computing, but from a marketer's perspective, these are important services out on the Internet that you must plug into to do your job. Your audience is in the cloud, and you have to go in there after them. The IT aspects, however, reside outside of your control.

2. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications. These are applications that you access through your web browser, are hosted on a server farm by a third-party, for which you have zero operational involvement. Some are free, such as Google Analytics, but many are provided on a subscription basis, such as Salesforce.com. Pay only for as much as you need for as long as you need. There are a plethora of SaaS applications for marketers available today, with more coming online every month — if you have a favorite that I've missed in my "for instance" below, please add it in the comments:

• customer relationship management (ex: Salesforce.com);
• landing page management (ex: LiveBall — disclaimer, my firm);
• surveys and questionnaires (ex: SurveyMonkey);
• email marketing management (ex: ExactTarget);
• web site analytics (ex: Google Analytics);
• marketing resource management (ex: MarketingCentral);
• blogging platforms (ex: Typepad);
• lead nurturing (ex: Marketo);
• digital asset management (ex: Celum Imagine);
• search marketing management (ex: SearchIgnite);
• project management (ex: AtTask);
• web conferencing and webinars (ex: WebEx);

3. Web services and on-demand IT infrastructure. If there are specialized applications that you still want or need to build yourself — including online applications that are built into the ecosystem of your product offerings — you can take advantage of components, services, and infrastructure layers out in the cloud. Your programmers will develop your app, which will nominally live inside your IT environment, but certain components or layers of it will be dynamically accessed in the cloud. These include:

• data storage services (ex: Amazon S3);
• semantic processing (ex: Reuters Calais);
• mapping and geotargeting (ex: Google Maps);
• APIs for Twitter, Facebook;
• payment processing services;
• feed aggregators (ex: Yahoo! Pipes);

4. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). The furthest down the continuum, platform-as-a-service means that you develop your own custom applications, but they live entirely in the cloud. Salesforce.com was one of the pioneers of this idea, by opening up their platform — force.com — to let any developer create application on their infrastructure. Google recently announced their Google App Engine with a similar vision.

The value proposition for developing on a cloud-based platform is that you get all the scalability, reliability, and high-speed performance of these environments without having to build up all that infrastructure yourself. Put in terms that marketing can appreciate: you can create a custom app on the web without necessarily having to engage the overhead or ongoing involvement of your IT department or corporate data center.

Advantages of cloud computing and SaaS/PaaS in general:

• you can try a new idea with less up-front investment, which facilitates and encourages a more experimental culture — this is a great way to quickly engage the leading edge of new marketing channels and methods;
• if you end up with an overnight sensation, you have "instant elasticity" for matching capacity as demand requires it;
• economies of scale, since cloud providers are aggregating infrastructure for a certain type of service across hundreds or thousands of firms;
• time from concept-to-launch of a new application is shortened, since you're not reinventing the wheel or waiting on physical installations;
• more direct relationship between expense and benefit, as cloud computing is usually a variable cost;
• direct IT maintenance overhead is almost completely eliminated;
• for SaaS applications, new features come online automatically without having to engage in the delay, cost, or frustration of "upgrades";

There are, however, objections, caveats, and trade-offs as well:

• you end up with dependencies on third parties for these applications, rather than having the safety (or the illusion of safety) of being self-reliant for uptime, availability, continuity, etc.;
• your data can become fractured in many different silos by working with many different providers in the cloud;
• security and privacy risks: what happens if someone breaks into your account or hacks the provider's database?
• business continuation risk: what happens if the provider in the cloud goes out of business?
• terms of service risk: what if the rules of how you can use the service change unexpectedly?
• price change risk: what happens if usage costs rise unexpectedly?

While these are legitimate concerns that should be weighed when adopting any cloud application, the reality is that many of these risks already exist with your internal IT operations. Uptime, security, privacy, sustainability, data integrity, etc., are all issues that plague IT departments.

This is the "fear of flying" phenomenon. The odds of a fatal car accident far exceed the odds of dying in a plane crash. However, many people who are afraid of flying aren't afraid of driving because in a car their hands are on the wheel. This is a false sense of security. (Sorry, hope I didn't spoil your commute.)

Failures of major cloud computing applications and platforms get a lot of attention, but the number of internal IT "crashes" are actually much higher, the far majority of which receive little or no publicity outside a company's four walls. (And sometimes not even that.) Because cloud computing providers are under such intense scrutiny for their performance — their reputation, and hence their business, is on the line — they often take far more precautions and invest in heavier and more redundant infrastructure than IT departments hosting the same application for their own firm.

