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Frictionless future: wearable, linguistic and gestural trends to watch

June 22, 2012 – 10:33 am

A model wears a prototype of Google’s Glass wearable computer (image credit: Google)

At first, it surprised me. Sure, I had authorized Rdio to add songs I played to my Facebook Timeline, largely as an experiment. But when I started seeing 80s hits show up, thanks to some fun I was having with family at home, it took me aback. Do I really want the world knowing that I’ve listened to Roxette?

Mark Zuckerberg calls this “frictionless sharing.” Rather than explicitly clicking a “Like” button or taking another action to share with friends, it happens automatically once we authorize an application to do it on our behalf. Like so much of what Facebook does, it caused controversy, largely in relation to privacy concerns and being even further overwhelmed with information.

But I think “frictionless sharing” hints at something else. Clicking “Like,” as easy as it is, is still a horribly unnatural action. Ditto to “friending” someone on Facebook. In fact, almost everything we do with computers currently is unnatural, relative to the way we interact with the rest of the physical world, including people.

I think the concept of “frictionless” digital interactions will expand, thanks to the adoption of wearable, linguistic and gestural technologies. Think of wearable devices like FitBit, which gives you frictionless health logging, and Google Glass, which overlays a display on the physical world. Think of linguistic interfaces like Siri, which by this fall should be sophisticated enough to let you run third-party apps on your phone. Think of gestural interfaces like Kinect and Leap, which let you control computers with natural body movements.

All of these are moving us further and further away from the horribly unnatural (and damaging) act of sitting at a computer and punching keys. Mobile devices, with their touch screen and gesture-based interfaces, started the trend. But I think that’s just the beginning. Today, you can share songs you play automatically with the world. I think within the next two years, you’ll be playing those songs by asking for them, and your devices will know they served the right song by watching you nod your had and dance to the rhythm.

Social and mobile are certainly important digital trends of the day. But if you want to think a bit ahead for your digital marketing or product development initiatives, you could do worse than consider wearable, linguistic and gestural endeavors.

 

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Journalism doesn’t need dying media companies to save it

June 8, 2012 – 2:02 pm
If paywalls don’t work, there’s always protectionism.

As more newspapers and other traditional media companies struggle and collapse, there’s a trend to equate their death with the death of journalism. And, accordingly, to cry for their protection as a public service.

Postmedia CEO Paul Godfrey, for example, is lobbying the Canadian government to “provide a level playing field” for Canadian and foreign-owned websites, by either changing foreign ownership rules or removing tax deductions for Canadian businesses advertising on foreign-owned websites.

All of this, however, is motivated by the idea that newspapers and traditional media companies serve a public good beyond that provided by new media, as the protectors, defenders, advocates and outlets of real journalism.

I call bullshit. This is nothing but a plea for protectionism from an industry being disrupted. As someone who studied and practiced journalism, including for print media, I firmly believe that:

Journalism is better off

Consider how much more transparent, global, direct, immediate and democratic today’s news sources are. I can read news in real-time from around the world and around the corner, and connect with professional and citizen journalists without a mediator. And with a click, I can connect with background information, or directly with sources.

Some may decree a lack of analysis. I would disagree. While the internet currently favors a quantity and speed of dissemination over a quality and depth of content, sources like Wikipedia, an increasing number of big data analytics services, and a plethora of talented online columnists, journalists and bloggers are helping to make sense of the noise.

The public is better off

When I began journalism school in 1996, there were effectively three main channels for news: television, radio and print. And for the most part, print drove radio and television. Journalism was theoretically a meritocracy, but as in every industry, money, connections and politics got people exalted positions from which they could spout and control messaging. (That’s one of the main reasons people like Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black build media empires.)

Today, it’s hard to imagine any one media outlet or individual exerting that much influence. We have access to real-time information from more voices in more places, greater connection with journalists to whom we can give direct feedback, more insight into  journalists’ background and potential biases, and a greater opportunity to participate in creating the news.

Are journalists worse off? No
(although some may be temporarily displaced)

What about journalists themselves? Certainly, journalists working for traditional media companies, and especially newspapers, are being temporarily displaced by disruption.

In the long-term, however, I believe that journalists will be far better off. And this is already starting to happen.

Let’s start with hard cash. As a freelancer, I could be paid as little as $400 for a 1,500 word article submitted to a major national newspaper. When you factor in pitches to get the assignment, research, interviews, writing and rewriting, it amounts to earning far less than minimum wage.

