Nobody knows anything

So said William Goldman of the entertainment industry, as he tried to sum up his experiences of Broadway and Hollywood. 

It's one of those phrases that is used time and weary time again (oh, and once more now), possibly because it can be read a number of ways - but possibly because it's usefully provocative.

According to my mate Brian Dargan (who's usually correct in these matters, I find) he meant that if the film industry knew which films were going to succeed, it wouldn't produce so many flops.

I'd like to use this phrase today to sum up where we're at with the plethora of digital stuff we're all trying to evaluate at the moment.

Here are some of the questions that nobody seems to know the answers to:

- Is Twitter worth the alleged $700m price Apple wants to pay? Will it ever be able to be monetised?

- What is good web design protocol? At a recent EFP conference in Munich, one of the senior guys at healthcare social network www.doctors.net.uk said of his site, and of Facebook, that the design mattered far less than the sheer volume of content contained within. Is he right? I know plenty of UX / IA guys who'd say no. They'd probably also counter the fact that he reckoned that Google's success wasn't down to the design of its homepage (I, for one, would argue that the simplicity propelled it into popularity far faster than if it had been as cluttered as Yahoo!, for instance).

- Speaking of Facebook, hundreds of thousands of people publicly grumble about the design refreshes it gets from time to time ... but most of us go on using it. And I, for one, tend to forget the last one quite quickly. Was it any better, or are we just pretty adaptable?

- What are the best ways for Pharma marketers (or 'communicators', to use the suggestion in my last post) to approach digital marketing? What should we do first? Blog? Tweet? Film?Listen? Respond? Build yet another sodding great website with reams of dull tiny print that no-one even visits? 

Are we sure? Are we hell. (Perhaps excepting the last one, it would seem.)

So instead we could use common sense, adduce some lessons from the past, pull in the few bits of data we may have, try to find some parallels with consumer examples, and away we go. 

Nobody knows much here and, as a result, most are too scared to try.

They just build another sodding great website instead. Or don't do anything.

My point to all of this? 

We'll never know everything (for a variety of philosophical reasons - see future post on Occam's Razor vs. Goedel's Incompleteness Theorems).

But knowing something is about as good as we're going to get, and I'd implore the pharma industry (and the ABPI) to start with / sanction something rather than watch every other industry sector zoom past us in terms of modern communications effectiveness.

Many films may flop, but at least the entertainment industry keeps moving with the times.