Have I got your attention?
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Cue bad Alec Baldwin/Glengarry glen Ross tie-up here..
TRANSPARENT BUNDLES by Seth Goldstein: Media Futures: From Theory to Practice
This is probably one of the most interesting things I've seen this week (apart from the $100 laptop)
I can't even begin to do this justice, so I'll just quote him verbatim:
"Our goal at /ROOT Markets is to maintain liquidity across all of these tiny markets. This is no small task, especially against the backdrops of apathy. Consumers are generally apathetic about the value of their attention data. Advertisers and publishers are apathetic about the cost of taking consumer attention. Investors are apathetic about consumer attention as a tradeable commodity. By educating the market about the value of attention, and enabling it to be traded (in the form of leads), we can continually feed back better and better information in terms of price, quality and yield on attention. While this may not create new attention, it may indeed help reduce our significant attention deficit.
One final observation: the Internet business path is about to split. One direction leads to an open approach to data, governed by the principles of transparency and publicity. The other direction leads to a closed approach to data, focused on privacy and opacity: the black box. Both directions have legitimate and consistent end-user benefits and economic rationales. The danger is getting stuck in the middle: (1) looking to increase your edge but not locking up the information it is based on; or (2) promoting your open-ness but not sharing data back to the system."
This from the guy who's helped setup and fund Attention Trust.
Where this gets really interesting for me is the way in which all this open innovation can support multiple uses.
I've spent a lot of time thinking how broken education is in companies - and how marketing is a far better industry to adopt practices from, than the education world, because really, employees are a company's consumer - and attention is the currency employees spend.
So if I want to get get an employee's attention, I better damn well adopt some marketing techniques and stop building hour long 'courseware'.
The latest thinking in Attention is a fascinating blend of technology and philosophy - and it's all out there in the open.
But marketing is a clumsy tool, and employees exist in a tighter community than the open world, i.e. one where more subtlety and a longer view can be taken. Getting an employee to spend their attention on something is potentially expensive - particularly if employees spend their attention on the wrong things...
And an individual's attention is a finite resource, and like all resources, increases in value as it becomes scarcer. Busy employees will spend their attention with care.
And ploughing through hour-long 'in this module you will learn...but in the order I decree' e-learning 'courseware' is something no sensible, busy employee would do (besides, think how much email they could get through in an hour!)
But, and this is a huge, huge difference - these guys are talking about enabling, capturing and managing the gesture of attention... this becomes much more interesting and enables greater subtlety in employee education. it might also allow corporations to get over themselves and finally allow their own people to start educating themselves (I think I've done the employee blog thing to death , already?).
When employees write their own 'content' and other employees pay attention, there's starting to become an infrastructure to gauge, and more importantly, capitalise on that.
In a world where just letting people get on with stuff is never enough, this infrastructure might just provide the metrics and mesh to leverage employee-employee information flows.
Imagine an auto-correcting application, that captured what you were paying attention to and subtly steered towards related information (or steered you to important information)
And imagine the seismic shift in companies, when they start to see what employees really pay attention to, instead of what they're told to pay attention to.
This ain't big brother metrics, it's enablement, observation and recommendation on a personal level.
E-learning has one final chance of redeeming itself - and that's admitting that it's peddling information, and we're all in the attention market.
