Paul Miller of Talis, who also authors ZDNet’s Semantic Web blog, is one of the leading evangelists for semantic web technologies out there. He’s also the person who first inspired my musings on semantic marketing by asking, in an offhanded comment to one of my first posts, how exactly would I envision marketing and the semantic web working together?
That brief remark has blossomed into a major theme for this blog, with posts on semantic branding, semantic advertising, semantic SEO, and parallels between brands and the semantic web. Even though most of these ideas are fringe today, they have the potential to become a mainstream prong of online marketing in the future — and maybe not too distant a future.
Semantic marketing is also a perfect field for marketing technologists to rise to the challenge, driving marketing objectives in a highly technical domain. (Keeping the meta-topic of this blog in mind.)
Recently, Paul invited me to do a podcast with him on the subject of semantic marketing, which he just posted on the Nodalities blog. Although it was an improvisational session — which, unfortunately, resulted in some rambling by yours truly — I thoroughly enjoyed the discussion with him. Having a Semantic Web guru (Paul) and a marketing guy (me) approach the topic of their intersection from very different perspectives was interesting and inspiring. Or at least I found it so.
I think both Paul and I agree that more cross-pollination of ideas between these fields could bear fruit for both.