The other concerns can be mitigated by taking a few proactive steps and common sense precautions:

• have a technical gatekeeper in marketing who vets cloud applications (e.g., a chief marketing technologist or some such role);
• define and defend "core data" structures, while being open and flexible with more ancillary data feeds;
• understand the service level agreements (SLA) and track record of the provider;
• read the fine print of the agreement for terms of service;
• how much control do you have to customize via configuration and/or APIs?
• determine how easy is it to get your data out;
• think through "switching costs": if your concept works, but this provider doesn't, how easy is will it be to migrate to a different solution?
• follow security best practices with your cloud applications: good passwords, changed frequently, not distributed across multiple users, always used over secure connections, etc.;
• keep tabs on your provider, an ear to the ground on their business, more closely than you would a software vendor whose product you've installed internally;

Overall, working in the cloud enables marketing departments to react much faster to new ideas and new opportunities, without necessarily having to drag along IT. But, as has been said, "with great power comes great responsibility".

As marketing becomes more in control of its technological destiny, it must absorb technical leadership into its management and ranks. The future of the chief marketing technologist awaits in the cloud above.

A new S curve for search engine ads?

Are we on the verge of a new S curve for search engine advertising?

S curves are a phenomenon of technology adoption. They begin where a particular technology — in this case, ads on search engine results pages (SERPs) — arrive on the scene with chaotic, slow growth while early adopters figure it out. Then a dominant model emerges — e.g., Google AdWords text ads — where the winning approach and the benefits to the market become obvious, powering mainstream adoption at an exponential rate. But eventually growth levels off, adoption saturates, and incremental improvements and benefits plateau.

At this point, new technologies, approaches, and business models vie in the same space to be the "the next new thing" — to trigger a new S curve that will overtake the old one.

The beginning of this new S curve is again chaotic and slow: lots of ideas, many of which will fail, many of which are initially not as effective as the dominant winner in the old S curve. There's usually resistance from people on the old S curve, who have mastered that game and are reluctant to have the rules change. When you're used to something, especially something on which your livelihood is based, it can be hard to imagine something different.

But the forces of entrepreneurial ferment and early adopter incentives conspire to push past that skepticism and uncover the winners of the new S curve. Once they crystallize, and the new value proposition comes into focus for everyone else, people jump from the old curve to the new curve, and the new dominant model takes off at exponential speed.

And the cycle of disruptive innovation continues.

Recent events make me wonder if a new S curve is soon to emerge for search engine ads:

1. Growth in US online ad spending is slowing. A recent eMarketer article reported that, in particular, "comScore data shows a second straight month of slower growth in paid clicks for Google's main ad-serving business." Now growth is still growth, and given the talk of recession, a slowing of search ad budgets may be a temporary blip. But it's also consistent with the hypothesis that search engine ads are nearing the top of their S curve. Since "paid click measurement is critical for Google" financially, they have strong motivation to find the next catalyst of growth.

2. The Google Operating System and Digital Inspiration blogs recently captured screen shots of tests Google is running to include video ads alongside select search results. The interface is cautious about maintaining Google's minimalist design standards: ads with accompanying videos have a small button with a plus sign that can be expanded to watch a commercial or testimonial.

Although this isn't a huge surprise — Google had previously announced its intention to try this, with commentary from Danny Sullivan's SearchEngineLand and the Mashable blog back in February — it sets the stage for a major shift in the concept of search engine marketing. There's a big difference between 130 characters of stand-alone plain text and 130 characters of plain text as an introduction to a 30-second video spot.

Whether this particular ad format takes hold or not, it signals Google's intention to experiment with new advertising ideas in their previously sacrosanct SERP interface. Marissa Mayer of Google told the New York Times that the company would explore adding small thumbnail photos to the video ads as well as considering other formats that may include ads with images. That's a momentous shift.

3. Yahoo's plan to render structured semantic web information in its organic search results. This will no doubt have a major impact on search engine optimization (SEO) practices, a movement I describe as SEO + Semantic Web = SEO++. However, once you set the example for how organic search results with a structured interface are more attractive and useful than plain old text summary results, it's not too much of a stretch to visualize the same for paid search ads.

4. Google's completed acquisition of DoubleClick. As a story on BetaNews pointed out, up until now, Yahoo! and Microsoft have left Google in the dust with regard to display advertising. Now, with DoubleClick officially in the fold, analysts expect Google's display ad sales to be going up exponentially. That's going to put pressure on them to grow display ad opportunities — as well as to find synergies between their businesses that extend beyond being complementors in independent areas.

