Search engines are on board with the slow but steady march to leverage structured data in delivering query results. Are marketing departments across industries marshalling their resources to take advantage of all the opportunities that are enabled by structuring data?

Yes, and no, says Scott Brinker, the president and CTO of marketing technology company Ion Interactive. The people within companies who have the Semantic Web technology expertise are starting to realize the importance of “co-opting the marketing department and those with business objectives with this technology, and doing a better job of advocating what those benefits can be,” says Brinker, who will be participating in a session on the Semantic Web in marketing at the Web 3.0 conference later this month. “For marketers and the business side, it’s hard for them to conceptualize the value of data as a marketing tool to the outside world. Everyone is on board with having that data internally, but having the mechanisms to share that data with the outside world to get new customers and strengthen relationships, that is still a new concept.”

The good news is that there is increasing excitement and buy-in by business pros in the enterprise, including marketing leaders, about the usefulness of integrating RDFa, microformats and other structured data open standards to improve the findability and rankings of web sites. Best Buy has served as something of a flag-waver here, disclosing that it has published BBY SKUs in RDFa, using the GoodRelations e-commerce ontology to happy effect. That includes a 30 percent increase in traffic on BestBuy stores pages and seeing product pages rankings in Google improve significantly. Says Brinker, even if marketing types “don’t grok RDFa or microformats at the highest level, the SEOs they hire to do this do recognize it as a leading edge and valid tactic. And the net result is you start to see it adopted across a much wider base.”

One of the great things about the SEO community and the social media marketing movement, he says, is that it’s gotten a broad set of businesses to realize that they have to be smart about how they’re getting their information out into the world and strengthening their relationships with their communities. “The data side is still very early in the process but it is the very natural next step,” he says.

From the Content Provider Perspective
Maybe business execs across sectors can learn some lessons about data as an external marketing tool from those toiling away in the media space to market their online content. Information — acquiring and disseminating it and leveraging it to drive further involvement by their audience in their online properties — is critical. “There are five basic categories of things you can do if you are working on marketing content,” says Krista Thomas, who works on the Thomson Reuters Calais Initiative and developer community at OpenCalais.com. Thomas, who is participating in the same session at the Web 3.0 conference, has been privy to the efforts of well-established and start-up content providers that use OpenCalais tagging services for their efforts – those providers range from Mail Online to The Huffington Post to Al Jazeera to CBS Interactive/CNET and The New Republic.

She sees such semantic web technologies as helping with:

▏ Automated tagging for editorial efficiency, improved SEO, better search and navigation – “If you come up with five tags [manually], is that enough for all search engines to find you?” she says. “You can use OpenCalais Tageroo for WordPress and the tagging module for Drupal in the Calais Collection or other tools to automate that tagging piece. That’s the low-hanging fruit.”
▏ More ambitious CMS integration work, using RDF returned by services such as OpenCalais to feed related content into reader engagement features such as recommended reading widgets and topic hubs – “This is about what I do if I really want people to engage with my content and stay and click,” Thomas says. “It’s search engine eye candy because it’s rich content and a full surround-sound 360-degree experience of that topic.”
▏ Improved ad placement, using the tags in combination with ad serving to inform placement for improved relevance for the reader and better performance for the advertiser – “This is one of the hardest, and the holy grail for marketers to know that within their content they’ll never have inappropriate ads showing up,” she says. You don’t want, for instance, an ad for an airline showing up next to a story about an airplane crash, even though there’s obviously a semantic relationship between the two. “It’s not only picking ads by keywords but keywords plus tags of contextual intelligence I have around the page.” Marketers definitely need the aid of the IT group for these kinds of efforts.
▏ Delivering entirely new content experiences, as some start-ups are doing – marketing yourself within the browser as Feedly does is part of what Thomas labels the “blue sky” category. “If you are looking to create something brand new, delivering content through an add-in in the browser, this is great. It’s only because of semantic technology and meta-tagging that you can really enhance that browser-based experience.”
▏Leveraging Linked Data URIs as a way to enhance content with open data, and also to distribute content – that takes us from blue sky to future-state. Think, she says, about automatically enhancing and enriching content like a news story by leveraging resources from the world of linked data, such as having U.S. census data automatically formatted right into an accompanying sidebar – or distributing your own organization’s content, RDF and all, to the group of publishers with whom you partner. “It’s fully coded and distributed out to these partners using linked data as the transport layer,” she says. “This is the next-generation vision” but it’s being facilitated by more and more outfits providing URIs and participating in the linked data world.

“The end result is that publishers are getting-super efficient, very engaged with readers, and they are getting smart and getting specialized,” Thomas says. Instead of focusing on how to get paid for their content, how to get it onto e-readers, whether to limit the search engines it’s open to, she says, the more productive marketing route may be this: “What if we built better content, a better site, and enhanced and differentiated that content to make it special,” Thomas says. “Rather than throwing up a gate and charging people to read a story, what if we just worked on making this site as good as it could be?”

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