In case you missed it, Google has gone public with Knols. That’s short for “knowledge” and while it appears simple on its face, there are many implications that you should be aware of. Some have gone so far as to claim that Wikipedia’s days are numbered.
As I sit around after Thanksgiving dinner thoroughly stuffed, I am reminded of an article I recently read in Fortune entitled the “Dawn of the Web Potato.” The premise of the article was that Americans are moving off the couch and becoming Web potatoes. In fact, we’ve moved so far already that we no longer just “surf the Web,” but we go online to do a wide variety of other things like reading the news, shopping, emailing, watching videos, Googling and the such.
…and are you ready for it?
A recent survey published in The McKinsey Quarterly, the Online Journal of McKinsey & Company, explored how companies are using the Web to reach customers throughout the marketing-related decision-making process. Respondents indicated that by 2010, they expect a majority of their customers to discover new products or services online and a third to purchase goods there. These expectations appear to be driving plans for future Web- and marketing-related spending.
Have the days of the huge clinical enterprise Web site come to an end? Has the “everything about our hospital/health system” site strategy finally lost its usefulness? Is general health library content no longer of value? Will targeted clinical service micro-sites and landing pages tied to online ads replace the CMS-driven content monsters we now serve? Are organic search optimization techniques losing out to search engine marketing and adwords? It’s Marketing 2.0 There’s a compelling logic to moving our energies away from our current broad based – dare I say, shotgun – marketing strategies toward more focused, performance driven, interactive marketing campaigns with the Internet at the center rather than as an afterthought. These coordinated campaigns are laser-like in focus, highly flexible, tightly budgeted, locked into analytical tools, and exquisitely measurable. The logic of this flows from clear marketing objectives tied to performance goals: new appointments in profitable services, cost-effectively increasing consumer mind share in new markets, increasing awareness and referrals among in physicians regionally and nationally, and new hires of physicians and nurses in profitable services that lack the capacity to take increase patient loads. In future blogs I will be talking about the mechanics of these campaigns and their components: Read more…