Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS
Teodora PetkovaModern communication on the web is best when it’s semantic and meaningful, networked and conversational.
Creating web conversations starts with collaborative internal communication and then invites the marketplace to join in.
Teodora Petkova is a semantic web explorer with a PhD in digital marketing and communication. She loves to share her fascination with the evolution of web content and her expertise in cultivating marketing conversations.
We talked about:
- her identity as a semantic web explorer
- how our abilities as “intertextual animals” help us find meaning amidst the noise of modern media
- her discovery of “dialogic communication” and how it applies to content marketing
- the stakeholder’s theory of communication
- the importance of internal communication
- the role of internal communication in dialogic communication strategy, and the importance of documenting common understandings
- why she doesn’t like to talk about content marketing
- her definition of content: digital object in an artifact, a result of communication
- the core of her thoughts about marketing: business is about listening to the rhythm of the market
Teodora’s bio
Teodora Petkova is a content writer fascinated by the metamorphoses of text on the Web. Very much in love with the Semantic Web, she explores how our networked lives transform (and are transformed by) the expanding possibilities of the written word. With an educational background in Classical Studies and Creative Writing, Teodora recently earned a PhD degree in Digital Marketing and Communication at the Faculty of Journalism and Mass Media at Sofia University. In her research and practice she continues to explore words, concepts and the way we use them to transfer or create meaning. More specifically, Teodora works to discern (and sometimes pave) the ways web content is changing marketing communication, us and the way we think, write and live.
Connect with Teodora online
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 119. When you communicate on the web, it’s tempting to focus on the messages you want to share. Teodora Petkova will remind you that modern marketing content is more about conversation than announcements, more about listening to the rhythm of the market than about composing your own messages. Teodora describes herself as a semantic web explorer and is fascinated by the ways in which modern networked content is transforming the way we think, write and live.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 119 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to have with us Teodora Petkova. Teodora is… She’s a language lover and a semantic web explorer. That’s how she describes herself, and welcome Teodora. Tell the folks a little bit more about what a semantic web explorer does.
Teodora:
A semantic web explorer looks into how the semantic web changes the way we communicate and opens opportunities for richer exchanges between us through our machines.
Larry:
I love that. You recently completed a PhD in communication, and so you’ve thought about this very deeply.
Teodora:
Yeah. I’m a recovering PhD graduate. I’m trying not to think about that, but it chases me because I’m so curious how language evolves with our machines being able to understand it. I’m all the time saying our. They’re not our. I mean, they’re Google’s algorithm or somebody’s digital assistant. I shouldn’t say our, because it blurs the perspectives we need to be able to do better content. We need to be very aware that we cannot talk about machines as a whole.
Larry:
Yeah. When you say that our, because that was the original hope of the semantic web, that we’d all have our say, and it would all be connected and we could share, but in fact, Google and Facebook and Twitter and some big entities control an inordinate amount of it. What are the implications of that dynamic for communication on the web?
Teodora:
Well, we have more noise and more distortion and still we are that good intertextual animals that we can manage to let meaning come across. This is because we are powerful and language is powerful. It finds its ways when there is dialogue, by the way, to make a circle and get back to dialogue.
Larry:
Well, no. That’s right. A lot of times when I’ve heard people talk about you, the first thing they say is dialogic communication, which I think that seems easy enough to understand intuitively, but can you talk about specifically what dialogic communication is?
Teodora:
Yes. I started looking at dialogue intuitively because I believe when you talk to somebody and when you are in a conversation, you can let a lot of perspectives and their kaleidoscope manages to keep the meaning alive, but to get off my theoretical cloud, I went into searching for frameworks and for theories that are looking at dialogue from a, let’s say pragmatic perspective. That is how can we use dialogue? In my case, organizational communication, because we say content marketing, we say B2B communication or whatever, but at the end, if we need to be to define that this is organizational communication, meaning many people are talking to many people. We have many to many. How can we weave a concept such as dialogue into many to many? How can we weave the one to one into the many to many? This was a problem for me in my research.
Teodora:
And I found that there is this vein of explorations and research called dialogic PR theory, where dialogue is looked from the perspective of organizations engaging with audiences and negotiating relationships with them. I thought I will find answers, but there, I found even more questions because dialogic communication by definition is hard, and it’s very theoretical. That is when you get on the ground, it is super hard to negotiate meaning.
Larry:
Right. That’s what the… Because I’ve had a few conversational designers on the podcast and they often talk about… I forget there’s this one researcher who always comes up, who identified the nature of conversation. I gets a lot of what you say, but I think we often assume that it’s between two people, but what you just said, and in organization…
Teodora:
Organizational.
