Navigating Dialogic Communication in the Digital Age

Teodora Petkova Teodora Petkova is a scholar and content marketer whose PhD dissertation explored semantic technologies and dialogical theory and how they apply in the field of digital marketing communication. She thoughtfully combines her rigorous academic thinking with pragmatic data- and knowledge-management practices in her content-marketing work. She's currently building a knowledge graph with marketing content at Ontotext, the RDF database and data-management platform company. We talked about: her work building a knowledge graph of marketing content at Ontotext her book "Being Dialogic" and the concept of dialogic communication the importance of metadata in dialogic communication architectures how creating a controlled vocabulary or an ontology can support a shared understanding of the concepts stakeholders and users work with her overview of the semantic web her current study with the 90-year-old marketing-education legend Philip Kotler the connections she makes between corporate knowledge management and corporate marketing the utility of enterprise-wide controlled vocabularies how your content efforts can help you curate your knowledge graph the urgent need to cultivate the social practices to help us generate and curate metadata Teodora's bio Teodora Petkova is a philologist fascinated by the metamorphoses of text on the Web and curious about the ways the Semantic Web unfolds. She holds a PhD. in Marketing Communication, an MS in Creative writing and a Bachelor of Science in Classics. Teodora is the author of the books The Brave New Text and Being Dialogic. Following her genuine commitment to creating dialogic moments through semantic annotations, from 2022, Teodora is part of the Ontotext Knowledge Graph team. The Ontotext Knowledge Graph is where Teodora strives to harness the potential of the Semantic Web to foster dialogic marketing communications. Driven by the fascination with the ever-evolving nature of text on the Web, Teodora is also teaching web writing to students at the Content Strategy Masters program in FH Joanneum. Connect with Teodora online TeodoraPetkova.com Teodora's newsletter LinkedIn Teodora's books The Brave New Text Being Dialogic Resources mentioned in this interview How to Do Things with Data, Klaus Bruhn Jensen The Semantic Web, Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, and Ora Lassila Marketing 4.0: Moving from Traditional to Digital, Philip Kotler Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vF5xKzXxoWM Podcast intro transcript This is the Knowledge Graph Insights podcast, episode number 7. When you combine deep academic curiosity, a powerful concept like the semantic web, and an intellectually innovative approach to understanding how humans, computers, and corporate knowledge interact, you get Teodora Petkova's concept of "dialogic communication." Combine this powerful idea with a nuanced appreciation for modern marketing and carefully curated enterprise metadata and you can powerfully convey your organization's value to the world. Interview transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number seven of the Knowledge Graph Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show, Teodora Petkova. Teodora is just an ordinary content writer stumbled into the knowledge graph world. So welcome to the show, Teodora. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you are doing these days. Teodora: Hi, Larry. Thanks for having me. I'm doing what I have been dreaming about. I'm building a knowledge graph with Ontotext, out of marketing content, and I'm doing a lot of fights, a lot of things that I imagined and envisioned, but they need to be translated into specifications and requirements. So I now have a lot of time to write, do content writing per se; however, I write in the book of life. Larry: Yeah, because your writing is; it's not like my original career was in book publishing, and you just got a manuscript from somebody and turned it into a thing and put it out in the world, and that was that. A little different world these days. But the foundation of this new world you've articulated this one aspect of modern communication I think is really important, this notion of dialogic communication. Can you talk a little? I know this, and just for background for folks, this was Teodora's whole PhD dissertation, so that's a big subject, but I'm hoping to get just sort of an overview for folks who want to dip into the waters of the dialogic communication. Teodora: And that's my book; that's called Being Dialogic, and it's steps on the shoulders of being digital. So to transition to that idea of the world being new, we all think that being digital and digitalization and everything is the core of that new communication, and yet the web is the core. And Cyberia, the so-called Cyberia that cyberscape is the core. Where we communicate in a many-to-many scenario and there are different audiences, algorithmic ones included, but to get all of that academic and maybe to theoretical cloud, we are now in the position to say, "Why would I read you? Why would I buy from you? Why would my fridge automatically order potatoes from your website or from your API?" Teodora: And that communication is exciting. Where does dialogue come in? It has never been out of this. The thing is that we are now in the position to, I wouldn't say, design dialogue because that's not dialogic; you don't design a dialogue. However, you can design for and build systems for dialogic orientation, meaning you can listen, embed feedback into your systems and into your loop, and you are not. We as marketers are now not in the position to shout and to publish relentlessly. We're in the position to understand what exactly the user needs and what are their data needs. Teodora: Final sentence: why do I say data needs? Because I might need to compare products, my app, my personal agent, my personal knowledge graph. I might want to hook it to your enterprise knowledge graph and see what happens. But that's, of course, too visionary. It's not reality yet. However, that new way of, as we said in the preliminary conversation, of allowing the user to pull content, read content with all the metadata artifacts in it. Is the new reality, at least for me. Larry: Yeah, and I think that thing you just said about building a system that supports dialogic communication, you can't really design any one communicative situation, but you can design the setting in a way that, like, "Here's some content, here's some metadata that goes with it, here's the other things you need to have this dialogic communication, and whether you're a human being or a computer," am I hearing that right? Teodora: Yes, you are. And because I'm living that every day now, and I'm thinking how easily we slip into saying, "Here's some content, here's some metadata, here's the situation." However, if we get our hands dirty with that, think about that. Here's content. What content? What shall we write about? Here's metadata. Okay, what metadata? What are the controlled vocabularies we would use? What are our systems? How metadata terribly overlaps across different systems? How departments speak with different metadata, how they talk about one and the same thing with different tags and with different naming in the different systems, and how that juggles or whatever. I'm not sure what the word is, but the internal flow is hampered by such inconsistencies. We're terrible at metadata; let's face it. Maybe not we, but at least from my experience, I've seen a lot of misunderstanding at the level of metadata, which is misunderstanding at the level of dialogue. Do we have the systems to hear each other and to agree upon shared meanings? Larry: What you just said, that seems key to this whole thing. Because I think about, I'm deep into the technical structured content stuff, and I think about metadata as just this conceptual thing that helps you stitch back together disarticulated or intelligently unarticulated chunks of content. But when you're putting them back together, you have to have the metadata. And similarly, in a dialogic situation where you're trying to, like you just said, agree on meaning. Tell me how metadata can help people and/or machines arrive at a common understanding of what they're talking about and what they're trying to accomplish. Teodora: Semantically, the answer is in your question. For me, when you're creating a controlled vocabulary or when you're creating an ontology, you are going through that process of reaching shared understanding. I'm trying to ground this talk into tangible things. What tags do we use for certain content types? For example, in WordPress, how do we measure the performance of these tags? How are these tags and their values related to our HubSpot measuring system? Can we say what content brings what people? Can we design journeys by embedding business logic in our metadata? Larry: Interesting. And one of the things you just said is reaching that shared understanding. Then you immediately got me back into my comfort zone, which is talking to both the internal stakeholders and users, all the people involved with the system, and just coming to a basic agreement about what do you mean by the word "customer" or "product", or things like that. And that's sort of like, it's not always called a controlled vocabulary, but once you've come to that agreement, it can serve as such. And what you just said, you just kind of touched on a whole bunch of different things like marketing metrics and customer journey mapping. Teodora: Yes. I have a troubled life because I'm trying to... No, by the way, it's good that you're saying it because I'm talking like this as if it's a mesh, and it can be a mesh when we talk at that abstract level,