In the words of Sir Francis Drake (and repeated countless times in pop culture since) “knowledge is power”.

As a person that is painfully enthusiastic about the marketing world, I find it very easy to get caught up in some of the more exciting and innovative work that we’re able to produce across so many mediums. It’s very easy to forget the importance of intelligently addressing your message to make sure the right people receive potentially focused and targeted messages.

All of this messaging can only be accomplished through accurate in depth details on people, businesses, places, and things. Building in depth catalogs on places and things is somewhat easy. Building intelligence on businesses is more challenging as they tend to be private by nature and trying to build in depth details of consumers has become easier and more complex at the same time.

The whole idea for this post started yesterday while chatting with a client. We had their site hooked up to Google Analytics and after giving them a tour they exclaimed, “I can’t believe this is free!”.  I explained that Google, in exchange for giving away analytics software, had received at least two valuable things in return. First, they had a foot in the door to sell you Adwords. Second, they were now collecting deep data on the details of people that visited your site, how the found your site, and how they used your site. Since Google Analytics maintains a dominance in market share of web analytics providers (in terms of the number of sites monitored) they are now collecting shocking amounts of data about the who, when, what, where and why of how people use the Internet.

At the bottom of this post you’ll notice the “ShareIt” component that has become so common all over the web. This common web component now openly posted on hundreds of millions of web pages not only tracks website traffic data, but also stores information on the content that people are most commonly sharing. This brilliant innovation starts to get into a part of analytics that is frequently overlooked: the how and why aspect of people’s online behavior.
I don’t think I need to point out that the social networks are starting to build mind blowing repositories of personal information about people. Not only are they deep into our personal details and individual tastes, but they are also developing an understanding of the friends we keep and how social groups are formed. They might not be selling this information to third parties but they are, without question, using this data to intelligently address the ads within their own network. I don’t think any social network VC firm anticipated their future users would ignore a good portion of their ads (thus devaluing their ad costs to some of the lowest in the ad game), but theoretically they have the ability to bring the most target (and valuable) ads to the table. I foresee the social networks starting to operate in the “gray” area of their privacy policies. They might start to partner with other media outlets using their data to power more intelligent ad serving but continue to keep the data secure on their own systems in accordance with their privacy policies.

Take a company like Google that owns Google Analytics, owns a social network like Orkut, and could easily develop or buy a company such as ShareIt. Now imagine the amount of data that they’re analyzing about the way we live and work.

Ultimately, all of this rich data will power the next generation of the internet, the semantic web, as it evolves over the next ten years. If the current web is the glue that weaves our modern economy together, then dominating the semantic web will be the deciding factor in establishing the most powerful companies of the next decade.

I repeat “knowledge is power”.