Larry:
It’s like it’s one to many, many to many, many to one or whatever it is.
Teodora:
Exactly.
Larry:
Yeah. How does conversation scale, I guess, or does it? Does that present unique problems?
Teodora:
Yeah. That’s very interesting question. I think it scales, of course, with frameworks first and next with a mindset, with a mindset that through marketing, especially when it comes to marketing, communication, and dialogue, a mindset that sets you as an open structure, which uses marketing as a feedback machine for a feedback loop. That is when we say that we want to talk with audiences and not wave corporate flags, we should mean that we are talking with audiences and we need to set frameworks that make us ready to receive an answer.
Larry:
Do you think people are succeeding or their organizations are succeeding at that receiving? Because it doesn’t seem super two-way to me. Are there folks who are actually doing that? Actually getting that kind of… Hearing the feedback and actually developing conversations and relationships?
Teodora:
Well, I want to say yes, but I will say no. I don’t think we are even scratching the surface of being dialogic on the web. However, for example, from my small circle where I have impact with the people I work with when we write together or when I help them create content, which is an oversimplification of saying, share knowledge on the web, this is what we do all the time. I’m all the time explaining that to create good content, we need to be very well aware what value we can provide. This value usually lies within the people in the organization and within their ability to talk between themselves and be passionate about what they’re saying and how they can add to that global conversation about their specific domain because why would you be in a business if you’re not changing the world?
Larry:
Yeah. The way you just said that, it sounds like these… I think we started with assuming these conversations were between the organization and the consumers, whoever on the outside, but you just talked an awful lot about the internal communication. Is that the key to this, or is that just the start of it?
Teodora:
Yes.
Larry:
Yeah.
Teodora:
Thank you, Larry. You intuitively stepped into something I didn’t know I want to say now, but that’s again back to another theory and that’s the stakeholder’s theory. This is all the people and all the organization that your business is communicating with. You have to have that communication core, strategic core, which you can then dress accordingly depending on the different stakeholders needs and responses, and I don’t have a ready answer, how you do that, but knowing that you can build your Swiss army knife of a strategy where you communicate on different levels, on different layers with people who have different context.
Larry:
Yeah. The way you just said that, you talked about the needs and responses, it almost sounds like this needs to happen at a programmatic level that you need to have a communication program person who’s thinking, because I think any individual thinking about dialogic communication will… It’d be easy to get stuck in that one-on-one conversation thing. Again, I guess this comes back to that scale thing of like, is it a programmatically manageable thing?
Teodora:
I think, yes, given everybody’s on the same page and given you did the dialogue with the so-called internal audiences. Your employees are your audience. You should talk to them too. You should have a strategy to talk to them too, because you need passion. You need knowledge and everything. All that, you can do with dialogic communication, but you need to be ready to hear the other side and ready to go at places where you didn’t plan to, and this is scary and you can do it on a small scale. Not every communication needs to be dialogic by the way. This is another thing. It’s part of marketing communications research, and especially the research that talks about relationship marketing. Sometimes you just need to buy a coffee. You don’t want to have a dialogue. You are not ready for a dialogue. You’re not open for a dialogue. If me, Teodora, decided that every stakeholder needs a dialogue, this will be again a violation of the protocol and it’ll break the communication.
Larry:
Now, is there a clear threshold between that need for dialogic communication and just like, “No, I just want my coffee.” Because I think a lot of what you’re talking about will be… I think people will immediately get it and want to do it, but how do you tell where you just inform people versus when you engage in a dialogic conversation?
Teodora:
Well, you listen to them and you are open to the situation, which we forget sometimes when we do all our planning and all the measures, the metrics and things. We forget to be human, and it’s strange that we need to build frameworks for being human on a scale. Yes, it’s hard. How do you create human on a scale given not all the people in the organization, for example, are ready to take this with an open heart and be ready for any situation, that is be ready to communicate. Again, this gets back to that idea of communicating with your internal audiences.
Larry:
Right. I get this is a dumb question, but the percentage of attention to internal versus external, like internal stakeholders and communication with your colleagues, I’m guessing that that’s a lot of it. Then, what you figure out there about what you really have that’s valuable to talk to people about. Is it, I don’t know, 70% internal, 30% external, or is it even worthwhile or thinking about it way? Yeah.
Teodora:
Yeah. I can’t answer that question.
Larry:
Yeah. No. Yeah.
Teodora:
I wish I can.
Larry:
But just talk about like trying to scale it and understand these things. I think this is a good point to shift a little bit to the notion of the web and the semantic web. The web in general and the semantic web in particular as the channel through which a lot of this communication is happening. I think probably most of your… I don’t know. All those internal conversations, those are probably happening in Slack and meetings and whatever, but the external communication is especially, it’s mostly happening on the web. Right? Or is that the assumption?
