Prologue

This book is about written content perceived and practiced with a view to the archetypal force of human connection and the riches hidden in two of its manifestations: dialogue and the World Wide Web. It is my attempt to capture the dynamics of what I have been observing in the past decade working and dreaming at the intersection of marketing communications, Semantic Web technology and dialogue.

Being Dialogic emerged as an intertextual bridge when I was rereading Negroponte’s brilliant book Being Digital, as Douglas Adams in the 1990s called it report from the future. Back then, preparing a class for my students on web writing, I came up with the notion that digital is about dialogue,  more specifically dialogue being the differentiating factor in the digital realm. Little I knew in 2020, having come up with this alliteration, that my personal and professional knowledge quests will from then on converge and gradually manifest into a PhD thesis, a working project that entails building a knowledge graph out of marketing content and this book.

Being Dialogic is an invitation to see successful marketing content on the Web as a process of becoming. Becoming more transparent and less formulaic, more open to conversations and less prone to waving corporate flags on our Web. It’s an invitation to climb three watching towers: Cyberia – a cumulative concept of our digital world, Dialogue – as seen, theorized and framed by dialogic communication research, and the Semantic Web – the vision and the reality of the Web as a space with machine-readable, interoperable data.

In Part I: Cyberia And Its Communication Riches we will look at the ways marketing changes from a practice of manipulating the marketing mix towards a practice of knowledge management. Through a three-part conceptual model, consisting of a user, a set of channels and a cornucopia of content we will put marketing communication on the Web in the broader context of the shift in communication and exchange networked society brought. We will also look at content as a communication artifact, interoperable data code and semantic capital trying to crack it open for dialogic experiences.

Part II: You say Digital, I Say Dialogue aims to get us closer to the concept of dialogic communication and examine it in a marketing context. We will walk into the worlds of dialogue, dialogic communication, relationship marketing and PR dialogic theory, to more clearly see the dialogic potential of the Web and our data on it. We will look at the different approaches towards understanding Dialogue to further see which marketing lineage of research brings dialogue closer in its theories and practices to marketing communication. We will also explore the pillars of relationship marketing and their adequacy to todays’ networked society and communications.

Part III: Being Dialogic On The Semantic Web is about the relationships and interdependencies between dialogue and data on the Web. It is about the possibilities and the practices of managing content with semantic web technologies. This is where we will see the Semantic Web meeting marketing communications, first in a theoretical walk about the dialogic potential of the Web of Data and then in an empirical talk about schema.org.

Part IV: Being Dialogic With A Knowledge Graph is about knowledge graphs – what they are, how they relate to the Semantic Web and also what marketing communications needs they can potentially meet. We will also go through my conceptual model of a knowledge graph serving as an enabler of a continuum. Last, we will look at examples of knowledge graphs powering content experiences to keep us motivated to approach the Web and its contents as our own shared space where we need to cultivate relationships on both dialogic and data level.