Supernatural Agency: Online business tales

“TextWise Semantic Signatures® are based on vector spaces with thousands of dimensions, each corresponding to a single concept in some domain of interest. We use a special semantic dictionary to map the content of a given text document into a point within that conceptual space; and one can then gauge the similarity of two documents from the distance between their points in the conceptual space.”

The above quote is from SemanticHacker, the blog for a semantic search engine company called Textwise. Semantic search is the next generation of search, focusing on creating search engines that can take natural language queries and understand the relationships between the words in the query. It’s something that is difficult to grasp and equally difficult to explain as the quote above demonstrates* (and as my own attempt to explain also demonstrates). Yet it is an advancing technology that is going to have a big impact on our lives. Unfortunately, until someone figures out how to explain it in simple terms, it won’t have value.

As a professional communicator this is an issue I deal with everyday. In the semantic example, the best way to explain it would be to show an example, i.e.:

Type a request into the search engine: How do I make eggplant less bitter?

The engine understands the terms ‘how’ and ‘make’ mean there is a process involved. It understands that ‘eggplant’ is an object and ‘bitter’ is a characteristic of that object. Finally, it understands that the word ‘less’ is associated with bitter in a quantitative manner- we want less bitterness. After assembling all of this understanding it returns a search that has specific directions for making eggplant less bitter.

This is semantic search. Normal search just returns keyword combinations and phrases without this deeper understanding of context and the query: eggplant+bitter+less+how, etc. As a result you get more non-relevant results. Semantic search is an improvement in that it returns higher quality results.

In any business there is the need to explain the value of what you offer in very basic terms. I usually tell people that if you want tell your story in the most compelling manner you need to become your customer and then ask yourself:

What’s in it for me?

If you provide a strong answer to that question you will get your customer’s attention. If you don’t, you won’t.

*In fairness to Textwise, their posts are targeted to people with a very sophisticated understanding of semantic search. This just happened to be one of the more convoluted examples of a product description that I could find.

If you’re doing search marketing, including SEO and SEM, for your site(s) then you need to understand multivariate testing, the science of choosing various page elements, ad copy, keywords and other variables and testing them against a control. Your control is basically a combination of these elements that so far is your steadiest performing combination.

Jonathan Mendez is far deeper into this testing than I am and has begun a series of posts that go into how multivariate testing works into detail. This is complex stuff, but if you take the time to start learning and applying it to your search campaign, the payoff can be huge and the knowledge you gain will be a major business asset.

The days of pretending that there is some kind of separation between ‘branding’ and measurable direct marketing are over- everything is measurable and the results don’t lie. Traditional agencies and marketers take note: The creative director who ignores this reality in favor of amorphous ‘creativity’ is going to lose you clients.

If you’re a business owner this eliminates the old “I know half of my advertising budget works, I just don’t know which half (sorry, can’t find the attribution- if you know it please comment)”. With sophisticated testing, analytics and conversion tracking you can know exactly what dollars/creative are working and which are not.

It is increasingly apparent to me that we curently have two distinct business models on the web. Online applications including search, e-commerce, productivity and information management are replacing the antiquidated desktop proprietary software model. The challenges with this model are monetization and scale.

The other model is content delivery or media property development. Here we create sites that either deliver news or vertical-interest information including social components. Monetization is naturalized due to the relevancy algorithms used by ad networks and search advertising. The challenge is the creation of highly relevant and profitable content combined with developing traffic.

Semantic search is going to combine these two models in ways that will make them indistinguishable to the user. A query involving a potential shopping decision already combines search, reviews, specifications, pricing and transaction-capability, vis a vis Amazon. Hundreds or even thousands of web resources are utilized in these semantic searches and combined to create an idealized response, one that completes the search in one destination. Understanding and building these semantic destinations will be the new Internet business model.

It is common wisdom that the first thing to scale back during downtimes is your marketing budget.
This is screwy for a number of reasons and can be downright dangerous to the future of the business. Here’s why:

• Typically, by the time we know we’re in a recession it has been going on for several months.
• The average recession lasts around eight months.
• The lead time for effectiveness of any marketing campaign including online is 2-6 months. Last year we had a Google rep tell us that you cannot judge the effectiveness of PPC until it has been running at least six weeks. Of course he would not give details and it’s in their interest to encourage long tests, but I can see the logic.
• If you stop or cut back your marketing during a downtime you’re cutting off your nose to spite your face. Let’s say I decide I’m in a recession and business is down so I need to economize. I cut back drastically on my marketing. Since I probably stalled on my decision while trying to figure out whether we really were in a recession let’s assume that four months of the actual recession have passed when I cut bait. Three months later things are looking up so I start ramping up again.

A month later the recession ends and business starts to swing upward but my marketing has two more months to regain a foothold. I lose a potential big burst of business optimism because my market needs to learn over again that I’m around to do business with.

Lesson: We are marketing now for sales later. Reacting to situations now in ways that hurt us later is bad strategy. You’d be better off increasing your marketing at that point when things seem to be at the bottom so you can have a head-start when the up cycle begins anew.