Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

From enterprise marketing management tools to search engine optimization, marketers have had to become conversant with the technologies that will enable them to achieve their branding, campaign, or lead-generation objectives, though they needn't actually aim at becoming technologists themselves.

"The channels in which they are operating tend to favor the advantage to those who understand the technology," says Scott Brinker, the president and CTO of Ion Interactive, a company that delivers post-click marketing software and services to test and analyze web site visitors' landing experiences. Brinker writes the blog Chief Marketing Technologist. "So if you understand how to do really good search engine optimization, your company ends up with higher placement, or more traffic, or more customers."

Yahoo's recent announcement that it is embracing semantic web standards -- especially if other leaders in the search world follow suit -- now is providing marketers with a clear and immediate incentive to leverage semantic web technologies in their web properties to gain a clear advantage over competitors.

"Search engines, in my opinion, have been the primary driver of Internet marketing taking off to the degree it has," says Brinker. "Whole businesses and agencies are focused on that aspect of helping companies represent themselves in search engine results. But what they are doing today is uni-dimensional or two-dimensional at best."

They've been very creative about exploiting the very narrow band of things they can influence with the 95 characters of text they typically get for the headline, blurb, and URL that show up in search engine results pages, but "the Yahoo announcement, to me, represents a chance to add several dimensional layers on top of that," Brinker says.

In a world in which skeptical consumers closely suss out search page results to try to determine whether a site really meets their specific interests or they just happened to get caught in the wide net thrown out by someone, those companies that can start exposing semantic data that is clearly very relevant and targeted to a particular searcher will gain the advantage, Brinker says.

"Even if you assume that initially [adding semantic metadata] doesn't impact where [something] appears in the results, the reality is that in the results data that comes across, one that represents quality semantic information is going to be more compelling than that sort of random mash-up of text that usually appears" as a link synopsis, he says. Plus, as more people visit and link back to that site, it creates more inbound links and naturally starts to raise the page's position in the search engines, he says.

In his blog this week, Brinker discusses these issues, even coining a next-wave term for search optimization -- SEO ++, in a nod to the past paradigm shift from the C programming language to C++. And make no doubt, it is a paradigm shift, he tells Semanticweb.com. At the Search Engine Strategies show in NY last week, he says, you could have heard a pin drop when Yahoo! Search's chief scientist Andrew Tomkins gave a keynote that described its plans for the Open Search platform.
"These people make their living on the agency or the client side with search engine optimization, and what Andrew was talking about was essentially changing that entire world in ways that go far beyond that," Brinker says.

What Yahoo is enabling may just be the starting point. Consider, for example, the tension between exposing more and more semantically enhanced data to customers, enabling them to get deeper into your data web -- but also the fact that this data may be equally exposed to competitors and/or, at some level, out of your control. "So there is a strategic question of how much openness we will have on data at various positions in the organization, the trade-offs between opening data and bonding with customers, vs. how much risk are we putting the organization in by baring that competitive intelligence," he says. "Some of what proposes to happen at the semantic web layer is analogous to how companies are going to represent themselves in [social networking and social media] communities, where almost by definition, once you start to engage in them, you lose control."

That, as well as questions over which semantic technologies and standards have legs in the long run (microformats, RDF, both?), means that CMOs need to go into this with their eyes wide open, understanding the strategic choices and advantages of the various approaches. It also demands that the marketing organization have very strong technology representation within to provide advice and implementation around the infrastructure underpinnings that will help achieve marketing goals.

"If there is too much division between those leading applications technology being on the other side of the wall in IT, and marketing is in its own silo, it's going to be very difficult for companies to collaborate at the rate that is necessary to take advantage of things like this," he says.

Brinker has also been spending some time wondering how the next steps by Yahoo or another major search engine vendor can impact on ion interactive's post-click marketing business.

"Wouldn't it be incredible if Yahoo or Google makes the next leap in being able to expose some of that for the paid advertisements as well," he says. "Our customers who do paid search engine marketing have a very narrow pallete they can work with, and we know sooner or later that will evolve to support richer opportunities. It seems like there might be a real symmetry between being able to offer that same semantic visibility to what's behind the click for the ads as there would be for organic [search] listings."