Teodora:
Well, yes. On the web, like all the channels we have. I lost the thread, which connected internal. I know why I lost it because I was wondering why would internal communications happen on Slack, which is the case. However, just a reminder, because we are talking scaling and frameworks, we have documents and we have documentation and we need to codify what we agree upon. That is if we want to be consistent and again, ready for dialogue that is ready to receive feedback and answers and react. I mean, not react, rather engage. We need to be very clear on who we are, and as organization, we are clear by having these… First, we talked about this. We argued about them. We had fights. We collided, and this is where we crystallized the notion of us.
Teodora:
Then, knowing who we are, it’s easier to refer to the other and to get back to the web. By the way, speaking about the web and the semantic web, what fascinates me and what fascinated me when I first, years ago, read what an ontology is, I liked the word in… I think it’s Guarino’s definition, shared. Shared conceptualization. Think about it, one word and so many dialogues behind it. How many groups, W3C groups are working on shared definitions? Because yes, I can think that I’m super cool and glued, and I have a definition for something, but what would it take to make this definition shared? It’ll take a lot of ripples created in people’s heads and it will align those people into one shared goal.
Larry:
Because that practice of developing an ontology is super collaborative, involves a lot of stakeholders, and it culminates in this understanding. I guess can you quickly define on… Because that’s a fairly new term to some of my listeners, I think. If you could give us your definition of an ontology?
Teodora:
Oh, I can’t afford to have a definition of ontology. I can only cite one.
Larry:
Okay.
Teodora:
But I don’t know it by heart. We can just give a link to a reference. I’m just searching the definition which had shared in its…
Larry:
I think I’ve seen that same definition that it’s a shared understanding of a body of knowledge or something like that. Anyhow, I’ll link to that in the show notes, for sure. But basically, it’s sort of not a ironclad, finished codification, but it’s an attempt to describe an understanding of a body of knowledge, and it’s highly collaborative, so I think that gets at what you’re talking about, that all this internal communication.
Teodora:
Yeah. I need to say that this is formal, like formal description of knowledge. This is where we made the U-turn from all the things that I talked about, dialogue, dialogic, all these processes, which can take a lot of ambiguity and they need to take it. Then, a U-turn to formal descriptions and formalizations. Why? Because the medium we are sending our messages through requires, or at least I believe… I guess the systematic web believes requires standards. By the way, today, I was trying to do hook my Calendly to my Google calendar. I wrote a query on Google, how to do that. Then, I get Zapier. Is this how you pronounce it?
Larry:
Yeah. I have a friend who works there and they say, “Zapier makes you happier.” That’s correct.
Teodora:
All right. Great. But thing is that there are so many integration tools between things, the semantic web is the opposite. Solid is the opposite. You get your data standard and then everything connects, even the things that haven’t been invented yet. You ask me what a semantic web explorer does. At least, I, many times wonder why the heck are we doing it the opposite? Why are we building integrators when we could have build standards?
Larry:
Well, that’s interesting. No, I’m super curious about that because there are a gazillion standards out there like HTML and HTTP and RDF and SHACL and OWL, and all these other things. Tell me more about that.
Teodora:
Well, yeah. Why not start with this idea of linked data? Well, especially, we, in the content domain with the people who are dealing with the soft power of language, why don’t we recognize the backend that is defining concepts through universally naming them, the linked data principles.
Larry:
When you say linked data principles, are you talking about the old one, the five-star thing or the new FAIR? How do you decide that these days?
Teodora:
Well, I don’t decide it. You’re asking me as if I’m like… I don’t decide that. I talk about linked data principles. There is no old or new. Yes, FAIR is a nice way of framing this. But again, as we talked in our prerecording conversation dialogue, different framings devoid us from the ability to step on the shoulders of giants. We have traditions, content marketing, any term you think about, which is the new buzzword, has its roots somewhere deeply back in history where people were banging their heads how to do that. We’re not inventing the wheel. We need to look at these traditions to have more strength in the new things we build. This is why I don’t like to talk about content marketing. When I first started my thesis, yes, I admit I wanted to write about content marketing. Then, I realized I want to write about something that doesn’t exist in the… Let’s say in the conceptualization of people who have dealt with communication science so many years ago.
Larry:
Are terms like content marketing, is that just rebranding of well-established principles just in the service of some new activity or…
Teodora:
Yeah. Well, no. For me, I wouldn’t say rebranding because the term itself didn’t – came on the basis of trying to reframe old communication theories. It rather doesn’t take them into account, but I don’t know. I don’t want to talk like this about content marketing, me being a content writer. To be honest, I have this place in my thesis where I’m talking about the lack of a good definition of content. There are definitions across the books we all love including the one that you said you have on your desk and you reread. Which was that?
