borrowed relevance...

Josh Bernoff published a report recently here talking about "boring" brands.

It resonated with me - a lot of the brands I work with at Dig for fire are what he'd define as "boring" - healthcare providers, banks, government departments, building supply merchants and educational institutions - brands that certainly aren't going to be adopted by users just because they're "cool" (I'm aware just using the term "cool" - means I'm likely to be anything but...)

As someone at the coal face of always on marketing, tasked with getting these sorts of brands to exist online, I can attest to the fact that a lot of the issues on a day to day level, come down to brands not being comfortable with "borrowing relevance".

Its not about "cool". Its about convincing brands to get involved with what people are actually talking about, as opposed to what the brand would like them to be talking about.

In other words - there is possibly too much getting stuck up on the relevance of the marketing tactic and not enough understanding, that so long as whatever the application or technology employed (the application, viral, widget, newsfeed, weird bit of technology) resonates with the brand essence - in most cases, that's enough to start.....

So long as they're contributing in a positive way, a brand in unfamiliar territory is something users probably take more notice of, at least initially. Removing friends from your facebook account has got precious little to do with eating burgers but it reinforced Burger King's playful, cheeky brand values. On the other end of the scale, Keep Britain Tidy publishing data in RDF format has nothing directly to do with picking up litter, but being seen at the cutting edge of web 3.0 means the brand can have conversations it could never have had, had it stuck rigidly to its push messaging plan and segmentation model.

what is the semantic web?

Recently the concept of the semantic web has been coming up in conversations - and many people I talk to don't seem to have a grip on exactly what it is.

A "semantic"(or meaning) web is one in which machines "understand" data. Data about data if you like.

Ostensibly, from a business perspective, the semantic web is about data - but it will likely be much more than this as the idea matures. In time, by using a common language (RDF), a technical ecology will evolve where systems and devices of all kinds can share data and come to understand each other more completely. Many people are talking about the semantic web as the world growing a central nervous system.

As a drugs company. I might want to find out why a particular group of people in an area are more susceptible to diabetes.

At the moment, due to the limitations on the amount and type of data I could practically look at, I might confine myself to the obvious - I might look at smoking rates, or lifestyle data.

In a semantic web world - I would instantly be able to pull in a much wider variety of data from different sources - allowing me to see non linear correlations between the disease and factors I could never have assessed before. Perhaps a DTI data set could tell me how many lorries with toxic waste travel on the nearby roads? Is diabetes related to the amount of dog poo in the local park? Perhaps data on the weather could tell me whether there was any link to above average rainfall?
 
At a practical level then, the semantic web is about the format of data. The establishing of a common language and systems to enable people to combine information, cut it how they want, and make it more useful for themselves in the real world.