| | APRIL 20189CIOReviewDuane ForresterThis has wide-ranging implications, from your agent being able to book travel for you and charge your credit card, to being a filter for all manner of information. The digital agent will ultimately determine which messages reach a person, meaning loyalty programs will be key to access customers, and random marketing outreach will be filtered away before a human has a chance to see it. This step, several years away still, will revolutionize data retrieval and redefine the concept of "usefulness" on an almost daily basis.Yet none of this will be possible without data. Clean, accurate, factual, organized data. Organized public data about a business is key to today's systems and will remain an important factor as technology and adoption moves us towards the advent of true agents. This field of data management is known as digital knowledge management (DKM), and it needs to be a critical focal point for businesses. If a business manages their data footprint well, trust in the business grows, ensuring today's digital assistants and tomorrow's digital agents engage with that business. Skip this step, or manage it half-heartedly, and you'll see your competitors pull ahead.A well-run digital knowledge management program will have a dedicated role assigned to manage oversight of all digital assets. Part of this role--the digital knowledge manager--will be to understand and integrate programs from across a company, ensuring efficiency and avoiding cannibalization. Your paid search program should know what your TV campaigns are focused on, so online paid campaigns can align as consumers come online. Your organic search program (SEO, or search engine optimization) should work with your social and paid search programs to ensure each is supported. This is especially beneficial for organic and paid search as you can effectively lower overall paid search costs through organic optimization. Another part of the focus for this role is to understand the evolving voice landscape; to track consumer behavior and guide the company on how to optimize for voice search, as well as to tackle the tougher work in building dedicated assets like Google Actions or Alexa Skills. Each of these is another gateway to consumer attachment via each company's proprietary in-home devices.There is truly a lot on the immediate horizon. From digital assistants, to voice, to DKM, there is a lot to learn and plan for. It's important that your business understands these areas as each is intimately connected with today's consumers. People are turning to digital assistants more and more, and those assistants need your data to answer questions. An increasing number of people are using voice as their favored user interface, which is forcing other changes to the digital marketing landscape. In a world where there is one spoken answer, what does it even mean to "rank" anymore?The companies who will win in tomorrow's landscape will be the ones who started working on their digital knowledge management today.
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