Do you know all of your national capitals?

Quick.

The capital of Norway.

Got it? Stumped?

Stay tuned for the correct answer.

For those of you who learned and remembered this type of information from your grade school days, congratulations. Geography is a tough subject for most of us. There was a time (not too long ago) when it would have been pretty challenging to find the answer to this question if you didn’t learn it at some point in the past and remember it. For those who didn’t know the answer and “Googled” it, accidentally stumbled upon the point of today’s post.

Recall a time not too long ago when you didn’t have Internet access. If you wanted to find out a capital of a country, you didn’t have much choice but to look it up in a book. If you had some encyclopedia’s on hand, you could find it there. You might even find it in one of those giant unabridged dictionaries or an almanac. If you didn’t have any of those, you were out of luck. You could call a friend to get the answer, but you certainly couldn’t send them a tweet or even an email.

Things have changed very dramatically in the past 15 years or so, such that it isn’t necessary for you to have a set of encyclopedias in your house should someone challenge you on the capital of Norway (which is, of course, Oslo). To find the answer today, you just search for it online. We even have a new word to describe it: “I Googled it.” For you youngsters out there, there wasn’t always a company called Google, much less a verb based on it. Today, of course, you can find out the answer to any factual question almost instantly no matter where you are. With mobile technology advancing very quickly, you can do much of what a desktop PC can do with only an iPhone. If you compared the guidance computers used for the Apollo moon missions to an iPhone, the two wouldn’t even appear to have been developed by the same species, much less separated by less than 40 years. One stat: the Apollo computer’s speed was 1.024 MHz. My iPhone’s is 600 MHz (my laptop is 2.53 GHz, which is about 2000 times faster than Apollo’s). Enough geek talk, what’s the point?

The point is that there’s no reason to waste your time learning capitals of countries. With this type of  information at your fingertips in an instant, wouldn’t your time be better spent elsewhere versus the hours required to memorize information you might never need? Yes, there’s value in learning, but not memorizing information like this. The value come from learning how to remember things and how to process information.

Let me put it more plainly. Basic information has no value. It has no monetary value and very little time value. Since you can get it anywhere for free, almost instantly, it’s a waste of resources to learn it and have it cataloged in your own head.

Instead, what you do with this information is far more useful. That’s what people pay money for. That’s why we hire consultants. For example, we don’t pay them to tell us the capitals of countries, but rather which ones are likely to have the biggest influence in global economics in the next 10 years.

The question for content producers (and if you’re reading this and have a website, you’re one of them) is what this means for your content creation strategy and what value you provide to people. If you’re giving them information they can get elsewhere, then you aren’t adding value. I’ve already shown you “How Google and Bing Plan to Eliminate the Need for WebMD” by providing basic disease state and medication information, such that you never have to even leave the search engine to get it, much less dig through your website.

This change is happening now and will only exacerbate in the future. Less and less content will be stored in people’s heads and we’ll focus more on interpretation. Less and less value will be placed on basic information, as it will be everywhere, easy to access, and completely free. As a marketer, do you know how you can prepare for this future and to lead the change as it’s happening now?

That’s what I’m here for.

Before we go any further, you have to accept the fact that “content is king” isn’t really true anymore. While Bill Gates coined the term (good trivia question BTW), it’s been adopted by entertainment companies most recently. Ironically, you don’t need to look much further than these companies to see that this phrase no longer holds true. They have been the first to have their business models turned upside-down simply because the content itself isn’t as valuable as it used to be.

There are two different areas that you need to look for a future “king.” Cataloging and Calculation. Try these on for size: “Cataloging is king” or “Calculation is king.”

Cataloging is King

For as much as I might talk about how wonderful it is that content is available everywhere, in massive amounts, and for free, there’s a problem. Content is available everywhere, in massive amounts, and for free. That’s right…it’s good and bad. You already know the benefits, but here’s the downside. With all the content out there, it becomes very difficult for people to find exactly what they need. It’s simple to find the capital of Norway, but what about finding how many people lived in Norway in 1980 compared to 2000. That information exists, but not all in one, nice, neat place and not in this format. At best, you’d have to look up the populations in both years and break out your calculator to do the rest. Or do you? The evolution is already in up and running: WolframAlpha. While it’s still a little hard to use if you’re not familiar with it, it’s a powerful computational tool that does more than just math and was able to instantly give me the answer to my question. The power lies not in the data, as it comes from free, open-source databases, but rather in how you access the data. Here, WolframAlpha saved you two steps, as you don’t have to look up the population information for each country or do the math on your own.