Larry:
Oh, I have a bunch
Teodora:
Information architecture. Right? Is it? You told me, I remember that.
Larry:
God, I’m trying to remember which one that is because I have…
Teodora:
This one?
Larry:
In terms of defining content… Oh, the polar bear book. Yeah. But that’s…
Teodora:
Yeah. That’s the polar bear.
Larry:
Yeah. That’s the original information architecture book that I read cover to cover in 1998 or whatever it came out because I was like, “Thank God, there’s a name for this.” Yeah. That’s where I started to think about content differently as the difference between names and labels and between identification things and sharing things. Anyhow, yeah. That’s the tip of the iceberg. I’m actually working on a whole slide deck about how to define content.
Teodora:
Wow. Great. Great.
Larry:
But when you’re just sitting down to think, like when you say “content,” do you think… You’ve thought about this a lot, so can you just give like the elements of what you consider to be content versus…
Teodora:
Yeah. It’s a digital object in an artifact, a result of communication.
Larry:
Oh, I love that because I sometimes think of… One of the ways I think of content is like the substance that underlies communication, but everything we’ve talked about today reminds me that no, where it comes from, it’s the result of communication as well. Okay. No. Sorry.
Teodora:
Sorry.
Larry:
This reminds me something you said we just did. The reason I’m in a hotel room, not in my office, because I’m at the Knowledge Graph Conference, and Teodora and I were on a panel earlier in the week about search engine optimization. You said something about that you had this insight in that conversation about… We were talking about the AI notion of the human in the loop and you were like, “No, it’s the…” What was the insight you had? Because I think it might be relevant to what we’re talking about.
Teodora:
Yeah. It’s a machine in the hermeneutic circle, and I invite our listeners to read Pierre Lévy. Maybe I’m not pronouncing his name well, but I’ll share a link to him.
Larry:
Yeah. I’ll include a link and he’s well-known in our world, but anyhow… Oh, interesting. You’re saying you think of almost the opposite that it’s the machine in the human loop, not the human in the machine loop. Is that…
Teodora:
Yeah. It’s the machine in the hermeneutic loop, the hermeneutic circle, which is a notion saying that you understand something, you understand parts of… When you start to engage with the text, you understand parts of it, but you go on and then, having gone through the entirety, and you make a circle and then you are able to understand those same pieces with one layer more of the understanding.
Larry:
Got it. I’m going to have to mull over that, to be honest, but I love the insight. Teodora, I could talk forever with you and we do sometimes, but I like to keep these episodes a semi-reasonable length. But before we wrap up, is there anything last… Anything that we haven’t talked about or that’s just on your mind that you want to make sure we share?
Teodora:
Yes. The idea of marketing and its relation to poesis, which is a portal for us when we see such research or read, I have a favorite researcher, Barbara Stern, and she talks about marketing text. Again, the iterations needed for its meaning to come across. She talks about ad texts as being very much connected. For them to work, they need to be connected to the outside world and to the dynamics of the living language, which flows there. You cannot just formalize marketing, you need to dive in that living language and see what will emerge, so that you can engage truly. This is what poesis is, when you get into something and you are not sure about the result.
Larry:
That can be challenging in business because you feel like you know things, but…
Teodora:
It can, but I think at its core, business is about listening to the rhythm of the market. If you get the rhythm and you dance to it and then you can invite your partner to move with your steps, but first you need to understand the partner so that they accept your invitation for a dance.
Larry:
That is the perfect note to wrap up. That’s just beautiful that you listen to the rhythm and you get in the dance. Yeah. You’re feeling your partner. That’s fantastic, Teodora. Thanks so much. Hey, one very last thing. What’s the best way for people to stay in touch with you to follow you online?
Teodora:
Twitter and my email. I am one of those, I guess, dinosaurs that are using email for communication. I like that.
Larry:
Okay. I’ll include-
Teodora:
I don’t want to stop wondering to the wonders of the web. I don’t want to take them for granted.
Larry:
No, I don’t think you take anything for granted from our conversations, but I appreciate that.
Teodora:
Yeah.
Larry:
Well, I’ll include your contact info in the episode webpage as well.
Teodora:
Thanks, Larry. Thanks for having me and for allowing me to enter your world, for inviting me to dance.
Larry:
Likewise. I enjoyed the dance immensely. Thanks so much, Teodora.
Teodora:
Thank you, Larry.
Leave a Reply