Chief Marketing Technologist by Scott Brinker

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.

Marketing in the semantic web

What should be the role of marketing in the semantic web?

Should there be any? According to the W3C, the semantic web is about common data formats that make it easy to integrate and combine data from diverse sources. It's about mapping ideas expressed in human language to data in a way that facilitates automatic processing, where software can programmatically comprehend how different pieces of data are related. It's a web behind the web of animated banner ads and branded UI designs.

Cool stuff, but it sounds very IT-ish, not very marketing-esque.

But consider this circular, three-step riddle:

• if the semantic web is successful, it will unleash an enormous wave of information exchange between organizations and individuals, empowering a new level of findability and knowledge sharing;
• for the semantic web to be successful, organizations must assign responsibility for their participation in it to someone who will lead and manage it — otherwise the semantic web devolves into semantic soup;
• for someone to take responsibility, there's going to have to be incentive; in the commercial world, incentive translates most directly into generating more business — which is inherently a function of some form of findability and compelling knowledge sharing.

Hint: for generating new business in the non-semantic web, findability = ads, PR, word of mouth, SEO, etc.; knowledge sharing = feature sheets, pricing, case studies, white papers, etc. Whose domain is that?

The answer to the riddle: marketing. If the semantic web could be harnessed to generate more business — essentially be a new channel to the market — then the marketing department can and should step up to lead its adoption in the enterprise. Arguably, this will be necessary for the semantic web to reach its full potential.

But marketing in the semantic web clearly won't be like marketing in the visual web. Advertising and branding won't exist in the form we know today. Sure, marketing will continue on its current trajectory in the visual web — accelerated by semantic technology in certain areas such as search engine marketing. But what will it mean to market one's organization at the semantic layer?

Here are my preliminary ideas of 7 missions for semantic marketing, marketing in the semantic web:

(1) Marketing becomes the champion of the underlying data — good, accurate, detailed content and the processes by which to keep it up to date. This isn't just old-school "marketing" data, i.e., the stuff of brochures and the visual corporate web site, but rich, detailed information that historically been trapped much deeper in the organization — information that can create value for the firm by its wide dissemination (or, as we'll discuss shortly, that can create value through bargaining with others).

Part of this job is uncovering existing data. But perhaps the more important part is advocating for new data feeds, re-engineering the organization to generate semantic web content as a competitive advantage.

(2) Categorization of all that data, framing with the right metadata, supporting the relevant microformats, and deciding how to best componentize it at different scales — atoms, molecules, living cells — to maximize findability and mashability. This will include proactive work with partners, customers, and industry groups to coalesce standards for domain-specific metadata.

This constitutes a new kind of market positioning and placement via the semantic web, semantic branding if you will. Accordingly, you can almost imagine a key role of chief ontologist in the marketing department. Okay, maybe director of semantic branding sounds better. (A more literal meaning to the old hype line, "Our company is redefining the market.")

(3) Distribution and promotion of your data through formal and informal networks of all kinds, analogous to what search engine optimization (SEO) is today — semantic web optimization (SWO)? — to extend your reach as far as possible. This will be SEO+ and then some. Marketing will want to sponsor or create new semantic networks (and subnetworks within existing networks) that cater to specific audiences, drawing from the same techniques that are emerging in social media marketing. This also contributes to semantic branding — "where" your company is in semantic cyberspace.

Perhaps this will lead to a new type of semantic advertising? People paying to have their semantic data distributed through certain networks, tagged with certain metadata under the authority of the network owner. I believe there are vast entrepreneurial opportunities for vertical market networks here.

(4) Structuring incentives to convert semantic web interactions into real business objectives. This may be the greatest business model challenge in semantic web marketing, since there's an inherent tension between openness and incentives. Information asymmetry shouldn't go away, but it should be managed more consciously — achieving the right balance becomes part of a firm's marketing strategy. (Vaguely comparable to the dynamics of open source software businesses?)