Companies that make it easy for people to sift through the data that’s available will lead in the future. For healthcare companies, this means being able to take information about a certain disease and personalize it. Picture this: I want to find only information that’s relevant to my condition and treatment stage and history. Let’s say a patient has stage IV non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). I’ve already taken carboplatin and Gemzar (together) and then Taxotere after progression. His question is simple: “what treatments are now indicated and what’s the average time to progression for these treatments?” If you think about it, that’s really a simple question, but it would be almost impossible to find out the answer online quickly and easily despite all the information needed to answer the question being freely available.

If this person visited the average website, he’d have to sort through all the different stage information to find stage IV, then look through each of the treatments and data to see what’s applicable to him. The WolframAlpha-style solution would allow him to type (or use drop-down selections) in his stage and past treatments, what parameters he needs to know and then spit out an answer. The companies who present the data, the content, in this format will lead in the future. How hard would it be to create this tool? Answer: not very.

The second part of aggregation is alerting people when information has changed. To take our example above of the NSCLC patient, if a new treatment is approved or studied that matches his current status, he needs to know about it immediately. He shouldn’t have to go online and dig around everyday for new news. It needs to come to him. That’s the idea behind RSS, but this needs to go even further to make feeds automatically from any source, not just pages that happen to have feeds already. This exists in many areas, but for customized data like we need here, it’s not that simple. Making new, relevant information available to people that finds them instead of the other way around is the future.

When you wrap all of this together, whoever is able to simply and effectively catalog and deliver all the content that’s out there will win the day.

Calculation is King

I take this theory very much to heart and have tried to practice it here on this blog. Rarely will you ever see me simply stating a bunch of facts or statistics (that you can get anywhere else) without an interpretation of that information. The statistics and facts have no value. I hope the interpretation does. That’s the reason why some posts (like this one) run a little long. I try to present the data, what it means, and what it means for you. That’s calculating.

The main point here is that you’re trying to help people make choices. This is what Bing’s entire “Decision Engine” positioning is based on. They don’t want to just give lists of information (i.e., links) leaving you to pick which is the right one, they want to guide you to the answer. Here’s how they’re promoting this concept via a series of clever commercials:

If you want to see the actual features that Bing is touting to deliver this new type of searching, then you can check out the video here (big points off for Microsoft since I can’t embed the video here). While I’m not totally sure that Bing delivers on this big promise (helping you make decisions) just yet, it’s a step in the right direction. What Bing understands is that the content (in this case, links) isn’t as important as helping you find the information. When you search for something on Google (or Bing), you aren’t doing it to see what links come up, you’re doing it to find the answer to your question. Think about that for a minute.Today, both of these search engines are trying to do this for basic searches. That’s why, for example,  if you type “define” followed by any word in Google, you get the definition as the first listing, so you don’t have to go to another page on another site to find the answer. You don’t want links, you want answers.

It’s the same thing for any other type of question. Going back to our NSCLC patient, he doesn’t want  bunch of links. He wants to know the answer to this question: “what treatments are now indicated and what’s the average time to progression for these treatments?” The answer(s) should be easy to find and immediately available (that is, he shouldn’t have to dig through tons of pages to find the answer). That’s a good first step and is why “Cataloging is king.” To deliver “Calculation is king,” you need to be able to not only answer this question, but to then tell our patient which treatment of the possible choices is best and why.

Of course, this already exists. We call them doctors. But a doctor isn’t always available to answer these questions. When you’re researching, you’re probably doing it to educate yourself so that when the doctor does recommend something, you understand why. I’m not recommending that we cut doctors out of the equation or that they won’t be important in the future. Rather, I’m saying that the “calculations” they do based on their knowledge and experience is what is valuable and what people need. But it’s not the sole domain of doctors or any other expert either. The companies that can effectively find the information and analyze it for people are the ones who will win in the future. They will win because they will be the go-to source for answers. If people come to you for answers and you can supply them, then you’ve provided something of almost limitless value and will have created a very powerful bond with your consumers.

Contrast this to the information and content you supply today for people visiting your sites or through brochures or any other medium. How far are you away from being able to provide calculations and not just content? I know that there are limitations to what pharma companies can recommend, but that’s narrow thinking. It’s not the way the world works now and certainly not the way it will work in the future. Far from being a starry-eyed optimist, I’m even more of realist. If you can’t figure out a future where you can provide this service to patients in some form, then you will be left behind. The good news is that you have some time to figure it out. The bad news is that it isn’t that much time.

Remember: content isn’t king anymore. Cataloging and Calculations are king.

Possibly related posts (auto-generated):

1. Your Choice: Your Privacy or Your Life?
2. How Google and Bing Plan to Eliminate the Need for WebMD (and Your Website)
3. 10 Healthcare Dinosaurs Digital Technology Will Make Extinct