Cross Pollination Media | Social Media Strategy | Social Media Marketing

I've addressed the 'what-it-is' and 'why-it's-important' of the semantic web in my last two posts, so today's post is going to get a little more concrete. While many developments of the semantic web have yet to be seen, there are still a plethora of great examples of marketers and companies who are already using semantic technology to their advantage. Here I'll take a look at examples of where social media is already coming together with the semantic web, and I'll also look a little bit at where this path could lead.

Much Ado About Places

Unless you've been hiding in your bat cave for the past couple of weeks, you likely noticed that Facebook rolled out another new feature to fill our newsfeeds. I won't get too much into the nitty gritty of Places, as Autumn already covered most of it in her recent Places post. But on a more opinionated note, I believe that this move could drastically speed up the geo-location aspect of the semantic web and result in handing even more of our data to a single company. By looping Foursquare and Gowalla into Places, Facebook may have squashed their "competition" without a fight.

In the next few months, I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a lot of marketing campaigns that include or even demand the use of Places. How many Starbucks stores can you visit in your area? Can you check in at every Hard Rock Cafe in the U.S.? How many Boston bars can you visit in one weekend?

Any of these campaigns could have been done on Foursquare or Gowolla, but with around 2 million and 400,000 users respectively, compared with Facebook's 500 million, the reach of the average update on these networks wouldn't amount to nearly the buzz as the average Facebook post.  It will be interesting to see who will be the first to pull of a successful campaign with this app.

There's Something About Ottawa

If you're looking for the social media campaign of the future, you may need to go no farther than the Canadian capital. In 2009 the City of Ottawa launched a campaign called Picture it Downtown. Ottawaians (??) were asked to snap photos of their city and upload them to the contest's microsite.

When uploading their photos, not only were entrants asked to identify the neighborhood in which the photo was taken, but they were also required to choose at least one of fourteen descriptor options (i.e. tags), such as "coffee talk" or "family activities"  to label the content of the photo. In other words, by the end of the contest, the city had rights to hundreds of diverse and correctly tagged portraits of downtown Ottawa.

Now, though the contest is over, residents are still encouraged to submit their photos, and the site lives on as an evergreen tourism bureau. With the ability to sort by eight different neighborhoods and fourteen types of locations, Picture it Downtown is now a great little semantic database.

The folks behind Picture it Downtown realized that semantic tagging is a great way to allow contest entries that may have otherwise become lost in the sea of web content to become evergreen advertisements for the City of Ottawa.

Hunch - It's Halfway There

A third recent development in the world of semantic tagging comes in the form of a search engine. This is almost ironic, since I (and others) have argued that the semantic web will likely change "search" as we now know it. But Hunch.com is different.

Hunch is a search engine in the sense that there is a "search" box in which one types queries which are then matched with words, phrases and topics on the site in the form of "results." But Hunch is really an engine that's more interested in being your life coach than it is in providing every possible solution to your query.

To begin with, your registration for the site is not complete until you answer at least 20 questions about yourself, such as:

and

Based on your responses to these questions, Hunch claims the ability to recommend everything from good reads to ideas for future blog posts and even what religion your should adopt. The site even launched a local version this month, that recommend restaurants, bars and other local venues that it "thinks" you would like based on what the site "knows" about you.

Hunch doesn't really "know" anything. It organizes members in a database based on their responses. The site also allows members to input whether or not they actually like its recommendations. In this way, it's constantly "learning" more about you, and, in turn, more about others who are tagged as similar to you based on their responses.

In this way, Hunch is a quasi-semantic database. It takes the information that users give, sorts it, and gives it all meaning; meaning that gets more and more fleshed out every time a new user inputs data. The ideal semantic web would organize information in a similar fashion - using and tagging data that most users provide without even thinking about it.

The New Crowdsourcing?

So Facebook Places is pushing us further into the semantic web, campaigns like Picture it Downtown are showing how to incorporate the semantic web, and sites like Hunch are paving the way there. But these examples could still be considered semantic add-ons to the way that the social web currently works.

The interesting thing about the future of social media in the semantic web, however, is that it will enable this medium which has, for the most part, been used (at earliest) for product launch campaigns to work its way into the entire product-creation process. Remember the"Windows 7 was my idea" commercials? What if every product could boast such grassroots conception?

Imagine if, before designing its next top-of-the-line shoe, Nike not only interviewed and gave surveys with hundreds of focus groups, but if the corporation was also able to monitor, organize and sort everything that anyone has ever said, anywhere on the web about their current pair of athletic shoes. The good and the bad, the neutral and the new ideas. The information is already out there - monitoring programs such as Radian6 sweep through and pick it up all the time. But, as of yet, there's no simple way to organize this info.

Until the semantic web, that is. It's possible that a web that is readable by computers would be able to filter and sort and form their own sentiment analysis, digesting the plethora of information generated on the social web and providing it to marketers and corporations. Who needs a focus group when you have a Facebook page? Who needs "beta testers" when you have tweeters? In this way, almost any brand page, on almost any social network would be method of crowdsourcing a product. No longer left to the elites with a little extra time, "crowdsourcing" as we know it could become a standard for product development.

No matter where the future lies for social media, it's clear that a semantic web will enable marketers to monitor and interact with fans in ways we can currently only imagine.

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