5. At last month's SES NY show — a gathering of professional search engine marketers — I was struck by how much mileage search marketers have squeezed out of a 25 character headline, two 35 character lines of text, and one 35 character display URL. People are running whole careers based around a canvas of 130 characters of plain text. Yet while I was impressed by how much nuance they've extracted from so little, it also seemed that the curve of innovation with text ads is nearing its upper bound. After listening to a panel of senior executives debate the use of the word "free" versus "complimentary" for 20 minutes, it's hard not to conclude that the bottom of the barrel is near.

6. Recognition of the value of brand marketing — including exposing an audience to your brand before they're ready for a direct interaction — is on the rise (again). Although search marketers and brand advertisers have come up with novel ways to engage brand development in search engine text ads, it's like trying to cut a steak with a spoon. Brand marketing may still represent a huge market of "non-consumption" for search engine advertising as it exists today. Incorporating images and video in search ads could be the catalyst for a flood of brand spending in this channel.

7. Entrepreneurial creativity continues to push the boundaries of alternate search engines. Under the shadow of the Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft search mountains, a plethora of new search sites continue to blossom. Take a look at Alt Search Engines and their Top 100 list. Vertical specialization, social search, and new visual interfaces distinguish these upstarts. But innovation in the search experience also opens the door for innovation in search advertising. This is a Petri dish from which new search ad formats may likely evolve — and eventually be adopted by the giants.

Add these pieces together:

• the search engine text ad S curve starting to level off;
• strong financial incentives for unleashing the next S curve;
• a cauldron of new search ad formats beginning to bubble;

...and it sure seems that conditions are right for a new S curve.

The implication for marketers — and marketing technologists in particular &mdash is to be ready, alert, and open-minded. When a new S curve surfaces in an industry, reaction speed and flexibility are competitive advantages. As the environment changes, it can be a valuable edge to experiment, learn, and adapt before your competitors do. This is what it means to view marketing as a science.

If image-based ads and/or video are predictably an integral part of this next wave, you can take a few steps to prepare that are either low-cost or valuable in their own right:

• put your digital asset management house in order;
• shore up your internal or external design resources;
• start to talk with new vendors in the micro-video space;
• don't let your search marketing processes get too rigid;
• if purchasing or building search management software, make sure that you have contingency options in case significant changes are required quickly — or if even an alternate solution may need to be substituted over the next 12-24 months.

This will certainly offer a new round of upheaval for software vendors and agencies in the search marketing space. New entrepreneurs: take heed. And to the degree that this next S curve has more visual canvas than plain text ads, it may offer one more chance for traditional (or "tradigital") advertising agencies to play a leading role in the search marketing space.

S curves do look a little like roller coasters, don't they? Should be fun.

Marketing as a science, but science is a creative endeavor

Let me state right up front: I am an advocate of scientific marketing. Just in case there's any doubt as you read on.

Marketing ideas should be tested and one should apply the scientific method to those tests.

Most of marketing is now measurable, directly or indirectly. With digitally produced and distributed marketing — particularly channels such as search engine marketing, online advertising, email marketing, post-click marketing, and web site optimization — it's often practical to test dozens or hundreds of ideas within a short time. So if you have more than one competing suggestion for "what will work best", the solution is "test them and let's find out". The answer is quantifiable, not emotional.

One of the missions of marketing technology leadership should be to provide the tools and the processes for an organization to approach marketing scientifically.

This has inspired more and more people to declare "marketing is a science, not an art".

However, that declaration always raises the hairs on the back of my neck — particularly when it is promoted by software vendors — because it is often used to imply that analytics dominates creative, that quantities are more valuable than qualities.

In my opinion, it's the inverse: scientific marketing is at its best the other way around, when creative harnesses analytics. A subtle but important shift in priority. The right fuzzy qualities have far more value than the wrong precise quantities.

True scientists understand this because science is a creative endeavor.

To be sure, with the scientific method, testing must be rigorous. But the process of determining what to test and how to measure it and framing the right hypothesis in the first place takes imagination.

Science is about discovery, and it's one of the most creative ventures in the universe.

In this way, the divide between science and art is largely artificial. Show a mathematician an elegant and original proof, and he is just as likely to find artistic beauty in it as any painting at a gallery. Vice versa, an artist who isn't continually experimenting in their medium is labeled commercial or derivative. The geniuses of science have more in common with the geniuses of art than either have with the hacks in their respective disciplines. (Enter Leonardo DaVinci stage left.)

That's why I love marketing as a science. It is both creative and analytic, and at the end of the day, it is about discovery. Just as the capacity to conduct more tests with more accuracy has been a boon in every scientific field, the new wave of marketing technologies is rocket fuel for proactive exploration of the marketing domain on an unprecedented scale.

