Semantic technology can help take businesses into a new era of the internet, according to Marta Strickland, at her BMF Sticky Blogspot.

Semantic refers to the meaning behind data. At the moment computers are good at sending data back and forth but not great at discerning the meaning of that data. The semantic web aims to change that.

The semantic web refers to all web data, and the meaning of that data, which could be read by machines. The semantic web has been enjoying a commercial revival thanks to marketing companies like us at Eclipse, and is referred to by the new buzzword “Web 3.0”, as it is the third decade of the web (2010 to 2020).

Semantic technology can help marketers and aims to solve some of today’s biggest problems in marketing by making information more relevant and meaningful. Semantic technology can look at the structure of a sentence and interpret word meaning and sentiment.

Identifying sentiment is becoming invaluable for advertising on user-generated sites such as blogs, forums and social networking sites e.g. Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, as businesses don’t want to place ads on a negative post or comment. The latest semantic technology can scan social content sites for reviews that are either new or positive.

Semantic technology can be the key to measuring the success of social media, which has been one of the toughest marketing challenges in recent years. Semantic technology can pull together connections between different words and phrases, as measurement tools move away from the tag cloud and look at the trends of the conversation. Semantic technology builds on meaning, not key words.

Semantic analysis is becoming an increasingly popular tool within marketing, as it looks at the entirety of a comment or an article, as well as studying from where it came from and who it was directed towards. It uses natural language processing and analysis of meaningful relationships to distinguish the “good” from the “bad”.

For example, a comment or post where someone states that they love their new Nokia phone would be “good” but a comment or post where someone states that they had a problem with their Nokia phone would be “bad”. This is invaluable to businesses enabling them to effectively identify whether consumers are happy with their products and how, among other things, they can improve their business.

The possibilities for semantic technology are endless. It is only a matter of time before businesses move into the third decade of the internet. To find out more about semantic technology click here.  

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