Speaking at “The Future of Digital Marketing”, e-consultancy – June 2008, London.

I really enjoyed speaking on Wednesday at e-consultancy’s FODM conference. This is the 5th iteration of their ‘what’s new in online marketing’ format and the emphasis this year was less on “newness” and more on strategic importance and direction.

The roster of speakers was intimidating and the senior audience (with many clients and contacts) just added to the, ahem, ‘helpful pressure’.

It was a great opportunity to build upon some of the Digital Resolutions and similar best-practice presentations I’ve given this year and look at the underlying trends and emergent opportunites: from data, metadata, microformats, attention data (and my current love, APML), semantic data and towards a time when the data, enlivened by algorithms for use, spacial/place-awareness, contextual triggers and oodles of cunning creates a network effect – changing the nature of future marketing and engagement with customers. Long sentence.

The slides are available slideshare, but since it’s more picture than points I’ve listed some of the key sites and references below.

• Socialisr from Yell – an interesting take on making their database into a social event organising support thing.
• Microformats.org – the space for little things. Little, structured and portable things. Standards therefore.
• APML – the standard, interchange, thinking space for Attention Profiling Markup Language.
• engagd – useful and early implementations of APML. Worth bookmarking and keeping under watch.
• Tastebroker.org – a place to grab and see your APML.
• Phorm’s “Open Internet Exchange” – read, consider and see whether it’s threat, opportunity or both. And to whom…?
• TrueKnowledge – really interesting take on structured, explicit and inferred knowledge.