What I don't agree with is the warping of "marketing as a science" to mean "marketing as accounting". This is what happens when the structure of tests and the categorization of customers — the underlying model — gets set in stone, and where all "testing" from that point forward is rigidly boxed into existing assumptions. When marketing becomes more about optimization than discovery, you end up with an organization on rails: streamlined perhaps, but it's only going where the track has been laid.

If you don't see the danger in this, read The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Its examples are more from the financial industry, but the fallacies of "quants" in that domain are extremely relevant to the risks in analytical marketing that mistakes the map for the terrain.

A couple of years ago, I attended a lunch with the physicist and novelist Alan Lightman, who gave a talk on the power of bridging multiple disciplines. His main point was that the most important aspect of different fields and disciplines — chemistry, physics, biology, literature, sociology, architecture, etc. — wasn't so much their different bodies of knowledge, but rather their different "ways of thinking". Each brings a certain set of perspectives and approaches for solving problems.

The power of cross-pollination is unleashed by applying the perspectives of one to help solve a problem in another. In the scientific community, this has gained recognition as the genesis of many breakthrough solutions.

In the business world, it's known as "thinking outside the box" or lateral thinking. (Or sometimes just "huh?")

Lightman himself embodies such cross-discipline thinking. A theoretical physicist and a MIT professor, he made fundamental contributions to the theory of astrophysics under extreme temperatures and densities. (And I thought AdWords management was tricky.) Yet he also wrote the novel Einstein's Dreams, an international bestseller, and has contributed essays and short fiction to The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Magazine, and The New York Times.

In his talk, Lightman made three points that every scientific marketer should take to heart:

1. The scientific method — start with a hypothesis, prepare an experiment to test a prediction of the hypothesis, measure the results, draw a conclusion, iterate — is based on the creative spark of the hypothesis. There is no cookbook recipe for robotically generating hypotheses. (Side note: the combinatorial probability of a room full of monkeys with typewriters eventually writing Hamlet may not be zero, but the span of time required exceeds the age of the universe.)

2. The process of discovery involves four stages: (a) mastering the craft of the domain, doing the homework to have a "prepared mind"; (b) getting stuck on a problem, what becomes the creative catalyst in your subconscious; (c) having a shift of perspective, a new viewpoint, which is where the power of different ways of thinking comes into play; and (d) finally having a breakthrough, a creative synthesis of disparate elements into a solution.

3. The irony of very sophisticated models is that they are almost always based on arbitrary assumptions. There's nothing wrong with that as long as those assumptions aren't mistaken for absolutes. Sometimes the most powerful tests are those that test the validity of the models one has been using for testing.

Marketing as a science is — or should be — a very creative endeavor. And that's pretty inspiring.

Semantic Marketing, SEO++ Feedback

Thanks to everyone who's shared or responded to semantic marketing and the SEO++ idea. It's been great to connect with other people who are also intrigued by the possibilities that are starting to appear at the intersection of marketing and the semantic web.

• Jennifer Zaino at SemanticWeb.com interviewed me and published an article To Market, To Market, The Semantic Way.
• Richard MacManus at ReadWriteWeb awarded me Comment of the Day: Semantic Marketing for my remarks in response to Alex Iskold's terrific article Semantic Web Patterns: A Guide to Semantic Technologies.
• Valeria Maltoni of Conversation Agent also gave a nod to SEO++ in her post on Web 3.0 Search Aligning with Data.
• Kevin Newcomb at SearchEngineWatch shared a little SEO++ link love in his Highlights from the SEW Blog: March 17-21, 2008.
• A brief exchange of comments with Paul Miller, who writes The Semantic Web blog on ZDNet, was the catalyst for putting these preliminary thoughts together.

Greatly appreciate the encouragement, feedback, and sharing of these thoughts. It's one of the more exciting areas of ferment in the (not too distant?) future of marketing technology, and I look forward to more discussions around it.

SEO + Semantic Web = SEO++

Two weeks ago, Amit Kumar announced on the Yahoo! Search Blog that Yahoo! will be supporting semantic web standards in their new Yahoo! search open platform.

This is a game-changing moment in online marketing.

Essentially, Yahoo! is proposing that search will be the "killer app" for sparking the explosion of the semantic web into the mainstream. With this release, when Yahoo! recognizes semantically tagged data in the pages it crawls — structured data such as contacts, calendar events, reviews, blog/news feeds, etc. — it will present far more compelling summaries of those pages in its search results.

As their example shows with a LinkedIn profile, results no longer have to be bland snippets of text that all blur together on the page. Different types of results can pop, conveying far more information — and far more relevant information — to searchers. The quality and meaning of the data shines through, which reflects extremely well on the site represented by that result.

