In this post I invite you to think about digital marketing communication as a way of communicating value, which in the interconnected cyberspace of the Web, inevitably demands taking good care of the machine-readable aspect of the message, carrying the framed value, that is of the data it is annotated with.
On a conceptual level, marketing communication is about communicating value. Be that the value of the product, the company or the interaction itself. It is also about adding value and thus increasing the perceived value of the exchange. Why would I pay attention to your ad if I don’t perceive the value of its proposition bigger than the cost of my effort? How is spending time with the information you provide me with would help me do more and know more?
On the Web, a knowledge-intensive environment, communicating value requires an approach that takes into account the many places where value is or can be potentially presented or can emerge.
Think Mickey.
Alexa at Home and at Walt Disney World Resort Source: https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-details/amazon-and-disney-introduce-hey-disney-magical-voice-assistant
Online these places of conenction and interaction are made of data points, they are part of a Web of Data. For, nowadays, users consult their personal bot to find, aggregate, and personalize information and to reserve, book, or buy products and services, as Dieter Fensel and collective argue in the preface of the book Knowledge Graphs Methodology, Tools And Selected Use Cases, write.
In consequence, on the Web, marketing communication goals (the most trivial being: differentiate, reinforce, inform, persuade) are facing the challenges of sending a message (to communicate value) in a language that both human and algorithmic audiences would understand.
Why (take) care of the Web of Data?
“It is increasingly important for providers of information, products, and services to be highly hearable and visible in these new online channels to ensure their future economic sustainability.”
Fensel, Dieter A., Umutcan Simsek, Kevin Angele, Elwin Huaman, Elias Kärle, Oleksandra Panasiuk, Ioan Toma, Jürgen Umbrich and Alexander Wahler. “Knowledge Graphs: Methodology, Tools and Selected Use Cases.” Knowledge Graphs (2020): n. pag.
Such taking care of being visible and hearable, is actually possible by first understanding, next caring and further taking care of the Web of Data.
WEB OF DATA INFOBOX: The core objective of the Web of Data is to publish content on the Web in formats that machines can process more easily and accurately than the human-friendly HTML documents forming the current “Web of Documents”. As the Web becomes increasingly machine readable, increasingly complex tasks can be automated on the Web, yielding more and more powerful Web applications that are capable of discovering, cross-referencing, filtering, and organising data from numerous websites in a matter of seconds. Aidan Hogan. The Web of Data, Springer, October 2020. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51580-5
In marketing communication practices such caring would be related to attending to the machine-readable aspect of content where messages live.
In the context of marketing communication, I would say we can talk about a Web of concepts that matter to audiences. I borrow hte beautiful framing “concepts that matter to audiences” from the description of BBC things. (BBC Things provides a single reference for the growing collection of entities that matter to the BBC and our audiences.)
So to answer the question “Why care about the Web of Data”: Because we need to take care of the way our marketing messages (which are essentially a weave of concepts) travels the Web. Online we are to sustain a continuum of interactions (key to building trust and brand equity) with stakeholders in the context of disparate systems, fragmented marketing content and a user switching for an average 10-20 seconds to different content.
How to add a little semantics to the content of marketing communication on the Web?
The flow of our messages and communication on the Web, I argue here, we can channel using structured data with which we can describe the concepts that matter to people. And we can start with using schema.org to formally describe some basic concepts such as products, company, offer, website, address, event etc.
In my PhD research I collided to paradigms: one where meaning is formalized and another where meaning and value are emergent, ever-changing dynamics born out of a dialogue. As bold and at times close to “hubris” this approach sounded, sticking to its basics, I managed to design a framework, which can be used to add a little semantic to the content of marketing communication on the Web.
Below you will find one principle of dialogic communication (The Dialogic Loop principle) which is met with different (as they were seen back in the days when the paper had been developed) elements of a website.
