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, …
It never ceases to amaze me how much there is to learn out there. Okay, there’s obviously an infinite amount of stuff to learn. But even if you carve out just the choicest subset of what’s most interesting and relevant to your passions in work and life, there’s still many lifetimes worth of potential learning in front of each of us. Some people may get depressed or bored with that. I actually get turned on. …
Pursuing computer science for marketing at Harvard Continue Reading »
If you’ve been at the intersection of business and technology for a while, you’re probably familiar with fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD). I’m not talking about the natural stress, worry and concern that everyone feels in the course of their work. Instead, FUD is an intentional “tactic of rhetoric and fallacy” that has been used in sales and marketing, particularly in high-technology, to dissuade customers from considering a competitor’s products. By many accounts FUD-as-strategy took …
Beyond fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) Continue Reading »
You have to admit, the social dynamics of Twitter are worth a chuckle, especially when you try to explain them to people who aren’t into it: You overhear something someone says. For some random reason, it intrigues you. So you start following them. And listening in on their conversations. And repeating what they say, verbatim, to your friends. You even start following their friends too. Until some minor thing they do annoys you. (“Oh, come …
I’ve been thinking about quintessential marketing skills and how they’re evolving. Skills can be very specific, such as “mastery of ExactTarget for newsletter email marketing”. But I’m more interested in broader skills that transcend individual projects and programs. For instance, in marketing, I’ve found that the following skills have perpetual value: empathy with customers, seeing through their eyes; a good ear for authentic, persuasive language; a good eye for compelling visual design; open-minded creativity and …
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