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ePaper created 2017-03-17, 11:21:45 | version 1.38.0
| practice management marketing actions Walking among giants Marketing dentistry in the global connected economy Author: Chris Barrow, UK © J e s u s S a n z / S h u t t e r s t o c k . c o m In an information-rich world, the wealth of infor- mation means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it con- sumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.These prophetic lines were shared by Nobel laureate and social scientist Dr Herbert Simon in 1971. It seems incredible to think that his words predate the Inter- net by 20 years. Simon lived in a world in which ad- vertisers tried to gain our attention with bill-boards, newspaper advertisements and television commer- cials. At the same time, the local ma-and-pa busi- ness prospered through convenience and human interest. The connected economy and growth in population have created statistics that are beyond our com- prehension. There were 60 trillion websites at the last count and every year the Internet grows by eight million new songs, two million new books, 16,000 new fi lms, 30 billion blog posts and 182 bil- lion tweets. Google handles 35 billion e-mails every day alone, and 1.8 billion photographs are uploaded to the Cloud from everywhere around the globe. I speculate as to how many of those photographs are of happy, smiling faces. IBM tells us that we are “a world awash in data”, 80 per cent of which is currently invisible to our computers; however, with the IBM Watson project, 06 CAD/CAM 1 2017