This past week the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the international community organization led by Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee that develops web standards, issued a working draft for Emotion Markup Language (EmotionML) 1.0. This is the genesis of a very exciting phase in network centric marketing.

The Marketing Consigliere thanks Roger Dooley who brought it to his attention last week in a Tweet; knowing that Roger would probably blog about it, out of professional respect the Marketing Consigliere wanted to wait for his post (and encourages you to read it) before he posted his.

While this is rocket science for the average marketer and merely a framework for the future, in the next five to ten years, you will probably see an increase in the adoption of some form of EmotionML, especially with regard to a device where “convergence” has been occuring – mobile marketing.  Mobile phones have cameras to record our emotional expressions, microphones to detect emotion in our voices and other biological signs, and of course corresponding behavior.  Just think of some of the ways EmotionalML can be leveraged:

• Marketing Research – testing contextual verbal response and emotional correlations during focus groups or customer satisfaction surveys.
• Customer Support – finding solutions that may calm a distraught customer; or even a disabled customer who cannot physically display emotion as well as healthy customers
• Sales – knowing when to close a deal and kill a deal by being to fast with the sell.

Brace yourself for the predictable backlash from the privacy crowd who fear the “Big Brother” of network-centric marketing;  However, like the broader field of behavioral marketing, the business intelligence and data mining value of leveraging EmotionalML may prove very irresistable for marketers who have the deep pockets to navigate the potential landmines in this uncharted territory.  And when tied to social networking and user generated content, the contribution that EmotionalML can make to predictive analysis and web analytics in general could be amazing.