This Week in Relevance

Welcome to TWIR week 7. This week our never ending hunt for all things relevance leads us to examine the increasingly prominent role Data is playing across the web. Data is becoming more and more central to everything, not just marketing and measurement, but content development, navigation, personalization, etc. Here’s hoping TWIR week 7 will help you look at boring ‘ol data in a new and exciting light.

The Ad Campaign as Data Asset
We loved this Clickz article by @andrew_goodman which asserts that a paid search campaign can be a data asset which enables marketers to reap much greater dividends than using it strictly as a customer acquisition source. Search campaigns are “response engines” to quote Andrew, and as such, within a few short weeks marketers can get a great understanding about how consumers respond to offers of different types, at different times during the week, in different areas of the country, etc. The article also brings us a fantastic quote by Seth Godin when discussing clothing company Zara: “Zara is an information business that happens to sell clothes.” Here’s hoping that more marketers embrace this approach!

Data as Marketing Content
Scott Brinker, @chiefmartec, writes an interesting article on his blog, Chief Marketing Technologist, around emerging capabilities enabling marketers to publish data to the outside world. This starts with search engines with technologies like Rich Snippets and Search Monkey but ultimately extends out across the Web, where there are thousands of data APIs available for organizations to create amazing content. In fact, even the stodgy world of newspaper publishing is getting on board. As of this year, The New York Times is offering its data in RDF these days, which should make for some pretty incredible mash-ups and improved content experiences on the web. Now we can really figure out which was the best Yankee team in history…

Twitter Knows What You’d Like to Read
From Search Engine Land, Twitter has launched a new feature to suggest followers for you based on your interests and current list of followers. Twitter is using its massive data resources to get in on the personalization act and drive more engagement from its already passionate user base. To us, Twitter is looking more and more like a utility to enable content and information discovery across the Web and beyond. Lookout Google…

When Online Truly Drives Offline
From the early days of the Web, shopping comparison engines were central in helping users navigate the murky and often polluted waters of online retail, to discover products and deals. Over the last few years, some of those sites have struggled a bit and new tools for online product discovery emerged, such as Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Gilt.

Per a Search Engine Watch piece this week, it seems the next battlefield for shopping engines maybe offline, yes offline. With the vast majority of commerce still conducted in store, it does seem like a natural next step to enable in-store shopping comparison through the use of data and intent – it will be interesting to see who jumps out to a lead here. We know that if we had a dollar for every time I couldn’t find what I was looking for at the supermarket….you get the idea.

Bringing It Down a Notch
While we are talking about mash-ups, we thought we’d leave you with a fun, somewhat disturbing, and visually stimulating infographic on American’s consumption patterns.

While we are floored by the actual data in the piece, what is more interesting to us, as @chiefmartec mentioned in his piece referenced above, is how boring old data is getting very exciting again, especially as companies such as Factual and Freebase are enabling marketers and publishers alike to create engaging content to excite users. Just try not to think about this too much when you head out for lunch today.