The document provides an introduction to emerging technologies like Web 3.0, the Semantic Web, and the Internet of Things, and their impact on marketing and public relations. It discusses how these technologies will allow objects and data to be connected in new ways, enabling deeper understanding and new forms of discovery. This represents a shift from current models, and raises important questions about how organizations can empower customers and leverage digital information in the future.
The Future is Now: An Introduction to Web3.0 and the Internet of Things
1. The Future is now.An introduction to Web3.0 and the internet of things as they are happening today and as they impact marketing & Public Relations 1
2. Philip Sheldrake Influence Crowd LLP www.influencecrowd.com LinkedIn /in/philipsheldrake @sheldrake CIPR Social Summer serieshttp://bit.ly/ciprsm#ciprsm26th August 2010 2
3. These technologies massively impact marketing and PR. We are about to witness a technological Cambrian explosion. Today is about gaining an insight into this explosion. We can only begin to determine the effects if we deeply understand the causes. We’ll broach some of the effects in conversation, but we don’t have time to explore them in any detail today. My goal: provide you with serious food for thought. My goal today 26th August 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 3
4. The Semantic Web 4 26th August 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales “Web 3.0” “The Web of Data”
5. Fellow Londoner Sir Tim Berners-Lee put the first website online 6th August 1991, and things have moved pretty fast since then. The first consumer Web revolution was embodied by companies such as Yahoo!, AOL, Amazon, eBay, PayPal, Ticketmaster and services such as browser based email and online banking. This was the Transactional Web if you like, retrospectively labeled Web 1.0. Web 1.0 5 26th August 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales
6. “A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter – and getting smarter faster than most companies. “These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can't be faked.” Cluetrain Manifesto, 1999 Web 2.0 6 26th August 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales
7. Whilst there is some confusion over the term, most people use “Web 3.0” to refer to the Semantic Web. I do. Either way, the label is a bit of a distraction, but marketers love it, so what can I say! I use the terms interchangeably here, and we explain it in the following slides. Web 3.0 7 26th August 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales
8. If Web 2.0 was all about (user generated) content and community participation, Web 3.0 is about the Web itself understanding the meaning of all the content and participation. Indeed, the Web becomes a universal medium for data, information and knowledge exchange. Web 3.0 cont. 8 26th August 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales
9. You can consider the development of the Web as having been informed by a document metaphor: Files, desktop, documents Open, read, close Everything has a location (like files in a filing cabinet). The document metaphor 26th August 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 9
10. The location of a document is specified with a Unique Resource Locator (URL). Eg, http://influencecrowd.com/philip_sheldrake/index.php The URL 26th August 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 10 The file. The folder. The domain name that relates to an IP address of a server (via a domain name server (DNS)), in this case right now a shared server at 69.89.31.175. Stipulates the protocol for retrieving the resource.
11. A hypothesis of the Semantic Web is that meaning can be conveyed via expressions known as triples: Triples 26th August 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 11
12. Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a language at the heart of the Semantic Web for expressing data models using statements expressed as triples. And the secret sauce?... to avoid ambiguities, each and every subject, predicate and object of a triple can be referred to uniquely with a URL (objects can have literal values too however). RDF 26th August 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 12
13. We could define all three of these locally, in our own little worlds, but all three are likely to be referred to elsewhere too. And that’s where the power of the Semantic Web starts to kick in. Local and global 26th August 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 13
14. I’m not the one and only Philip Sheldrake. Eg, Professor Philip Sheldrake is a Professorial Research Fellow in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University. So how do we define me uniquely? Well, with reference to: http://sheldrake.myopenid.comor http://philipsheldrake.com or http://www.google.com/profiles/philip.sheldrake. Similarly, Doc Searls may be http://searls.com. The subject and object 26th August 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 14
15. But what about the concept of “knows”? What does “knows” mean to you right now? What about in different social contexts? How might other cultures and languages regard “knows”? Eg, The French language has “savoir” & “connaître”. The predicate 26th August 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 15
16. Well FOAF (Friend Of A Friend) is a machine-readable ontology / vocabulary describing persons, their activities and their relations to other people and objects. To invoke reference to the FOAF ontology we write: <rdf:RDFxmlns:foaf=http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/> At that URI we will find a definition of “knows”: http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/#term_knows The predicate cont. 26th August 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 16
17. So now, when we express a statement as a triple like Subject - http://philipsheldrake.com Predicate - foaf:knows Object - http://searls.com there is no ambiguity as to what it means. Note: this format is for explanation purposes only and does not constitute sound syntax! The resultant triple 26th August 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 17
18. How about?! http://xkcd.com/stickman foaf:complicated http://xkcd.com/stickwoman Simple complicated 26th August 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 18 http://xkcd.com/355
19. RDF is being used today by: dbpedia – a project to represent Wikipedia content in RDF data.gov.uk – making the UK’s data mashable! Amazon.com – to mark up its and its partners’ products bbc.co.uk – Aunty Beeb is well along the RDF road, in fact you could consider the BBC to be a global leader in the publishing, news and content world. RDF is happening today 26th August 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 19
20. In April 2010, the International Press Telecommunications Council announced the official launch and widespread adoption of its G2 family of news exchange standards, supported by: Agence France-Presse Associated Press dpa The Press Association Thomson Reuters It’s XML, and contains some RDF components. News from the IPTC 26th August 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 20
21. GoodRelations is the name of an ontology for ecommerce. Jay Myers, Lead Web Development Engineer for Best Buy, reported that applying GoodRelations: Improved the rank of the respective pages in Google tremendously Increased traffic on the BestBuy stores pages by 30%. Search Engine Strategies 2009 conference, Chicago. http://ebusiness-unibw.org/pipermail/goodrelations/2009-December/000152.html Google loves RDF 26th August 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 21
22. Google reads semantically marked up content and, as of May 2009, uses it to create “rich snippets” it in its search results. Eg, http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/05/introducing-rich-snippets.html Google’s rich snippets 26th August 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 22 This “rich snippet” is possible only because Pocket-lint marks its content up semantically and to a standard recognised by Google.