DIALOGIC LOOP PRINCIPLE INFOBOX: “One benefit of new technologies is that they “allow feedback from audiences to be embedded in the [public relations] tactic itself. Thus, a feedback loop is an appropriate starting point for dialogic communication between an organization and its publics. A dialogic loop allows public to query organizations and, more importantly, it offers organizations the opportunity to respond to questions concerns and problems”. Source: Kent, Michael L, and Maureen Taylor. “Building Dialogic Relationships through the World Wide Web.” Public Relations Review 24, no. 3 (1998): 321–34. doi:10.1016/S0363-8111(99)80143-X.
I added some other elements. Further these are mapped to the most frequently used content (on the the 23 website of the top 10 companies from the S&P ESG 500 index , I researched: Apple Inc.; Microsoft Corp; Amazon.com Inc; Alphabet Inc; JP Morgan Chase & Co JPM Financials; Tesla, Inc; Nvidia Corp; Unitedhealth Group Inc; Visa Inc.).
Last these are mapped to the formalization types from schema.org which satisfy a certain principle.
| Dialogic Principles and its elements | Frequently used website content related to the principle | Formalizations from schema.org that allow the semantic annotation of the content in question. |
| Principle: Dialogic Loop | ||
| Express opinions on issues. | Discussion forum. Contact form. Open comments to posts and other web content. Dedicated community website. | schema:DiscussionForumPosting schema:Organization schema:Rating schema:ContactPage |
| Frequent publication of news and / or current information | News. Press releases. Reports. Job description. Blogs. Product releases. | AnalysisNewsArticle AskPublicNews ArticleBackground NewsArticleOpinion NewsArticleReportage NewsArticleReview NewsArticle schema:NewsArticle schema:BlogPosting schema:JobPosting |
| Feedback | Contact page. Customer support page. | schema:comment |
| Discussion Forum | Discussion Forum (descriptions, user-generated content) | schema:DiscussionForumPosting |
| Chatbot | – | – |
| Ability to subscribe for news, information, tips. | – | – |
To give another, straightforward mapping, which is rather oriented towards explaining why the Dialogic Loop principle is important for marketing communication objectives on the Web, here’s another “mapping”:
| Principles | Corresponding marketing communications content | Availability of a schema.org Type | Why the principles (and the use of schema.org to annotate their corresponding content) are important for user engagement (DRIP) on the Web? |
| Dialogic Loop Opportunities to send messages on the site. Fill out survey instruments. Express opinions on issues. Online feedback option Chat forum. Subscribe for news and tips | Contact page. Feedback page. Forum page (dedicated community website). Newsletter. | https://schema.org/ContactPage https://schema.org/DiscussionForumPosting https://schema.org/ContactPoint | The fragmented, non-linear customer journey. A complex continuum of mediated interaction. Example question:Whom do I contact in case of a broken device? |
And this is how I see communicating value on the Web. In the first place understanding that the Web is made of pieces of data, not of websites. Next, realizing that the user journey is not as linear as most of our marketing plans imagine it, and also more often than not it starts with a simple question.
Epilogue: A little semantics in marketing communication Goes a Long Way
On the Web the question about value is a question about value-creation in a space where consumers are increasingly connected, demanding, seeking dialogue through software agents (yet, those like Pete’s in Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Ora Lassila’s and Jim Hendler’s seminal article Semantic Web ).
That said, and in designing plans for marketing communication on the Web, the question of value inevitably bears the question of creating content with machine-readable meaning.
Choosing to add a little semantics is not a marketing trick, it is a marketing choice. And yes, it does have benefits, the biggest one being the opportunity for us to ” … build [the Web] now so that those who come to it later will be able to create things that we cannot ourselves imagine”. (Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality By Tim Berners-Lee. December 1, 2010.)
After all the Web is not a vast wasteland of ads, spam, pop ups [add more “techniques”]. Neither is the practice of marketing communication on the Web. And it is up to us to decide how we want to relate to other people and content in an algorithmic environment and how we want to communicate and create value on the Web.
I will also be speaking about some of the points I made here at the upcoming KGC 2022 Conference. Hope to see you there!
