Chief Marketing Technologist

Marketing, technology, and storytelling

With social media marketing, everyone is a writer. Whether you're writing tweets, blog posts, or landing pages, you're telling a story.

So good storytelling skills are well worth cultivating.

Even for those of us in marketing technology, who work behind the scenes, we need to understand that the solutions we build are often vehicles for good storytelling — ideally masterful storytelling. And, more often than not, you need to tell a great story to sell your vision in the first place.

With that in mind, I wanted to share something a little tangential to my usual posts here...

I stumbled across The Writing Life II blog today, written by Charles Deemer, a screenwriting teacher at Portland State University, and found this excellent diagram of the storytelling paradigm:

To be sure, not all stories follow this format, but it's surprising how many do — easily the far majority of movies, books, and plays in Western culture. There's a certain rhythm to this formula that resonates deeply with most of us.

Something to keep in mind when crafting your own stories — or enabling others to tell theirs.

3 New Year's resolutions for marketing technologists in 2010

It's a new year — a new decade — ahead. The 10's will be a spectacular era for those of us at the intersection of marketing and technology. And before the next decade is out, there's going to be a lot more of us in that nexus.

But here on the immediate horizon, there's the business of New Year's resolutions.

Of course, there are the obvious ones: better search engine optimization (SEO), better conversion rate optimization (CRO), better web analytics practices, and better social media integration into the fabric of the organization. And a better diet and more exercise.

However, here are three resolutions to consider that are less obvious yet equally important — ones that marketing technologists are well-suited to lead:

#1. Creatively visualize your marketing data.

It's a deluge out there — we're drowning in data, yet parched for perspicacity. Making sense of the terabytes of tracking and analytics data flooding into our domain is as hard as it's ever been. And every year, we collect more, more, more.

One powerful — and underutilized — antidote to the cacophony is better data visualization. Sure, the software you have probably produces standardized bar charts, pie charts, and line graphs of standardized metrics. But in this age of digital discovery, the standardized answers aren't necessarily the most useful.

Think of yourself as Christopher Columbus — or Christina Columbus — on a sea of data, dauntlessly seeking the new world of marketing insight. Creative visualization is your Santa Maria sailing ship.

There are two inputs into creative visualization:

• combining and comparing different pieces of data;
• experimenting with a wide range of graphs and drawings;

Creative visualization should be both playful and serious. For inspiration on different pieces of data, start with David Berkowitz's 100 Ways to Measure Social Media.

For inspiration on a wide range of graphs and drawings, see Presentation Zen, The Back of the Napkin, the Google Chart API, and — of course — Edward Tufte.

For example, here are a few visualizations I was recently doing for PPC competition on Google AdWords, to explore how different advertisers stake and evolve their strategies (I'll do a follow-up post explaining this in more detail):

#2. Boost your marketing clockspeed by 2X.

Digital marketing is possibly the fastest moving industry today. Yet marketing management and execution, especially in larger organizations, is still quite slow. In the old days, before electricity — I mean, the web — it was okay to take weeks and months to plan and produce new campaigns and market-facing messages and experiences. But today, the operational tempo of marketing needs to be measured in days if not hours.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of legacy processes and politics that can gunk up high-speed marketing machinery. If you're brave, bold, and diplomatically-gifted, make a resolution to significantly improve this in 2010 — even if you just tackle one or two important capabilities, such as your ability to produce targeted landing pages.

Pick a key digital marketing tactic — one that's been feeling particularly sluggish to you this past year — and find a way to cut its end-to-end time in half. Or better.

Here are two suggestions to energize and accelerate your marketing operations:

1. Make a flowchart. Start at the beginning and jot down every step, hand-off, or approval that is required to execute a particular tactic. Draw arrows indicating the flow, noting any loops. Use your best judgment on granularity. At each step, approximate how much time it takes. Picture something like how a bill becomes a law in the US Congress — hopefully your situation isn't that convoluted and political.

A ridiculously complex flow chart can be a burning platform. (No need to actually set it on fire, though.) Brainstorm with stakeholders on how to simplify it. What's necessary? What's ancillary? What's a pain in the bottom? What would Google do? Where possible, eliminate costly detours — or relegate them to exception management. If a particular step seems to take a lot of time, examine it more closely: how can software or process changes optimize it?

2. Start adopting agile marketing practices. More things to do than hours in the day to do them, and all of them need to be done now? Sounds like the perfect justification for applying agile development practices. Agile isn't just an adjective and an ideal — it's an actual methodology. And there's nothing like a daily scrum to squeeze out unnecessary delays and inefficiencies from their hiding spots.

To learn more about agile marketing, here's a great article on the Marketbright Blog about the agile marketing method, Matt Blumberg's visionary post on agile marketing at Return Path from 4 years ago, and Anna Maria Virzi's example of agile post-click marketing.

#3. Link into the linked data movement.

It's time to join the emerging web of data, sometimes called the Giant Global Graph of linked data. Now that Best Buy has reported success with their product semantic web beta, the commercial benefits of sharing data, not just unstructured content, are starting to surface.

