Scott Brinker

Debate on The Long Tail

July 4, 2008 / Uncategorized / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

Chris Anderson’s theory of The Long Tail in Internet commerce and marketing has been one of the more influential concepts in online strategy and business models. Amazon, Google, eBay, iTunes, NetFlix — these are all major Long Tail success stories. I’d contend that many of the current best strategies in search engine optimization are essentially derived from Long Tail theory. These ideas will therefore be naturally extended into semantic marketing and SEO++ accordingly. Even MySpace, …

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Exponentials in marketing: watch out!

June 29, 2008 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

Exponential growth in marketing is not just a colloquial way of saying, “wow, there’s an awful lot going on in marketing these days”. That’s true, of course, but I’m specifically fascinated by — and concerned about — actual mathematical exponential growth, where something doubles, doubles again, doubles again, and so on. Let me start with the legend of the chessboard, as adapted from Wikipedia: When the creator of the game of chess showed his invention …

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BrandTags.Net — A Great Experiment

May 12, 2008 / Other / By Scott Brinker / 1 Comment

Noah Brier put together a fantastic little web application, BrandTags.net. The site shows you brand logos and invites you to respond with a one-word or one-phrase “tag” that pops into your mind when you see it. After you submit your tag, you can then see how other people have responded by viewing a “tag cloud” that shows all the words and phrases that other people have submitted, where the size is larger the more people …

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Marketing in the cloud

April 14, 2008 / Marketing Software / By Scott Brinker / 8 Comments

Marketers should have their heads in the cloud. If you haven’t read The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr yet, you need to add it to your list. Cloud computing — that is, computing infrastructure that is based somewhere out on the Internet, rather than installed on hardware locked in your company’s IT center — is becoming real. Fast. Combined with the maturity of web-based software-as-a-service offerings, the strong gravitational pull of social media sites where …

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A new S curve for search engine ads?

April 6, 2008 / Marketing Tactics / By Scott Brinker / 2 Comments

Are we on the verge of a new S curve for search engine advertising? S curves are a phenomenon of technology adoption. They begin where a particular technology — in this case, ads on search engine results pages (SERPs) — arrive on the scene with chaotic, slow growth while early adopters figure it out. Then a dominant model emerges — e.g., Google AdWords text ads — where the winning approach and the benefits to the …

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Marketing as a science, but science is a creative endeavor

March 30, 2008 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 4 Comments

Let me state right up front: I am an advocate of scientific marketing. Just in case there’s any doubt as you read on. Marketing ideas should be tested and one should apply the scientific method to those tests. Most of marketing is now measurable, directly or indirectly. With digitally produced and distributed marketing — particularly channels such as search engine marketing, online advertising, email marketing, post-click marketing, and web site optimization — it’s often practical …

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Semantic Marketing, SEO++ Feedback

March 27, 2008 / Marketing Data / By Scott Brinker / 1 Comment

Thanks to everyone who’s shared or responded to semantic marketing and the SEO++ idea. It’s been great to connect with other people who are also intrigued by the possibilities that are starting to appear at the intersection of marketing and the semantic web. Jennifer Zaino at SemanticWeb.com interviewed me and published an article To Market, To Market, The Semantic Way. Richard MacManus at ReadWriteWeb awarded me Comment of the Day: Semantic Marketing for my remarks …

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SEO + Semantic Web = SEO++

March 23, 2008 / Marketing Data / By Scott Brinker / 10 Comments

Two weeks ago, Amit Kumar announced on the Yahoo! Search Blog that Yahoo! will be supporting semantic web standards in their new Yahoo! search open platform. This is a game-changing moment in online marketing. Essentially, Yahoo! is proposing that search will be the “killer app” for sparking the explosion of the semantic web into the mainstream. With this release, when Yahoo! recognizes semantically tagged data in the pages it crawls — structured data such as …

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Who is a chief marketing technologist?

March 16, 2008 / Marketing Management / By Scott Brinker / 9 Comments

What is the role of a chief marketing technologist? Short version: a chief marketing technologist (CMT) is the person responsible for leading an organization’s marketing technology. A company may or may not be a “technology” business, but in today’s world it needs to deftly leverage technology in its marketing to: optimize its marketing strategy and tactics; interface with its audience through digital channels. In a wired world, marketing must be technology-savvy for a business to …

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Great marketing visualization tools

March 13, 2008 / Marketing Data / By Scott Brinker / Leave a Comment

As I’ve previously remarked, I believe that good, innovative visualization of marketing data is one of the more underutilized techniques in a marketer’s toolbox. One of the key roles of the marketing technology team should be to enable and infuse fresh perspectives of activities, initiatives, and results to the rest of the marketing team in creative ways that unveil useful patterns and opportunities. Sarah Perez over at ReadWriteWeb just posted a fantastic list of The …

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