This creates a tremendous incentive for marketers to adopt semantic standards in their web sites.

According to a presentation at SES NY by Andrew Tomkins, Chief Scientist at Yahoo! Search, this semantic data will initially only effect the presentation of the results — officially it will have no impact on a listing's placement in search engine result pages (SERPs), to prevent this from becoming a way for people to game the system.

Over time, I believe this position will change as the search engines develop better ways to police good vs. bad semantic data, since great semantic results make the search engine look good. And even in the semantic web, people aren't going to page through more than the first couple of pages of results. Exposed semantic data adds to the quality of the results. (This is not dissimilar to how people have been leveraging YouTube videos and Flickr photos to appear in advantageous locations in Google's "universal search".)

In the meantime, however, there will still be a positive feedback loop to incentivize marketers: great SERP summaries that stand out with semantic data will no doubt win a higher click-through rate. The more people who click-through and view your site, the more of them will end up creating links back to your site. This in turn will increase your organic search engine rankings, and the virtuous circle continues.

Simply put by Kumar, the benefit will be "increased traffic quality and quantity".

What marketer doesn't want that?

But to get in on this new game, companies need to get their semantic web act together. Since that virtuous cycle favors first movers — who will clearly stand out more in the early days before everyone is doing this as a matter of course — there is value to moving fast.

Many companies already have search engine optimization (SEO) initiatives underway, either with their own internal web team or through an engagement with a search agency. It probably makes the most sense for those teams to lead the initial charge into semantic web optimization (SWO) because they're already familiar with process of tagging pages and subtly alternating the structure of the site to improve its search engine rankings.

However, the semantic web is qualitatively different than SEO. It requires a deeper understanding of the business being represented online — combined with a strong mastery of semantic web standards such as RDF and microformats — so as to strategically identify the best ways to position a company in the data web. That is going to require collaboration higher up the chain of the organization.

Sure, there will be some low hanging fruit in the early days, with reviews, blog feeds, and event calendars. But to go beyond that superficial level of semantifying will require companies to start to shape their business around producing competitively advantageous semantic data on the web — and where necessary, advocating in the semantic web community to shape the evolution of new semantic web standards.

Companies who know what they're doing here will be active participants in places such as microformats.org and the Yahoo! developer community, taking a proactive role in moving the semantic web forward in ways that benefits them and their customers. (Word of advice: don't jump into this fray half-cocked.)

This sort of new way of looking at marketing and the semantic web is what will be the core of semantic marketing. It's as strategic as it is tactical.

In short, this next generation of web optimization isn't your father's SEO. It's a significant enough advance that I think it would be great to have a different badge to identify it, so as to not fall into the lull of thinking this is just a linear extension of existing search engine diplomacy. I propose:

SEO + Semantic Web = SEO++

(Pronounced: so-plus-plus.) This is a nod to the sea-change that happened when software developers embraced object-oriented programming, moving from C to C++. This is an analogous paradigm shift that will require people to think differently about SEO. And after all, the semantic web is very much about representing and working with "objects" in web space.

Arguably, search engines have been the primary driver of Internet marketing. Yet for 10 years, the interface of search engines has pretty much stayed the same. Google's universal search was a step in the right direction, but this new move from Yahoo! promises to be a major leap. No doubt, it will be followed by Google and will inspire a spectacular round of search engine innovation — one that will present incredible new opportunities for technology-savvy marketers.

This is the wake-up call: marketing must understand the semantic web and start to think strategically about it.

Who is a chief marketing technologist?

What is the role of a chief marketing technologist?

Short version: a chief marketing technologist (CMT) is the person responsible for leading an organization's marketing technology.

A company may or may not be a "technology" business, but in today's world it needs to deftly leverage technology in its marketing to:

• optimize its marketing strategy and tactics;
• interface with its audience through digital channels.

In a wired world, marketing must be technology-savvy for a business to compete.

This parallels another movement in the enterprise, which is to elevate "marketing" beyond a function isolated in a specific department — e.g., throw it over the wall to marketing and back again — into a broader organizational capability. Marketing needs to be about continual growth and innovation, and that marketing-driven mission needs to permeate all areas of the business. Think Apple. Starbucks. JetBlue.

Combined, the embrace of marketing technology and the transformation of marketing to a primary driver of competitive advantage is the essence of New Marketing — marketing without borders.

But what constitutes "marketing technology"?