Today, there are many more opportunities for journalists to practice and get paid for their craft than when I graduated journalism school in 2000. Take Gawker Media, for example, where a good friend recently began work as a contributing editor—for a substantially more reasonable salary than you would likely find at a traditional newspaper. Journalists like Mathew Ingram, a former Globe and Mail reporter, have jumped to digital publications like GigaOM. Others, like former Toronto Star reporter Tyler Hamilton, have started their own blogs and translate their following into book deals and other revenue generators.

(Not to mention companies like Demand Media, TextBroker and Living Social that, say what you will, provide a much easier way for writers and journalists to work for pay, at an arguably far better rate than most make hacking it as a freelancer.)

Some media companies will die, others will thrive, journalism will evolve

The bottom line?

Let’s not rush to protect companies being disrupted by new media.

Certainly, some people will be negatively affected, and are being negatively affected, by disruption wrought by new technol0gy. But we should be looking to help support a transition to new media, and to help them contribute to and create the companies that help define the future of journalism.

Which I believe looks quite bright, and far more democratic than when I graduated journalism school 12 years ago.

Image credit: NS Newsflash

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What if Klout is right?

May 31, 2012 – 3:57 pm

I admit it. My first reaction to Klout, which attempts to measure online influence, was similar to my initial reaction to Facebook: “Seriously? People are using this? It’s probably just a fad.” (Exhibit A.)

I remember the early days of Facebook. I would receive request after request to “friend” people on the site. And I ignored them. I had seen how such sites as Friendster and Tribe devolved into flame wars and spam fests. And I was happy with LinkedIn, a pragmatic and professional social network.

But eventually, I caved. And for the first few weeks (perhaps month), I was hooked. From the utility of reconnecting with old friends to the dopamine surge of being tagged in a photo, it became quite addictive.

So while I’m skeptical about Klout, I wonder: What if they’re right? Not just in their algorithm for determining influence (which can always be tweaked, like Google’s search algorithm), but in their bet on the impact of assigning and leveraging an influence score. Now, about five years later, Facebook has changed the world (regardless of whether its worth $100 billion or half that), and is approaching a billion users. It’s hard to imagine a world before Facebook, when people weren’t instantly sharing pretty much everything.

As close to “whuffie” as we’ve seen

If you want to understand where social media could take us, you could do worse than read Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. So much so that it’s become cliche to talk about “whuffie,” the social capital that Doctorow’s book describes as akin to today’s money: the more whuffie you have, the more stuff you can get in return.

We’re moving fast in this direction, for a few reasons. One is certainly the creation of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter (which, by the way, I also initially pooh-poohed as a waste of time, but now use avidly), which make it easier to analyze people’s social capital. Another is that an abundance of information creates a scarcity of attention. So in our information saturated world, we increasingly live in an attention economy (as Chris Anderson describes in Free).

Attention is capital that can be converted to goods and services. For example, if you have a top Google search result for an in-demand keyword such as “life insurance,” you can convert that attention to money in the form of advertising to visitors or generating leads for life insurance companies. There is tons of information online about life insurance (over 119 million results in Google). Gaining attention amongst that abundance is worth something (about $19 a click in the US, for a Google search ad).

And that’s just the beginning. Recently, for example, I learned of a service called Wahooly that’s partnered with Klout to exchange advocacy on behalf of startups for equity. Yes, you read that correctly. If you’re an influencer, as measured by Klout, you can earn equity in a startup simply by advocating on its behalf to the people you influence.What Klout’s trying to do is identify the people who have that increasingly valuable attention. If it can do that, it could sit as effectively between attention and monetization in the social space as Google sits in the search space. And just as Google lets people earn attention in organic results or buy it through ads, Klout could let people build influence organically or buy it, such as by brokering relationships between advertisers and influencers.

So you no longer need to be rich to get rich (most countries only accredit investors with a large net worth, such as $1 million or more, although that’s changing). You can build your social capital, and increasingly exchange it for range of goods and services, and even hard cash.

Does Klout threaten traditional authority?

Talk about Klout as anything other than offensive, however, and the technorati will heap scorn.

There are certainly worthy criticisms. For example, Klout skews heavily, it seems, to the technologically inclined. Prolific technology writer Robert Scoble, for example, has a higher Klout score than the Dalai Lama. Then there are questions of whether one number can ever adequately capture influence, whether one company should have the power to say who’s influential, and whether Klout is simply a digital reinvention of high-school popularity contests that will lead people to do what’s cool versus what’s right.

Even if Klout never adequately addresses these criticisms, I think it represents something important: the quantification of social capital. Whether Klout or a competing service (of which, perhaps surprisingly, I’ve seen few) achieves this goal in a meaningful way, enough people believe in the prospect and its desirability (including big investors) that someone will likely figure it out. And, like Facebook, many of us will get sucked into its gravity as more people and organizations heed the numbers.

