The Science of Communicating & Marketing Your Business

Well...duh!

Yes, I know I'm getting to this late. Sweetness sent me this post 23 Aug 07 and I'm just getting to it now and even taking that into account, duh!

I really want to write a blog entitled "Stating the Obvious" about news stories and research like this. Put everything else out of the equation, leave only that there's more information sources currently available and what do you get? People will reallocate their time commitments to incorporate the new information sources, especially if those new information sources (ecologically) benefit them more than their traditional information sources.

This is stating the obvious to me because, again, there's so much already known about similar phenomena (do some research on the introduction of Starlings to the New World, how the development of print changed the function of the town-crier, how the introduction of radio changed the function of print, how the introduction of television changed the function of radio, ...) that this article falls far short (and the research may as well) of pointing to what's happening and where things might go.

I was recently asked what I thought the future of traditional media was. I offered that traditional media exists as traditional media for an increasingly short period of time ecologically. Therefore the future of traditional media is based on its ability to determine how to provide increasingly targeted content through new, culturally divergent and increasingly utilized information channels.

What has been "traditional media" needs to evolve itself from outlets to information environments.

And thus begins another wonderful excursion into "Where is he going and how is he going to get there?"

Information is a resource. Right now (and I'm guessing for only a few more years, really), it's an overly abundant resource. My gosh there's so much of it that it takes the form of a nearly infinite resource.

Think "oil" in the minds of 1910 world economics. There were other ways to power vehicles. Oil hence gas was so abundant, so cheap, ..., that designing transportation systems around an unlimited resource was an obvious thing to do.

There weren't that many people with personal transportation requirements at the time.

Things change. We've learned the price of an unlimited resource is calculable and demonstrable in many ways.

The same will happen with information over time. We're seeing the seeds of this in the transportation market with the introduction of diesel, ethanol, hybrid, fuel cell, solar, etc., technologies. At first these new "fuel" sources appear in traditional outlets, gas stations. Then they appear in their depots. The metaphor is the same, only the expression of the metaphor changes.

Right now and because the internet tends to time-shrink things in distinct ways, the move to depotize information is in full swing. I wrote about this in Now that the SuperBowl is over, does anybody remember the Brands?. Traditional media drives its audience to new media outlets. Providing that information in differently digestible forms and providing those digestible forms in different locations will occur sooner or later and people will favor one form and one location over another.

Can you say "demographics"? How about "evolution theory"?

Match the two together and throw in a little economics in the form of "information is a resource" and you're ahead of the game. "Information" can be assigned a value, obviously, but the ability to communicate, to share that information, to make it available in a way that a target demographic can find and digest?

Show me the company that's exploring that and I'll invest.

Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.

• Audience Focused Optimization

• DC Emetrics Summit on 14-17 Oct '07
• Society for New Communications Research Annual Research Symposium & Awards Gala on 5-6 Dec 07 in Boston.