Official definition of marketing from the American Marketing Association web site Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offers that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. (Approved October 2007)
Informal definition of marketing from the top of my head Marketing is what you do to find and win new customers, grow your relationships with existing customers, differentiate yourself from the competition, and build a “brand” that helps achieve those goals.
Peter Drucker on marketing the father of modern management * Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two — and only two — basic functions: marketing and innovation. * Drucker argued in a 1984 essay that CEO compensation should be no more than 20 times what the rank and file make — especially at companies where thousands of employees are being laid off. “This is morally and socially unforgivable,” he wrote, “and we will pay a heavy price for it.”
Marketing is continually evolving. In recent years, that evolution has been accelerating — with more changes ahead.
Search engine optimization (SEO) and web APIs for mashups are a qualitatively different kind of marketing tactic.
Even across …previous shifts in marketing medium… tactics were crafted directly for human consumption.
These new tactics are different. 1st order: Directly crafted for computer consumption. 2nd order: Indirectly crafted for human consumption.
What is the semantic web? from the W3C web site The Semantic Web is a web of data. The Semantic Web is about two things. It is about common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources… It is also about language for recording how data relates to real world objects.
If the data web can be used to: • help connect to new customers • strengthen relationships • differentiate from the competition • build reputation and brand
If marketing can tie the cause-and- effect of data web initiatives to the achievement of its objectives… …there’s sustainable sponsorship.
Semantic “bargain hunter” agents are not attractive to most marketers. That vision of the semantic web is dystopian to marketers.
Pricing and product specifications don’t do justice to the potential of sharing data in the semantic web.
“You should take an inventory of what you have got in the way of data, and you should think about how valuable each piece of data in the company would be if it were available to other people across the company, or if it were available publicly, and if it were available to your partners.” — Tim Berners-Lee in Talis 2008 interview, answering the question from a CIO, “what does it mean, what should we do?”
Ways to produce valuable data: • Generate it internally • Collect it from customers • Collect it from partners • License it externally
Thinking about this kind of data is hard — because it’s not been done before. But that’s the opportunity.
Hypothetical example: Major chain of nurseries producing the leading reference of plant properties (climate, growth, soil, water, feeding, compatibility, etc.) — maybe specialized for a particular region.
Hypothetical example: Marketing software company aggregates performance data across customers to offer real-time industry benchmarks. (With permissions of participants, of course.)
Goals: • Become the authoritative source. • Popularize canonical references to your products, categories, competitive dimensions. • Build reputation, goodwill, brand.
Linked data success depends on: • Consistency • Logical organization • Stability • Trust Data consumers must be able to rely upon your data to use it as a foundation for their own applications.
Semantic spin Framing references with properties and nomenclature that are advantageous to your brand.
There are fascinating parallels between the concept of brands and the semantic web… but that’s a story for another day.
Just as SEO was about visibility (and ranking and authority) in the document web… …there will be an analogous need in the data web.
Spreading your data: • Build external links to your data • Link reciprocally to other data • Increase the findability of your data • Optimize the format of your data • Shape and adopt standards • Promote your data in other channels
You want your data to help others find you. For example, embedding data into your primary web site, such as for Google Rich Snippets and Yahoo! Search Monkey.
Provide the glue to connect to these different networks. This will probably be a little messy for a while.
A new kind of semantic advertising Paid inclusion in other authoritative data networks. A.K.A. data advertising
Hypothetical example semantic advertising (data advertising) semantic advertising (paid inclusion) I just made this idea up, so whether or not Calais actually does something like this is purely coincidental. Sponsored data
Goals: • Include your data in more places • Get links to your data in more places • Win more overall visibility/authority
Information asymmetry will still be alive and well. Data web marketing must strategically decide how much to share, when, and with whom.
Some data may be better harnessed as an incentive for other business goals: • Become a subscriber • Become a lead • Become a partner • Become a customer • Become a data buyer
Data for nothing and links for free. (the SEO++ approach) Capturing value via visibility and authority.
Restricted “members only” data. Exchange of value in permission marketing, or an added benefit to customers and partners. Capturing value via lead generation and customer acquisition/retention.
Data as a direct revenue source. • Data more pragmatic in standardized format. • Paid data access as a stand-alone business. • Paid data access as a “add-on” business. Capturing value the old-fashioned way: people pay for it.
Tracking is also going to be hard due to mashing and caching. How is data used and redistributed once someone gets it from you?
Count subscribers to data feeds or visits to URIs. • Measures 1st-order reach. • Measures frequency of access. • Measures new vs. repeat access. • But maybe limited to IP address.
Count inbound links to your URIs. • Measure authority (DataRank). • Measure findability. • Limited by who indexes you.
Goals: • Discovering what data is popular. • Discovering who your data audience is. • Discovering how your audience uses that data. • Keeping track of competitors and comparable benchmarks.
Goals: • Cool applications for your customers. • Advanced your own internal operations. • By doing the above, better understand how data is consumed to be better at producing it.
Legal questions: Do we have the right to share certain data? What are the liabilities from sharing data? Does sharing certain data constitute a risk to our intellectual property?
When data was in silos, inherently fewer conflicts. As data web marketing grows, this will become a larger issue.
Remove bad or expired data. It’s much more unattractive when the public has come in for U-pick-it data.
Goal: Achieve balance between openness vs. protection, distributed vs. controlled, standardized vs. loosely-coupled data relationships.
A more technical future for marketing? A role for “marketing technologists” in the organizational DNA of the marketing department & agencies. The new leaders of data web marketing?