Part of the challenge is that the breadth of applications that now reside under the domain of marketing is incredibly diverse. I think of marketing technology as generally belonging to one of three spheres (or overlaps between them):

1. A channel to the market.
2. An internal coordinating device.
3. An integral part of the product.

Marketing technology as a channel is using digital media — primarily Internet-based — to reach and engage with prospects and customers. Examples include:

• the web site;
• online advertising;
• search engine marketing;
• post-click marketing;
• behavioral targeting;
• social networking;
• online communities, forums, wikis;
• email marketing;
• syndicated content;
• mobile marketing;
• semantic marketing;

Marketing technology as a coordinating device is designed to organize and optimize the planning, execution, and analysis of everything marketing does — to process-ize it, measure it, improve it, and accelerate its clockspeed. Examples include:

• web analytics;
• business intelligence;
• customer relationship management;
• campaign management;
• competitive intelligence;
• sales force automation;
• digital asset management;
• content management;
• marketing/sales dashboards;
• marketing resource management;
• enterprise marketing management;

Marketing technology as a product is the embodiment of marketing principles into the product or service itself — such as e-commerce experiences in online stores. This is common in technology companies and pure Internet businesses, but increasingly firms in other spaces are offering complementary digital services as a competitive advantage as well.

These technologies may be based in several different operational areas:

• the marketing department;
• the IT department;
• the cloud: hosted applications and software-as-a-service;
• product operations (where applicable);

Wherever they operate, however, they are identified by being under the authority of marketing. The chief marketing technologist is responsible for the technical governance of this entire field of marketing technologies. This position must be headed by an equal blend of a marketing-savvy technologist and a technology-savvy marketer — a senior marketer-technologist leader. The main goals of this centralized, marketing-centric IT governance include:

• keep marketing technically competitive in all relevant application areas;
• facilitate useful interoperability and synergy between these applications;
• advocate for and adopt new technologies that drive growth and innovation;
• enable everyone else in marketing to leverage technology for their goals;
• navigate the lifecycle of marketing apps from one generation to the next;
• accelerate the overall clockspeed of marketing through technology and processization;

The chief marketing technologist works with the senior executive leadership at 2 or 3 key touchpoints:

• with the CMO to align marketing IT governance with marketing's business objectives;
• with the CIO to align with IT's infrastructure and broader technical governance requirements (e.g., security, business continuity);
• where applicable, with the product development team to incorporate and leverage marketing technology as a product and within products.

In companies where such roles exist, a chief strategy officer and/or a chief innovation officer may also participate in the marketing IT governance council.

Although the chief marketing technologist needs to collaborate across the enterprise, the position needs to firmly sit under marketing. This role must serve the marketing agenda, and therefore it must be primarily accountable to the CMO. (The relationship of the CMT to the CMO seems analogous to the role of a CTO to a less technical CIO in IT-intensive organizations.)

Depending on the structure of the organization, it makes sense for this role to have dotted line or matrix reporting to the CIO.

However, I do not believe marketing technology should be led by the IT department. IT certainly has an essential role to play, taking responsibility for a company's overall computing infrastructure — the network and server and platform underpinnings of much of what makes marketing technology possible. IT can also broker compatibility and synergy between marketing technology and operations technology. But the databases and applications that run marketing need to belong to marketing: authority and accountability must be linked.

In a small company, the CMT hat might be worn by someone with other responsibilities — a director of marketing, web marketing, or perhaps even a technically-astute CMO. But once an organization achieves any significant scale, the chief marketing technologist is a full-time role. (If it's not, your company is probably losing competitive ground in the marketing dimension.) For larger firms, the CMT will head up an entire team of marketer-technologists.

Who's leading marketing technology at your organization?

Great marketing visualization tools

As I've previously remarked, I believe that good, innovative visualization of marketing data is one of the more underutilized techniques in a marketer's toolbox.

One of the key roles of the marketing technology team should be to enable and infuse fresh perspectives of activities, initiatives, and results to the rest of the marketing team in creative ways that unveil useful patterns and opportunities.

Sarah Perez over at ReadWriteWeb just posted a fantastic list of The Best Tools for Visualization, with tons of links and examples. This is an incredible and inspiring resource, which points to many other incredible and inspiring resources.

Brand and the semantic web: 5 parallels

I recently posted some preliminary ideas about semantic marketing, what the role of marketing could be in the semantic web. One of the most interesting notions that occurred to me is how the concept of brand will be extended in the semantic web. What will constitute semantic branding?

This intrigues me because on the surface "semantic branding" sounds like an oxymoron. What we popularly think of as brand seems much more suited to human experiences in the visual web than the standardized structuring of data in the semantic web that will underlie it.

But when you dig a little deeper into the meta-dynamics of branding and how they intersect with the goals of the semantic web, a powerful synergy emerges. One that could be a strategic battleground in the Web 3.0 era ahead.

To frame brand in the semantic web, I think it's helpful to first step back and look at brand as a whole.

