Delivery vs Discovery

The past couple weeks have been difficult in terms of getting blog posts up:) I have a bunch of ideas queued up with handwritten notes etc, but not time to type them. One of my colleagues is in India visiting our offshore team, and so evenings are prime time for work discussions, leaving little time for blogging. However I have still been sifting through my feeds and came across this post by Tim Haskins on Content Discovery vs Delivery Systems.

He defines 7 key aspects of content discovery systems:

1. Content discoveries looks like solutions in the eyes of the customer
2. Content discoveries come at a perfect time
3. Content discoveries serve the context of the customer
4. Content discoveries get shared by the customers
5. Content discoveries involve an adventure
6. Content discoveries put emphasis on how the content is used
7. Content discoveries transform the customer's experience

Like all aspects of business we need to transition from archaic models where we deliver something 'to' a customer to ones where the customer drives the transaction, and ultimately is more satisfied with the result. Are you a delivery company or a discovery company?

Our Mental Hard Drive

This is a great visual about information, and how much of it we see every day. Think about what this means - We see 1MB of information every second. This is only going to increase. What is the capacity for your mental hard drive? What is it for your customers? How do you make the best use of their limited capacity. Although this may seem dismal to marketers, In some ways I feel that the increased volume of content, is allowing the human brain to reach a great potential for information consumption. And now, as we develop new and better external tools to help us categorize and filter, it also allows our own hard drives to re-configure how it remembers things.

By the way check out lynetters other visual quotation images on Flickr - Just like this image, they will likely make you re-think your business.