Scott Brinker

Appoint a marketing technology czar

January 20, 2010 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

Avi Dan has a great article that was published yesterday in Advertising Age, Why Brands Should Embrace Technological Change. It’s an excellent piece talking about the rapid shifts in marketing technology and encouraging CMOs to embrace the phenomenon with all their heart (and all their organizational structure). I was pleased to see him advocate for a chief marketing technologist role that would report to the CMO: CMOs must lead a number of internal changes as …

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The 8th linked data business model

January 17, 2010 / Marketing Data / By Scott Brinker / 4 Comments

In response to my post on linked data business models, Leigh Dodds at Talis wrote a terrific piece with his thoughts on the business of linked data. Leigh presents a number of great ideas that I think really carry the conversation forward. One of his points is that I overlooked an important model, what he calls the “sponsorship model.” Under this model, a government entity or a non-profit organization has a funded mandate to deliver …

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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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