Scott Brinker

7 business models for linked data

January 8, 2010 / Marketing Data / By Scott Brinker / 13 Comments

Now that major companies are implementing linked data, and more marketing thought leaders are championing data as an outward-facing competitive advantage, the question I’m hearing more frequently is: How do you turn data into revenue? Creating, publishing, and maintaining data takes work. What are the economic incentives for companies to put in the effort? Here’s my take on 7 business models for data web initiatives: I’ve organized these by how revenue is generated, from direct …

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Mashable makes much of marketing data

January 7, 2010 / Marketing Data / By Scott Brinker / 2 Comments

Josh Jones-Dilworth wrote a couple of great columns about data and marketing on Mashable.com, Marketing in 2010: It’s All About the Data and How Data Will Impact the Way We Do Business. In the first article, he makes the case for data as a marketing vehicle: In the near term, learn to think of data as an asset, and be creative. Data shapes conversations and markets. But data doesn’t come to you — organizationally, the …

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Marketing, technology, and storytelling

December 31, 2009 / Uncategorized / By Scott Brinker / 3 Comments

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 …

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3 New Year’s resolutions for marketing technologists in 2010

December 29, 2009 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 1 Comment

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 …

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Best Buy jump starts data web marketing

December 11, 2009 / Marketing Data / By Scott Brinker / 3 Comments

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 …

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Web 3.0 conference focuses on advertising and marketing

December 10, 2009 / Uncategorized / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

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 …

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Google bets HUGE on advertising everywhere

November 9, 2009 / Uncategorized / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

These past few weeks, I’ve repeatedly remarked that social media marketing — while a glorious and wonderful phenomenon in its own right — is unlikely to be the death of online advertising. This has not been a popular position. In fact, I was feeling a little lonely out on that limb. But today, I had some company join me. And not just any company. Google, the great masters of the Internet universe, happily crawled out …

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How finance hobbles marketing innovation

November 6, 2009 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 2 Comments

When it comes to innovation and new market opportunity — why some companies harness those forces to catapult to riches and glory, while otherwise good and strong leaders stumble and fall — the smartest guy I’ve ever met is Clay Christensen. The chart above is from an article Clay wrote a year or so ago, Innovation Killers: How Financial Tools Destroy Your Capacity to Do New Things. You might be saying, “I’m in marketing, not …

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Study reveals issues with search ads — trust and usefulness

November 2, 2009 / Uncategorized / By Scott Brinker / 6 Comments

A few weeks ago, I launched an informal survey to ask people what they thought of PPC search advertising, hoping to peel back a bit more of the curtain of their sentiments and beliefs. As promised, I’m happy to share the results with you. Well, maybe “happy” isn’t the right word. As you’ll see, the feedback about search advertising is not particularly positive — although on the bright side, it does leave considerable room for …

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Risk in PPC vs. social media marketing

October 26, 2009 / Marketing Tactics / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

There’s an argument that’s been circulating in social media marketing circles about how “dangerous” it can be for marketers to rely on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, as compared to more organic ways of building traffic. You know, social media doesn’t have to be positioned as the destructor of advertising to justify its existence. The gist of the argument: a deep-pocketed competitor can come along anytime, say flush with VC cash, and outspend you. One day you …

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