The Difficulty of Breaking New Grounds and What to Do About It (a take-away from the May Semantic Gang podcast and the Semantic Technology conference)

The Semantic Web Gang met again last week and we talked to Powerset CTO Barney Pell. You will find the podcast here. During the introduction by Barney (who incidentally, is in the room delivering his Powerset presentation as i write this – we are at the SemTech Conference in San Jose), I grew really interested in his positioning and messaging, and especially with regard to a well-known, proven web activity: Search.

While so many of the articles about Powerset assimilated it to a search engine (see this article as one of the many examples), recently the company has tried to break away from that association (see that article). Barney made the point clearly when answering my question on the topic.  That is a smart move. From a business perspective, suffice to say that positioning oneself against Google would be unwise. From a user perspective, there seems to be little interest in trying yet another search engine. The next thing in search needs to be leaps and bounds above Google, and by that I mean helping you find faster what you’re looking for, from anywhere on the web. Ideally, the result should always be one click away from your query! No one currently competes with Google on those dimensions. Granted, Powerset is on to something with natural language search, which has the capacity to dramatically increase result quality (and ultimately to accelerate querying speed too - think of the possible combination with upcoming voice recognition technologies). But let’s be serious: Google is ready for that long-known threat.

Crossing the search chasm

So, Powerset is right in trying to stop orbiting Google, but announcing it is not enough, and for now it seems that the search gravity force is making it difficult for them to break free. They continue to be described as a search engine (even if not a Google slayer), still look a lot like a search engine with a homepage a la Google, and even present themselves as a natural language search engine, a Wikipedia search engine, or a deep search engine. Anyway you look at it, it still shouts “search, search, search”. From a marketing perspective, the gap between Powerset’s claim and its execution is striking. Sure, this may partly stem from a motivation to sequence their go-to-market strategy, to present simple benefits to users, which I very much applaud. But whatever you call it, the direction is still about delivering “search” as the key benefit to the user.

What Powerset and so many other start-ups in the online space are struggling with is a well-documented marketing problem. Think “crossing the chasm”. The difficulty is to invent a value proposition that’s distant enough from the existing ones so it stands out from the crowd and is not perceived as a threat by larger incumbents, while being familiar enough that mainstream people can understand it and try it. At the start of an innovation wave like the one we currently witness, fitting new paradigms into old mental models is a make-or-break proposition.

There are well-known solutions too. One of the most obvious ones is to find a new value proposition and sequence it in small pieces, ramping up each piece in turn by relying on an intuitive interface and on early adopters to tip and educate others. What the applications trying to take advantage of the semantic web haven’t really done yet is the first part: landing on a compelling value proposition. It must fit the conflicting criteria of being both new and simple.

Marketing semantics is NOT rocket science, so don’t ask rocket scientists to do it!

SIMPLIFY is one of the key verbs heard at the current Semantic Technology Conference. Flagship applications are or should be working on simplifying their value propositions: Twine announced it is dumbing down its interface, Zepheira was told in Q&A that its interface looks too complex (and it takes some imagination to see how nurses would use it), analysts like Carla Thompson at the GuidewireGroup report having a dreadful time trying to explain what the semantic web does to the media, and Reuters’ Thomas Tague suggests that the word “semantic” be replaced and that applications go out without any reference to the technology that powers them. Clarify and focus on simple benefits.

It’s worth repeating. Clarify and focus on simple benefits.

My claim here is that getting that done will take more than the geniuses who came up with the semantic web in the first place. And by more I mean, in fact, less. To paraphrase one of my favorite books, “Made to stick”, most tech-focused leaders face a “knowledge curse” that prevents them from marketing their ideas effectively: in the conference session on bringing those technologies to the masses, I made the point that the people who initially built the semantic technologies are generally not the best equipped to lead the charge in bringing those to the market, i.e. simplify, cut, communicate the value proposition. I stick to my point. I saw that again and again, in fields such as software, clean energy, telecom. Those people know and care too much about the technology, and have a hard time to let go.

That really jumped out throughout the conference, where so many founders fell short of describing their value proposition in simple, memorable ways. Compared to most presentations I attended before from professional CEOs and marketers in mature industries, the comments made on the business and customer acquisition side felt well, frankly, unbaked. My hypothesis is that the mental models needed to develop an innovative technology are radically different from those needed to bring it to the market, and especially to land and communicate a clear value proposition (and vice-versa). Those models take time to cultivate. Technological founders who have them are rare. Those who don’t can educate themselves and work with people whose job it is to translate complex technologies into simple solutions.

Salvation for semantic rocket scientists: develop the right mental models and rely further on “market geeks”

Let’s start with education: to overcome the hurdle and cross the chasm, it is important that those tech-savvy leaders force themselves into different mental models that focus on the immediate needs of the user and not the endless possibilities of the technology. To that end, I’d recommend especially (again) the book Made to Stick, which offers a clear methodology for honing in on viral messages. Although it appears less directed towards the development of value propositions, I believe its core ideas remain very relevant to that purpose. The process of coming up with a crisp value proposition really is similar to that of communicating it out. As Thomas Tague said rightly in his infinite wisdom: “if you have to explain it, I don’t want it”.

Other reference include classics such as What took you here won’t take you there, Crossing the Chasm  and Inside the Tornado will also help. Disclosure: I am not making any money on any of the book links here.

Learning takes time and motivation. Often, tech specialists are more motivated in identifying the next frontier rather than matching those with mainstream customer problems. The solution here is to give that task to market specialists. Those will be savvy with jobs such as positioning, messaging, targeting, and fields such as marcom, consumer discovery, user interface, product design. You need this. We know, because customer needs is what we do ;) This may sound like a plea for innovation marketers, strategic marketers (and the emerging concept of “marketing geeks”), but really, it's not. It's a plea to get more semantic web start-ups off the ground.

The semantic industry is at a point where it needs to attract such professionals, and give them a leading role in the definition of application specs, customer acquisition thought leadership and marcom efforts, supported but not directed by the technology specialists. People in love with the customers and users, not with the technology, are best equipped to lead customer adoption efforts.