The ‘Like’ button, an element of Facebook’s larger Open Graph API announcement, is part of the next chapter in web evolution by sharing data that is ‘understood’ by computers across the web for the benefit of businesses and users.
“By collecting data across different sites about your personal preferences, and having knowledge of your network of friends, Facebook can provide a huge amount of data to better inform your researching, buying and leisure activities,” explains Pouros.
B2B marketers are used to the fact that what starts in B2C marketing will eventually make its way to the B2B arena. It is highly likely that business-orientated social networking platforms such as LinkedIn will create its own ‘Like’ button, or even adopt Facebook’s like the 250,000 websites that have already incorporated it.
What’s there to ‘Like’?
If web 1.0 was about linking pages and helping users find good content, then web 2.0 was about linking people through social media sites and web 3.0 is about linking data to create the most personal and exact web experience ever. This will happen by mapping ideas expressed in human language to data in a way that allows for software to automatically understand how different pieces of data are related.
What does this mean for marketers? Rather then web marketing, or social media marketing, web 3.0 will herald the start of semantic and data marketing. This means bringing together valuable data such as market research, web analytics and CRM records – which have previously been kept in silos of spreadsheets, databases and documents – and making it shared and ‘open’ and implementing technology that can recognise and understand human language, not just key words.
While it might sound a little scary to share one of your company’s most precious resources, the essence of web 3.0 for marketers is about thinking about data for your customers, rather than data about them. This means sharing data among your customers, partners and prospects as a relationship and brand building exercise. In return marketers will receive leads, promotion, feedback and reciprocal access to partner’s data.
For businesses, says Pouros, it essentially heralds the return of old school relationship marketing, albeit with a digital face, “as people who like you and formally acknowledge that within web 3.0 will drive more business to you.”
Pouros explains, “That means that it becomes important to offer a great product, service, value for money, etc, as if you don’t, you won’t be rewarded by being given access to a customer’s network of friends, colleagues or followers. Dealing promptly with problems a customer might be having, communicating to them clearly, encouraging them to ‘like’ you formally and informally becomes critical to a business’ success in a way that it never has been.”
Pouros says the customer yields the power and businesses need to respond by:
- Targeting niches and servicing their needs perfectly.
- Identifying important and relevant influencers (people with lots of friends, followers, etc) and turning them into advocates and evangelists.
- Genuinely offer a good product and service.
- Encourage people to join your networks, ‘like’ you, follow you on Twitter, Facebook, and so on.
Pouros expects to see semantically-enabled devices (fridges, PCs, phones, TVs) and semantically-enabled websites to become commonplace within the next few years.
For Mark Redgrave, CEO of semantic technology company OpenAmplify words and their meaning are just as important as data in the semantic web, but understanding the significance of them is a huge hurdle for marketers. Redgrave says, “If marketers are able to understand and act upon the vast pool of user generated reviews, ratings, recommendations, and conversations that occur everyday in social media they will be able to unlock enormous value and feed the insight back into campaigns, product development and CRM.”
Semantic advertising
Graham Moore, director at NetworkedPlanet says semantic web will not only change the fundamentals of online search, but also the way the content of web pages is presented, potentially damaging to advertisers. “Currently the majority of web pages are created using HTML code and adverts are embedded in the static web page and presented to the user along with the content searched for,” he explains. “In the future aggregation applications within the browser will be used to display the structured data the user is looking for, stripping out the adverts. It could be a matter of advertisers building adverts directly into these apps.”
Scott Brinker, chief marketing technologist at Ion Interactive and a marketing technology blogger, says the distribution and promotion of data through formal and informal networks could lead to a new kind of semantic advertising, “People could be paying to have their semantic data distributed through certain networks, tagged with certain metadata under the authority of the network owner,” he explains. “I believe there are vast entrepreneurial opportunities for vertical networks here”, he adds.
Whatever the future, Moore is adamant that a major change is on the horizon, “It is essential that marketing departments and advertisers acknowledge this shift and begin to put plans in place so they don’t get left behind.”
Semantic web might sound like something you would rather leave to the IT department, but it will become vital to improving CRM and your customer’s web experience and monitoring your brand online, the two easiest areas to start in this burgeoning marketing channel. Using semantic search in your website means allowing it to understand the sentiment behind a users’ language. For example if a user types in ‘How do I get a French commercial loan?’ search results would understand that the users was also looking for ‘financing a European business’ and other alternative phrasings, delivering the customer the best fit for their search, not the best fit for your site’s keywords.
Search beyond keywords
One successful example from the US of a brand using semantic web technology to boost its online presence is Best Buy. The American retailer used semantic technology to better describe its products including their components, accessories, delivery options, payment options and warranties. The result of this semantic change has been a 30 per cent increase in Best Buy’s site traffic from organic search. There are suspicions that Google has already started to make changes to its algorithm to favour sites using semantic web markups.
Over in the UK, Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) is reported to be soon launching its own semantic web platform, which has been in development for the last two years. The use of semantic technology will allow the bank to target individual customers with relevant information and will be rolled out across RBS and NatWest sites. BMI also saw significant success in keeping its customers up-to-date during the recent closure of UK airspace because of volcanic ash (see case study, above) by using semantic search on its website to best answer questions.
All well and good but Tim Gibbons, director at Elemental Communications, remains cautious, “Marketers are just getting to grips with web 2.0, can you imagine the upheaval for many that will happen with web 3.0?”
