The Now in Knowledge

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What's the future of  information? Unlimited, I believe. All of the emerging technologies and new social patterns around them are all formed around information. Sending, receiving, multiplying, syndicating and federating information. In fact, they consume more and more information as the new technologies become more efficient and more widely adopted.  As the world becomes more complex marketplaces need more information to make sense of it all.

There are different kinds of information, of course. Jeremiah Owyang and I took a first pass at parsing the different kinds at lunch today. Simple enough to do, but the distinctions may be helpful in making sure that we marketers conciously address the different kinds and rush to fill the gaps that are identified.

Conversations
This is the ultimate user generated content. Twitter, Facebook, even email are primary examples of this unstructured, spontaneous and direct information. Most important to marketers, it's highly believable and largely unavailable to them. Though most advertiser-funded services do give marketers access to sidebars next to the user's own writing, no one except the user is in the content itself.

Content
This one's defined a little more broadly than perhaps it should be. Think of standard brochure-ware websites.  This is the stuff that we marketers have been building since 1995. It's vendor-generated and most customers view it as a necessary affliction if not an outright evil. We still produce terabytes of it.

Knowledge
Here's where it gets interesting. If there's been a revolution in user generated content, why not an equal revolution in vendor generated content. Imagine that your CTO or a sales executive or your online community manager is fully engaged in conversations with interested visitors and prospects. The informal and ephemeral nature of these conversations makes it difficult to present deep background or complex concepts. Even if one of your team has the chops to do that, it's a waste of time to repeat that information in the multiple conversations. Better for your company representative to establish mutual interest and then provide a pointer to the prepared knowledge that resides somewhere on the web.

Sure it sounds like more brochures and white papers, but it has to be more than that. It has to be what brochures and white papers should have been. What's required here is a qualitative improvement in relevance, writing and availability.

Possibilities
What's the thoughtful reference work that matches pace with the revolution in user generated content? Is it simply a well considered and consumable white paper? Does it rely on new or uninvented technology? What can marketers do now to be relevant and useful to the conversations that our customers rely on more and more?

Let's think about that. With a category called "knowledge", we can define it better and use it to improve the information that we're all creating. What do you think?