This is the archive of the goodrelations dicussion list

Thanks Martin

Do you also have this up on a website somewhere?

Steven

On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 3:14 PM, Martin Hepp <martin.hepp at ebusiness-unibw.org
> wrote:

> Dear all:
>
> I recently tried to reply to a blogpost that was critical of using Google's
> Rich Snippet functionality. Since I think my arguments may be of general
> relevance, I post them here, too:
>
>
> Hi XYZ,
> I think you are overly pessimistic about the potential of exposing
> structured data regarding your products or services. Clearly, while
> informing potential customers you are also making it easier for your
> competitors to analyze you. However, please keep in mind the following
> aspects:
>
> 1. Not being visible with all the details of your offer is always worse
> than being visible for both your potential customers and your competitors;
> nowadays, you can never survive by shying away from the public but just by
> having a different value proposition than your competition.
>
> 2. Structured data, e.g. GoodRelations in RDFa, helps keeping your value
> proposition intact when publishing it on the WWW. Instead of being reduced
> to just the price tag, the many ways in which you are different from your
> competitors remain accessible for search engines and novel recommender
> systems - e.g. stock availability, warranty, payment and delivery methods,
> or product features.
>
> 3. It is fairly easy for your competitors to analyze you even if you do not
> publish your offer data in RDFa. They can simply hire staff in low-labor
> countries or go via Amazon's Mechanical Turk service that will collect and
> consolidate what's on your Web page anyway. But your prospective customers
> cannot go that route, so you are putting much more friction on the
> matchmaking with potential clients than protecting yourself against your
> competition. So it is really about helping search engines to help
> prospective customers to find you.
>
> Best wishes
>
> Martin Hepp
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> goodrelations mailing list
> goodrelations at ebusiness-unibw.org
> http://ebusiness-unibw.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/goodrelations
>



-- 
Steven Forth
steven.forth at gmail.com
@StevenForth
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://ebusiness-unibw.org/pipermail/goodrelations/attachments/20101202/2ab23f07/attachment.html>