Linked Data, a Brand with Big Problems and no Brand Management

This post builds on the discussion that started on Twitter between Paul Miller and Ian Davis and quickly expanded to a few other folks. Paul subsequently wrote a blog post Does Linked Data need RDF?, and so did Ian Davis with The Linked Data Brand.

My turn:

I like Davis's suggested approach of looking as Linked Data as a brand.

It made me realize something: this brand hasn't been properly managed.

At this point in time, it's clear that beyond its inner tech circle, Linked Data is more often perceived as a technology that has wasted a lot more R&D funding than it should have, than as a solution to a problem.

If you are a brand manager, right there you have a huge perception problem to manage. In fact, at most companies, brand managers who let such an image problem spread out of control -like it has- without doing something about it would be terminated.

But there is no brand manager to sack for Linked Data.

Indeed, from what I've seen, there has been no deliberate effort from the W3C to manage that brand. That's where the problem lies. As Idehen illustrates so well with his comments to Ian's post ("marketing types will attempt to usurp and redefine the brand"), marketing is something many at the W3C have a 19th century view of, fed by Hollywood-propagated snake-oil cliches more than anything anchored in an actual education. In that regard, complaining that your brand will be re-framed is a little hypocritical when it wasn't managed and framed properly in the first place.

It may be time for the W3C to review its credo on marketing and do a little more of it. Time to learn it's not all coupons and spam. Marketers are also trained to align product development with real market needs (herein might lie the W3C resistance to it... want a reality check anyone?) and to -yes- manage brands. Even at nonprofits! I know, it sounds crazy, doesn't it?

So, as a "marketing type", let me try to make some constructive suggestions on managing the Linked Data brand, to tie this back to the comments left on Ian's post by Eric, William, and Paul, whose views I fully agree with.

First, and most importantly, pushing "Linked Data" as a monolithic block of technology conveys the perception one needs all the pieces to make it work. 1. That's not true. 2. That's enough to scare lots of potential users away, a bad adoption hurdle in brand management.

Instead, tell people you can include URIs in any piece of data. They may not get the full benefit of "Linked Data", but they'll get some of it, enough to start. In marketer's lingo, get them hooked. That doesn't make you a hooker. Doing that will get more people to try some pieces, see their limitations and find ways to address these, leading them to experiment with other parts of the stack and possibly alternatives to them. If RDF is as superior as the Linked Data apostles proclaim, it should win this battle, shouldn't it?

But Ian says he worries that solutions that only adopt part of the stack will not work well and create a perception that Linked Data is deficient, impacting the "seal of quality" he says Linked Data represents.

C'mon... 

For most, Linked Data rhymes with clumsy, academic R&D much more than with quality, as I wrote earlier.

If you really needed the whole stack for Linked Data to work, you would have a bigger problem on your hands: now you'd have to explain to users that to try Linked Data you need to understand and use RDF, URIs, SPARQL, OWL, and the other pieces of the stack. Good luck with driving adoption that way... Oh, but wait, that's what has been done so far, with the slow results we know of.

That's even why RDFa was created and is more successful (despite the confusing name). It's simplifying Linked Data into just one solution, easy to understand, easy to implement, easy to adopt.

Truth is, a lot of the advantages of Linked Data can be derived from using URIs or RDF independently, and lots more will come from mixing them with existing technologies to address real needs. Having them work together might be better, but it's by no means a must-do. That should have the Linked Data purists feel good about the whole thing. But no. Instead, they try to bundle up those technologies like pop and chips at a movie rental store (those snake-oil salesmen, some might say :)

Second suggestion about brand management. As we all know, it's very unclear what problem Linked Data actually addresses. Ok, I'm able to link data. Big deal. Most people after that ask "But what does it really do?". What does that mean for them? Well, in fact, there are plenty of benefits to being able to link data like that, but the people supposed to explain those can't do it in simple words. They suffer from the knowledge curse. They haven't been trained to communicate to non-rocket scientists or even mainstream programmers/webmasters, for that matter. They don't make things simple, and they don't make them sexy. That alone is a sin in this new world.

Case in point: calling it Linked Data makes it sounds like it's coming straight from the R&D lab. Bad brand name choice. Over time, you can address that, but you've got a hurdle to surmount right there.

So, should you re-brand or should you fix the existing brand? My guess is that a bit of both is happening right now.

On the one hand, we have companies making linked data theirs, putting their name on it, repackaging it. I think it's Peter Mika who said in our July semantic web gang podcast that what we called "Semantic Platforms" really were rebranded triple stores :)

It's not about making false claims and hyping it. It's about getting the word out about the real virtues of Linked Data.

For example: "With Virtual Knowledge, you will be able to quickly assemble your underlying data into custom interfaces that talk your language and meet your daily information needs. No more finding a needle in a haystack of news, no more calling the IT department to program interfaces or connect siloes, no more not doing it because it's too hard. You create your own dashboards in a few clicks and can see it all from there."

Or even "With RDFa, you easily embed information about your content. It helps both search engines and portals better understand and index what your data is about. This way, they can return results that are better structured, better presented, and thus more attractive to users."

Isn't that better than "With Linked Data, you interconnect the data through RDF, which creates qualified links. Those links can point to URIs, giving concepts unique central addresses, and add semantic granularity to your data. Add some SPARQL to run complex queries and OWL for the ability to create robust standard taxonomies, and you have your  recipe for success. Of course, you should really use all those together for the best results." Mmm, I can't wait to try that...

Now, as I said above, I think in spite of it all that the Linked Data brand itself is in the process of being fixed up. Even the toughest Linked Data fundamentalists have shown some signs of easing up on their purity claims, and understanding the importance of better marketing.  More importantly, we see more companies, like the New York Times, who want to "publish Linked Data". But what's most transformational is that use cases are getting clearer, for example with the adoption of RDFa by Yahoo and Google. Note, it's not pure W3C Linked Data, but hey, it's Linked Data nonetheless. Just like Coke Zero is still Coke.

There will always be people who argue that the original Coke is the only true Coke. Meanwhile, people drink the one that fits them best and still call it Coke.

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