I recently read an inspiring executive white paper from Cision Global Media Intelligence. In that paper Cision states that:

“An intelligent Web 3.0 will expand and energize today’s social-media conversation, providing the meaning, background and context of any question or conversation. It will dramatically accelerate communication, increase the productivity of PR professionals and enhance knowledge transfer and understanding in ways that will revolutionize every information-based communication business.”

It then calls out those in the marketing and PR industries, basically saying that ROI won’t be something vaguely quantified several months after a contract is over and that PR and marketing companies will have to “…start demonstrating quantifiable return-on-investment” Sounds like Cision may have been bilked by a marketing or PR company who delivered a less than stellar plan in the past. (as nearly every company probably has) It also states later in the paper how we can avoid the old clunky organizational silos by utilizing the communicative powers of web 3.0. No more being at the mercy of ad executives and marketing gurus. Sounds good- so what is it?

The effects of web 3.0 mean real-time, quantifiable data on your ROI or lack thereof. As soon as the campaign hits the ground you can see what’s working and what’s not. You can see who are being reached and who are not. And you can get instant feedback from them. This is because of new analytical tools that look beyond clicks and cookies and observe deeper trends and activities online. Semantic Search Engines and semantic software analysis tools will be able to scan conversations and articles looking for trends within the sentence organization of those articles, not just keywords. A keyword might not even appear in a text but the new semantic web agents will have the abilities to think critically, so to speak, and decide if in fact something is relevant or helpful to the user. Many of the ideas concerning web 3.0 were voiced by Tim Berners-Lee, a smart man from England who knows about computers and stuff. Actually he pretty much invented the internet, so I take his comments quite seriously.

The difficult part is that the retooling or “reannotation” of the net is a massive undertaking. And it is the reannotating of the net with additional meta-data existing in the back-end of websites that will be necessary for the new semantic agents to utilize. Meta-data is essentially data about data, who compiled it or when it was organized, how it was quantified or what company, school, gov agency etc compiled it and other particulars. There are several companies and sites (Yahoo for example) that have made these kinds of adjustments and have already incorporated a semantic portal, but we could potentially need a lot of work adding this meta-data in order to facilitate semantic web agents.

There are others who argue that this is not necessary though, that we can make the agents smarter and able to adapt them to read current pages. Adaptive blue is an example of this, as is Claria’s PersonalWeb which has yet to make a big splash. Several semantic search engines are already developed or being developed so ready or not web 3.0 is almost here.

If you work for a marketing, advertising or PR firm you better pull up your socks, web 3.0 is a game changer.

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Tags: Cision Global Media Intelligence, semantic search engines, Tim Berners-Lee, Web 3.0

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