Brand is a funny thing. Amorphous and (mostly) intangible, yet at the same time specific and visceral. Brands shape and reflect our culture — objects to be studied in anthropology departments as much as in business schools. Coca-Cola isn't just artificially flavored sugar water, it's happiness in a bottle (and a multi-billion dollar empire).

That's the grand, poetic view.

Down in the trenches, brand is built by thousands of tactics: names, logos, celebrity endorsements, slogans, jingles, product characteristics, customer experiences, distribution channels, product placements, movie merchandising, public relations, packaging, corporate philanthropy, viral YouTube videos, and just about every great television, radio, print, and (increasingly) web ad you can think of.

Almost every touchpoint between a company and the market contributes, intentionally or not, to its brand.

What does brand mean to the customer?

Brand as an image
The most common notion of brand is the imagery, association, and status conferred with owning or using a particular product or service. This is the source of our love/hate relationship with the power of brands, as it causes us to make seemingly irrational economic choices (why pay more for Dove soap than the generic equivalent?), warping price elasticity. In the extreme case of Veblen goods — where, as the price goes higher, people's preference for buying actually increases — it outright inverts the price/demand curve. Nonetheless, brand of this kind has cultural, social, and emotional value that is demonstrably worth a premium to us.

Brand as a bookmark
Brand names are a quick, unequivocal way to identify something. If I find a particular variation of a product in a field of commodities (or near commodities) that I like, I can quickly find it again. I can tell other people about it without risk of confusion. If my wife tells me she likes Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey ice cream, there's no chance that I'm going to accidentally buy her some other brand of ice cream with stuff mixed in it. I don't know if this "reference-ability" is worth much of a premium on its own, but it facilitates repeat purchases and referral business, which are immensely valuable, and enables all these other brand benefits.

Brand as a promise
Brand is also a promise to the customer, usually about quality and dependability. Who can tell one generic pain reliever from the next? But with Tylenol, you trust that the company has taken the utmost care in safety and reliability because their reputation depends on it — and their company depends on their reputation. In this way, brand is a commitment, a social contract of sorts, and it is perfectly logical for us to pay a premium for it.

Brand as a shortcut
Brand also gives us cues for making a good choice when we don't have the time or inclination to research all the details that would be required for an exhaustive, purely analytical decision. I think of brand here as a decision shortcut: go with a brand you know from a related context or a brand that has been socially well-regarded in that space, and you know that you're probably making a safe choice — even if it isn't necessarily the optimal choice. This too is about trust, and as long as that trust is maintained, it's worth a premium as well.

(Note that many of these interpretations of brand are also highly relevant in B2B marketing.)

So how does this translate to the semantic web?

Let's summarize 5 of these meta-dynamics of brand and look for a pattern:

1. Brand is about association, connecting one thing to another.
2. Brand is about reference-ability, a (relatively) unique identifier.
3. Brand is about consistency — reliable, predictable repeatability.
4. Brand is about decision-helping, narrowing complicated choices quickly.
5. Brand enables and encourages viral social propagation of itself.

Now substitute "brand" with "semantic web" in the list above. More than a few similarities? This parallelism between brand and the semantic web isn't purely coincidental. Brand has engaged companies and products in a semantic web-like structure in our wetware, our psychology and social dynamics.

Flipped around, the semantic web will enable software to programmatically find and relate things in the Web in a way that mirrors how we as humans manually interact with the visual web (and to a certain degree, the world itself) — a highly branded experience.

Why is this parallel so interesting with specifically brand instead of with more abstract cognition in general? Because brand is the incarnation of such cognition as it best relates to commercialization. Brand isn't just about association, recognition, consistency, etc. — it's consciously focused on the capacity to monetize those assets.

The success of the semantic web — and of companies in the semantic web — depends on similar commercialization.

Given these parallels, I can envision three areas where branding and the semantic web can dovetail each other:

Area #1: Applying the concepts of branding — what has made brands successful or not successful -- in the promotion and adoption of the semantic web itself. Recognizing the benefits of brand in the bullet list above gives us a business case for framing an organization's participation in the semantic web movement.

Area #2: Employing a conscious brand strategy in an organization's implementation of semantic technologies, content, and meta-data: the choice of specific categorizations, definitions, formats, network participation, etc. Where standards don't yet exist, in domain-specific areas that are critical to your business, there is a phenomenal early adopter opportunity to help define such standards in a way that's most beneficial. This is what I think of as pure "semantic branding": how companies will define and protect their brands purely at the semantic layer. It's interesting to think of the challenges that will arise here and how they are analogous to concepts such as brand rationalization, brand equity, and brand leveraging.