It's just not that hard to get started, and join the linked data cloud above. Make the commitment to add RDFa markup to your web site — even if it's only for a few select elements such as events or product specs. Check out standardized data vocabularies such as the Dublin Core and GoodRelations.

Experiment with DBpedia and Freebase to see how to interconnect with and leverage other data in your own applications.

This isn't a mainstream issue yet, but like the web in 1994, there's an opportunity for the pioneers and explorers of the next era of web marketing to stake their claims and lead the charge. Getting ahead of the curve on this in 2010 might prove to be one of the best competitive advantages you can acquire for the decade ahead.

Have a safe and happy New Year!

Best Buy jump starts data web marketing

There's an exciting story that's come out of this week's Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in Chicago that should inspire everyone in online marketing and the semantic web — and most all, those of us interested in the intersection of the two.

Jay Myers, lead web development engineer at Best Buy, presented a case study of what happened when they implemented the GoodRelations data vocabulary with RDFa microformat tags embedded in their pages, and the results are nothing short of astounding.

First and foremost, Jay reported that the rank of their pages that incorporated GoodRelations and RDFa rose significantly in Google. For example, the query "BestBuy Ferris Bueller" comes up with their new semantic web enabled page as #1:

http://products.semweb.bestbuy.com/y/products/7590289

It's actually placed ahead of the far more established page:

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Ferris+Bueller's+Day+Off+-+DVD/7590289.p?skuId=7590289&id=47476

The implication is that Google has started to tweak their ranking algorithm to show love to pages and sites that incorporate this kind of linked data and semantic web markup. If this is true — I know, there are other possible confounding factors that no one but Google knows for certain — it could be exactly the tipping point necessary to push adoption of embedded data on a large scale.

I've said for a while that the best way to jump start semantic web/linked data adoption is to give companies a clear market incentive to do so. This is how good SEO practices have developed into a billion dollar industry. Merging the ideas of data web marketing into SEO — an SEO++ vision, if you will — seems like the easiest path to get everyone moving into the data web era. Google is in the ideal position to create that incentive.

But it gets better. Jay also revealed that since they launched their beta Semantic Product Web, augmented with GoodRelations and RDFa, they've seen a 30% increase in traffic to their pages. Again, there could be many reasons for this — not a perfectly controlled experiment — but the correlation is remarkable.

There's certainly an incentive here for companies who take the lead. The linked data movement is itching to explode, and the whole point is to make it easy for people to leverage data from across the web into glorious new mash-ups and applications without having to tediously integrate with and maintain a different API for each and every source of data.

So as commercial implementations, such as the one by Best Buy, become available, they are extremely well-positioned to be adopted by the first wave of linked data developers and put on a pedestal: see, here's what we can do with just a little more structured data on the web. That's a virtuous cycle in which everyone wins — not least of which is Best Buy themselves.

Yahoo!, despite their troubles elsewhere in search, deserve credit for pushing this idea forward over a year ago with their SearchMonkey initiative. Nick Cox from Yahoo! has been quoted as saying that search results that are augmented with structured data, such as with GoodRelations, get a 15% higher click-through rate (CTR).

Speaking of giving credit where credit is due, I've got to take my hat off to Martin Hepp, the guy behind the GoodRelations ontology. He's created a fantastic framework to enable businesses such as Best Buy to harness linked data as a marketing and sales vehicle. With data web success stories like Best Buy now emerging, Martin may just end up being the fellow who nudged data web marketing over that tipping point.

Thanks to Steven Forth at LeveragePoint for alerting me to this developing story. There's also an excellent post about this on Priyank Mohan's Semantic Technology Blog.

Web 3.0 conference focuses on advertising and marketing

I think 2010 is going to be a good year for the semantic web — now better known as the linked data movement — especially as marketers become increasingly aware of its potential in their mission for online branding and relationship building.

It certainly seems that January will be off to a good start. Media Bistro is holding their next Web 3.0 Conference in Santa Clara on January 26-27, and a good number of the sessions are focused on the intersection of the data web with advertising and marketing. I've been invited to co-present with Krista Thomas (VP Marketing at Thomson Reuters, The Calais Initiative) on the topic Web of Data: Semantic Web in Marketing.

It's been about 8 months since my presentation on data web marketing at last summer's Semantic Technology Conference, and I'm looking forward to sharing many of the new developments that have happened in this space since then.

Other speakers at the event will include semantic advertising pioneers Amiad Solomon of Peer 39 and Brooke Aker of Expert System, as well as top folks from Google, Yahoo!, and Bing.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, MIT will be running its annual Independent Activities Period (IAP) during the month of January. The most exciting event to me for this IAP will be the Linked Data Product Development Lab that will be kicked off by Sir Tim Berners-Lee himself. Co-organized by my good friend K. Krasnow Waterman, the event will bring together 50 engineers and entrepreneurs from the extended MIT community for a 1-week intensive race to design and build a killer app based on linked data. It should be fascinating to see what emerges from that bootcamp — and I'd bet that one or more of those killer apps will be in the marketing domain.