Teodora Petkova
Modern 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
Twitter
email
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAbSqz8zc54
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.