If your contributions to the semantic web have value to your prospects, customers, partners, vendors, etc., then you can bargain to receive things you want in return: leads, promotion, feedback, reciprocal access to their extended semantic web data, etc. Access control here doesn't have to be all or nothing either. Data can be more or less detailed, can be more summarized or more atomic, can have varying levels of metadata, can be delayed or more real-time, and so on. These choices can be made on a very context-specific basis: which data for which audiences under which circumstances.

(5) Tracking and attributing distributed data in the semantic web, measuring the impact of the different content elements that contribute to customer and partner relationships. This is probably the toughest technical challenge, as we go from complex multi-touch marketing to ultra-complex micro-touch marketing. The very nature of the semantic web encourages wide reusability of data, largely culled by software behind the scenes — or as I like to call it, mashing and caching — which runs counter to the architecture of many of the current web analytics systems. (Web 3.0 analytics make the troubles of Web 2.0 analytics look like a cakewalk.)

The good news, however, is that we should be able to harness the semantic web to help solve this problem. Metadata structures that identify a "chain of contribution" with ping-back type mechanisms. Or something akin to friend-of-a-friend (FOAF) for businesses and their more atomic components. Thinking of incentives, per (4) above, those who cooperate with your tracking system can be rewarded with greater access. Streams of freshly generated data — engineered with the semantic web in mind — also become more valuable because they stimulate more frequent requests, which are the touchpoints easiest to measure. Entrepreneurial ingenuity will prevail.

(6) Leveraging other people's data in your own value-add mash-ups. For customer-facing applications, this is where your organization's semantic web inputs and outputs surface into the visual web. This next generation of web apps, widgets, and summarized reports and analysis — made feasible by the new level of networked data in the semantic web — will be golden because they directly serve a highly engaged human audience. Enter web advertising and promotion as we know it (with a nice boost from semantic context awareness). Great opportunities for "joint venture" semantic data partnerships — combining your chocolate with someone's peanut butter (exclusively?) to appeal to a shared audience.

The marketing department can also benefit from mining the semantic web for market research, customer monitoring, competitive intelligence — not to mention a more organized view of one's own content plumbing and business data pipelines. These will be mash-ups run for internal consumption only, but very helpful in marketing management.

(7) Finally, quality control to watch for bad data, conflicting data, competitive misuse, etc. — essentially brand protection in the semantic web. Someone in the organization needs to play the role of the semantic police, guarding against everything from broken feeds to breaches of confidentiality. There is a case to be made that if marketing is in charge of everything else above, this role should be handled by another group that can provide checks and balances (IT? administration? legal?). But I can think of several good reasons to keep it under marketing's control with broader oversight only at a higher governance level:

• semantic quality control will be a part of a firm's online reputation management, which to me is a marketing responsibility;
• the team building and managing a company's semantic web presence will understand it best — and be better able to respond to issues, judge their severity, appreciate the side effects, etc.;
• while confidentiality is important, there should be strong advocacy to avoid the reigns being too tight — if there's an overzealousness to label everything as secret (e.g., the legal department), the organization ends up effectively withdrawing itself from the global semantic web;
• as with all things on the Internet, speed in the market is important, and there's no surer way to slow things down then split them across departments that have competing agendas.

Collectively, these 7 ideas represent a very different kind of marketing.

This is obviously technical marketing, which makes it a great fit for a marketing technology group that lives inside the department, led by a chief marketing technologist who reports to the CMO. (Which, of course, is what this blog advocates.)

Historically, the management of this kind of data would have been an IT task. The big paradigm shift is that marketing must now take responsibility for it because the semantic web will be a conduit by which the firm interfaces to the market. Semantic marketing. Semantic branding. Semantic advertising. These may be novel terms today, but if the semantic web blossoms to its full potential, they will be strategic elements of the marketing mix — well outside the boundaries of the traditional IT department.

---

As of today, a quick Google for the phrase "semantic marketing" currently returns 396 results. "Semantic advertising" does a bit better with 665 results, but some of the first pages seem more focused on using semantic data of publishers to plug-in better contextual ads. Different than what I was thinking, but a good idea. "Semantic branding", a mere 17 results. Any bets for how many results these terms will have by March 2009? March 2010?