Havas Drive, A Technology Company At Heart

So this is the first post into the Havas Drive blog of the new ERL website, and I’m really excited about this space. It provides a great springboard for, well, me to rant about all things technical. Havas Drive, after all, is a technology company at heart. With that said, here goes.

Earlier this week I witnessed a few of my colleagues working on a concept for a healthcare portal. I actually didn’t see very much of it, but what I could acertain, it seemed to have all of the staples of a good portal site: widgets, messaging (forums, peer-to-peer communications), sourced content, UGC, and of course, and most importantly, search. Personally, I like using portals to consume information from. It typically is a single-sourced solution for discovering information on a variety of topics. If I wanted to learn about, say, Praxil and Lipitor, I can do so from the same site, without having to discover and then switch between the brand-name sites. This mechanism of data-consolidation makes it a no-brainer for end-users, and invites me to continue exploring the site, as there are numerous ways of participating with the data that’s contained there. For these reasons alone, I think in the near future, portals will largely kill brand sites. Pharma would be wise to either create their own portals, which I believe a few of them have, or perhaps even better, to partner with every portal that’s out there and institute a strategy to continuously update them with new information. Let the portals battle for site ranking, meanwhile Pharma concentrates on the strategy of reaching users with the right data (relevancy).

I think this strategy works for the short-term. At this time, portals are more of a destination site, as opposed to a traditional site. However, if portals will kill-off brand sites, what I think will kill-off portals is search (I believe search will kill-off a lot of destination sites, but that’s another blog entry). When I see PowerPoint decks in Pharma that discuss the topic of search, one of the first slides in the presentation shows how users start with a search engine first, when looking for brand information (we’ve all grown so accustomed to using search, that we as users typically start with search with looking-up information on any subject for that matter). This is precisely why I think search will knock-off portal traffic over time. For me, as an end user, I have no loyalty to any particular informational data website, I only have loyalty to sites that house my data (Facebook, Linked-in, etc). Perhaps when I make a discovery of a data aggregator that I think is good, such as a portal, I might bookmark it. But over time, I could forget the URL or bookmark, and loose the site. What I will won’t forget or loose, is the search engine. And who knows, the next time I perform a search for a subject, that portal that I had visited, might not even rank any longer. And to be honest, there is no real reason why I should remember the URL. But my reliance on the search engine to serve me the best information, is something that I heavily rely on. Albert Einstein couldn’t remember his own phone number, but he knew where to go to get it. In fact, as search engine algorithms get better, and new ways of presenting search queries (like the Microsoft Bing approach), the search engine page that renders the information will be the portal. With this, more users will begin to understand how to properly use search to serve the best results. Again, as an end-user looking for information, it doesn’t matter to me if the information is WebMD.com, a Facebook group, or Yahoo! What matters is the relevancy. That’s where I rely on search engines to get it right, the first time, and as of right now, that’s not the case. Over time, that will change. As an individual who has a provisional patent, and passion for search technology, I can say that there will be a point where search will be universal and will be 100% accurate when looking up information…years from now. Until then, keep discovering, using and participating with portals. Just don’t forget to bookmark them.

Portals, in a similar way to brand sites, centralize everything. Yes, they utilize RSS to aggregate content from other sources/sites, and the whole idea is that a portal presents information from a variety sources, which is what in fact, makes it a “portal” in the first place. However, most portals try to horde the information (for competitive purposes), to obtain repeat visits. This makes information very one-dimensional. Data is coming in, but typically not going out.