In the future of online marketing, the biggest internal tug-of-war might not be between the marketing department and IT — I maintain the belief that marketing will subsume technology under its own management umbrella — so much as it will be between the marketing department and legal. As we enter the next era of the web — Web 3.0 or the web of data or the semantic web, whatever you prefer to call it — …
As a shorter and more light-hearted post for the holiday weekend, here are five truisms about technology in the marketing world that I’ve found as good rules of thumb — somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but not entirely: 1. The Great Paradox Software developers are usually bad at creative marketing. Creative marketers are usually bad at software development. Excellent digital marketing requires both. 2. The Shoemaker’s Children? If you’re considering buying online marketing software or services from a …
A couple of major trends in software development — in particular, open source collaboration and the design of social network/user-generated content platforms — may provide useful insight for the future of marketing management. After all, the increasing number of marketing channels and the increasing granularity of initiatives in them combine to form ultra-large-scale marketing environments that share similar properties to ultra-large-scale (ULS) software systems. It’s not coincidental that many of the leading web sites whose …
Two powerful and parallel trends are underway in marketing. First, marketing is becoming more human. This is the social media revolution. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn groups, etc., are thriving with real dialogues, between real people in organizations and real constituents in the market. This pushes marketing as a whole to be more real — customers aren’t abstract models on a whiteboard, but splendidly diverse individuals with emotions, opinions, and microphones. What used to be a …
Flying home from the Semantic Technology Conference 2009 (#semtech2009 on Twitter), I have to confess that I’m drunk on the Kool-Aid. My presentation on marketing in the semantic web attracted a packed room, and feedback — from both technical and business attendees — was incredibly positive. But it was the sum of the rest of the conference that really inspired me to conclude: The semantic web — or web of data, web 3.0 if you …
Ever since reading that article in The New York Times about Wall Street-like data analysis being applied to Madison Avenue marketing — what I would call computational marketing, as a nod to computational finance — I’ve been searching for more stories about that idea. It turned into a bit of a nomenclature expedition. Computational Marketing A search for “computational marketing” in Google brings back ~1,000 results, with the first page being dominated by a single …
This past Sunday in The New York Times, there was an interesting article talking about the elevation of data and number crunching in advertising: Put Ad on Web. Count Clicks. Revise. Written mostly from the perspective of ad agencies, advertising is portrayed as undergoing a seismic shift from Mad Men to a mixed mission with equal parts creatives and finance quants (Mad Money?). “Where the data guys were once an afterthought in a marketing presentation, …
Madison Avenue + Wall Street = Computational Marketing Continue Reading »
A little over a year ago, I wrote a post on marketing in the semantic web (“semantic marketing”) that tackled the question of what marketing might be like in the semantic web. I should say that now, the semantic web is probably better thought of as a “web of data” — analogous to the existing web of human-readable content, but layered with structured and linked data that software can easily process. If you haven’t yet …
Exciting news came out of Google’s Searchology event yesterday for the advancement of semantic web adoption: the announcement of Rich Snippets in Google search results. Google is now starting to pay attention to structured data that is embedded — using either microformats or RDFa — in the web pages it crawls. And now, via these rich snippets, Google will start displaying that structured data in the search results. At the moment, these rich snippets only …
Google encourages structured data on your web site Continue Reading »
I recently saw the movie Jurassic Park again. It’s about an island of cloned dinosaurs, intended as a kind of zoo and amusement park, that spirals out of control during a pre-opening inspection. Spiraling out of control is a euphemism for having ravenous pre-historic creatures devouring everyone in sight. (Remind anyone of their last budget meeting?) It made me think of marketing automation. One of the characters is a mathematician who specializes in chaos theory, …
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