23. I referred earlier to the Semantic Web’s full potential, and that full potential is described by a vision known as Linked Data. The following diagram of Linked Data, and ones like it, are as important to PR and marketing professionals as any Web 2.0 illustration you will have seen bandied around over the years. The full potential 26th August 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 23
24. LinkedData image 26th August 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 24 Chris Bizerhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lod-datasets_2009-07-14_colored.png Creative CommonsAttribution-ShareAlike 3.0
25. Visit http://relfinder.dbpedia.org/relfinder.html Type "Million Dollar Baby" in the 1st box Type "Letters from Iwo Jima" in the 2nd box …selecting the first result the engine finds for both. Now click "Find Relations" and sit back and feel the power of the semantic Web! Click the boxes with rounded corners. Movie databases are one of the first data sources to be RDF’d, but this kind of analysis will become increasingly possible in Semantic Web browsers whatever your search terms as the Semantic Web continues to grow. See Linked Data in action 26th August 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 25
26. Tim Berners-Lee on the Semantic Web 26th August 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 26 http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=HeUrEh-nqtU
27. The Web of Data exposes connections, correlations, relationships. Discovery is the new search. Discovery is the new social graph. The founding business models of Web 1.0 companies such as eBay and Rightmove, and Web 2.0 companies such as Facebook and LinkedIn, which rely on network effects – where the analytical power accrues to the host with the largest data set so more data is gravitationally attracted – are dead. (Today’s) Facebook is dead 26th August 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 27
28. Some pundits already refer to Google’s search engine as the “reputation engine”. With a specific intention in mind, one can seek out various facts and opinions relating to an organisation, a product or service. With Web 3.0, the multi-dimensional informational assets can be extracted, synthesised and presented to you real-time to take a stroll through. Extant agents work on your behalf to analyse and identify information thought to be most useful to you (based on your “digital detritus” for example). Reputation management has a new meaning 26th August 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 28
29. The Internet of Things 29 26th August 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales
30. The Internet of Things refers to a network of objects not historically connected. We can consider four kinds of objects: The device containing electronics in order to fulfil its primary function (eg, washing machine, car, aircon unit) The electrical device traditionally absent of sophisticated electronics (eg, lighting, heating, power distribution) Non-electrical objects (eg, food and drink packages, animals, clothing) Environmental sensors (eg, for variables such as temperature, ambient sound and moisture). See the CASAGRAS Final Report for more detailed definition. Defining the Internet of Things 26th August 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 30
31. IBM Internet of Things video 26th August 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 31 http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=sfEbMV295Kk
32. Each and every one of us is going to be kicking off more data describing our use of digital products and services; what some refer to as our digital exhaust or digital footprint, and I like to call digital detritus. Detritus is a biological word for discarded organic matter, such as leaf litter for example, which is then decomposed by microorganisms and re-appropriated by animal and plant life. It is then interestingly analogous to our regard for and treatment of this data we’re all shedding. Digital detritus 26th August 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 32
33. We collect the clickpath of visitors’ interactions with our website today, but we can’t yet access the data describing their use of physical products. We can invite customers to share their location data with us via their mobile phones, but we can’t yet help them review their driving style (excepting Fiat’s Ecodrive facility) or use of public transport. Digital detritus cont. 26th August 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 33
34. We can encourage the consumer to reap the anticipated advantages of greener products and services, but we can’t identify the actual advantage they achieve and reflect it back at them. We can market a food product’s expected role in a balanced diet, but not the specific role it plays in a particular household’s diet. Digital detritus cont. 26th August 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 34
35. Does Sony sell you a TV or a home entertainment service? Does Fiat sell you a car or a transportation service? How might preventative maintenance be designed and marketed? How does this transform the concept of a warranty, and how might such a redesign of the proposition lay new foundations for a lifetime relationship with the customer? Some questions for you… 26th August 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 35
36. Is every future marketing communication personalised (and I’m not just referring to the address field!)? How will your customers employ Web 3.0 technologies to mashup their personal and collective use of your products and services? What customer information should you have access to? What should be customer opt-in? What benefits might you offer to entice the customer to share more? …lends a whole new meaning to conversational marketing. Some questions for you… cont. 26th August 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 36
37. VRM is the other side of the CRM coin. How might you wield semantic Web technologies and the Internet of Things to empower your customers? Vendor Relationship Management 26th August 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 37
38. Your in-store marketing system detects one is dressed predominantly in clothes from Primark, the other Prada. How does your in-store customer communications respond? How might this impact your real-time pricing strategy? _______________ I have >100 slides like these. Why not make up your own? Two guys walk into a store… 26th August 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 38
39. With the current paucity of “meaning”, forgive me for helping search engines help others find this presentation: Marketing and Web 3.0 Marketing and the Semantic Web Marketing and Linked Data Marketing and the Internet of Things Advertising and Web 3.0 Advertising and the Semantic Web Advertising and Linked Data Advertising and the Internet of Things Public relations and Web 3.0 Public relations and the Semantic Web Public relations and Linked Data Public relations and the Internet of Things Optimisation slide 26th August 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 39
40. http://semanticweb.org http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web http://linkeddata.org http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_data http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_Things http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/internet-of-things http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor_Relationship_Management http://www.philipsheldrake.com - my blog CIPR Social Media group: #ciprsm / http://twitter.com/sheldrake/cipr-digital-group Reading 26th August 2010 / Influence Crowd LLP / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales 40