Area #3: Leveraging the benefits of the semantic web to enhance a company's interactions with people in the visual web, thereby benefiting their brand in a more traditional sense. For example, if you're a car company, leveraging semantic data to better connect your customers with after-market providers that can match on specific models and geographic constraints can improve your brand. You're making the online services that surround your brand more useful, which in turn builds your brand. In this context, the semantic web is simply an enabler to a new generation of customer services.

Maybe semantic branding isn't such an oxymoron after all.

Marketing and computer science

I believe that the future of computer science — or at least a branch of it — is in the marketing department. And vice versa. Marketing departments need to hire computer science grads. Computer science researchers need to work on marketing problems. And there's a golden age of prosperity awaiting both disciplines in this collaboration.

Let me explain with three points.

Point #1. I had the privilege to hear a talk from Christos Papadimitriou at MIT last month. (For those of you without a computer science background, Papadimitriou is a legend — sort of what Brett Favre is to football — and one of the masters of computational complexity.)

The theme of his talk was "computer science is the new math". By this he meant that computer science is no longer just a stand-alone branch of science so much as it is now a tool that is adopted by all the sciences. He gave examples from physics, biology, and social science, where the algorithmic lens of computer science has enabled incredible breakthroughs in the past several years.

With the Internet in particular, computer science is now intertwined with the social sciences, understanding how people behave online, individually and in groups. And this is where computer science and marketing collide. Social networking dynamics — which are of critical concern to marketers — are the living incarnation of graph theory problems in computer science. Improving the effectiveness of advertising by leveraging people's patterns and preferences is a challenge for optimization algorithms.

Computational problems in marketing are sounding more and more like theoretical computer science dissertations.

Point #2. The inspiration for this blog was the realization that (a) marketing is becoming more and more centered around technological channels and methods, yet at the same time (b) marketing as a whole is still rather technologically deficient in its DNA. No offense intended: most marketers have simply focused on other areas of expertise. Previously marketing could rely on IT and/or vendors to "make it happen", without prying too closely under the covers.

Unfortunately, this Platonic separation of tech and marketing grows less tenable every day. The success of digital marketing initiatives are often inexorably tied to the details of their implementation. The diversity of technologies in the marketing sphere today — from campaign management to search engine bidding, from web analytics to lead automation — is staggering. New categories of marketing applications seem to arise every year (social marketing management, anyone?). Decisions for selecting the right packages and platforms for each fall on the marketer's shoulders, along with the challenges of maintenance, customization, and integration to weave them together. Think it's daunting now? Semantic marketing may be just around the corner, and that's all this and a bag of chips.

If you know what you're doing with marketing technology, you can have a real competitive edge. If you don't, you can blow a lot of time and money with little to show for it. The stakes are high. Marketing has to become tech savvy.

I'm not saying that all marketers need to be computer scientists. Just as not all marketers need to be "creatives". But as the aesthetics of creative talents such as graphic design and copywriting have been absorbed into the marketing gestalt, so too must be the talents of algorithms and architectures. The worldview of computer science needs to be cross-pollinated throughout marketing, even if it emanates from only a small percentage of the team.

Point #3. I just read in Computerworld that the computer science graduating class of 2007 is the smallest this decade, at least here in the US. This is alarming at both a microeconomic and a macroeconomic level, for industry and academia. (Unless you're reading this from India or China, in which case your future is bright.)

Part of the reason I think interest in computer science degrees has waned among college students is the image of their career prospects. Not to oversimplify, but CS grads have typically had two career options outside of academia: (1) software product development, epitomized for many as getting a job in engineering at Microsoft or Google or the next hottest start-up; or (2) "IT", managing systems and software inside an organization.

The former remains very exciting, as it promises (however elusively) Internet age fame and fortune. But there are only so many of those jobs, and competition for them is extremely fierce. Out of a class of CS grads, how many do Microsoft and Google take on?

IT careers, on the other hand, have just not been viscerally appealing to many teenagers. You don't hear them exclaim, "I want to work in IT!" It's not that it's not good work, important work, necessary work, well-paid work — it is. And there's definitely room for stars to rise. But maybe not so much as other careers. Some of this is perception, some of it is reality.

Marketing is sexy though. Part of the solution for inspiring more computer science majors is to develop a career path in marketing technology ("martec") that elevates their talent and skills to front-of-house demand generation and top-line growth, with all the glory and rewards that can offer.

Marketing and computer science can save each other.

Joint membership in the AMA and the ACM? I think that's the future.

P.S. As I was going to get the link to Computerworld, I happened to see an ad for an M.S. in Marketing and Technological Innovation from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Maybe the future isn't so far away.