If it were incumbent corporations decrying a disruptive technology, like newspapers complaining about Google or credit card companies complaining about Square, we would all likely recognize the self-interest. But with traditional authority figures decrying technologies that might disrupt their power, such as old media authors with poor Klout scores calling them irrelevant, we’re not so quick to make the same conclusion. Should we be?

Disruption doesn’t just happen to companies and industries. It also happens to people and societies.

And often, those disruptions are initially dismissed as fads.

Guilty as charged.

Image credit: Cheon Fong Liew (modified with Klout logo by me)

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Why your cool app isn’t enough

May 23, 2012 – 4:28 pm

Pinnerdise, just one of the many Pinterest clones you too can own for a few hundred bucks

A few weeks ago, I met a smart guy named Lon Wong who’s working on a neat project called Unstash. It’s built to capitalize on the collaborative consumption trend, something close to my heart. Basically, it lets you list “idle goods” you have lying around, like that drill you use for 11 minutes each year, so your trusted friends can check them out like books from a library.

Before the product was even complete (it is, in fact, still in development), someone had commissioned a clone.

Such is the current landscape for startups. As an increasing amount of stuff becomes software, that software is being cloned at an increasingly rapid rate. So much so that I (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) now describe three phases of software innovation:

  1. Innovation. Someone creates something novel (usually themselves building on the backs of giants). Like Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, Twitter, LinkedIn, Airbnb and other internet treasures with which we’ve become familiar.
  2. Clone. The innovation, if successful (or, as in the case of Unstash, if it seems like it could be successful), is rapidly cloned. This is done by dedicated clone shops or, it increasingly seems, coders looking to ride others’ success by selling clone applications and lookalike sites (for example, go here for Pinnerdise, a Pinterest clone built on clone software Pinnect).
  3. WordPress theme. The final phase of commoditization: you can purchase a clone or near-clone of the application as a WordPress theme or plugin, often for $100 or less. So you can create your own version of applications like Yahoo! Answers or even Facebook.

You can’t patent an idea

The point here is that, unless you have some unique competitive advantage, such as a patented algorithm, your once innovative software product will be commoditized in routine order. And there’s really not anything you can do about it, because you can’t patent an idea.

Furthermore, the problem is only getting worse: Freelance sites like oDesk make it cheap to recruit cloner developers; Facebook and Twitter make it ridiculously easy to grow a user base; and the massive, and growing, open source community loves to tackle proprietary technology with open source alternatives.

What’s the solution? I’m not entirely sure. But it probably has something to do with that old media concept of brand loyalty, combined with new media concepts like user engagement and network effects. After all, it’s much easier to clone Airbnb than it is to clone Airbnb’s brand equity, media coverage, user base and evangelists.

Still, the rapidity at which a software startup can be cloned suggests that fast followers may be better positioned than first movers to capitalize on an innovation’s success. You can let them spend their money to find product-market fit, while you copy their product for peanuts and spend your money on marketing.

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In defence of Lean Startup

May 17, 2012 – 5:13 pm

Lean Startup evangelist Eric Ries

Recently, I’ve seen several critiques (including here and here) of the Lean Startup methodology.

For those unfamiliar, Lean Startup outlines a scientific approach for entrepreneurship that advocates build, measure, learn loops; launching early and failing fast; using minimal viable products to test assumptions; continuously deploying and getting feedback from your market; ongoing improvement; and other tactics designed to find product-market fit in less time, with less waste.

As someone who has wasted far too much time and money on digital initiatives before discovering Lean, only to find far better, faster and cheaper success when using the approach, I’m a convert. But, as Lean Startup promotes, feedback is essential to test assumptions. So criticism is certainly welcome in order to evolve and improve the Lean Startup approach.

Meet the Lean Straw Man

But most criticism I’ve read creates a straw man misrepresentation that critics then easily defeat.

Others have pointed this out and defended Lean (including here and here). So I won’t repeat their points. But I do want to address one of the common criticisms of Lean that are also made of another favorite tactic of mine, optimization through split- and multivariate testing.

This criticism accuses Lean and other continuous-improvement approaches of incrementalism, claiming that they can never reproduce true genius of which only real entrepreneurs (enter your favorite here: Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, etc.) are capable.

Repeat after me: Neither Lean Startup nor other optimization approaches are designed to generate the Big Idea. They are designed to test the idea, and the assumptions behind it, in order to determine whether the idea is viable or better than other ideas.

Don’t abandon science for voodoo

The analogy is that of a scientist. Scientists generate hypotheses, conduct experiments, measure results, analyze results, and generate conclusions based on the data. Those conclusions often contain additional assumptions and lead to new hypotheses. And the process continues.

The process of generating novel, creative ideas is beyond the purview of Lean Startup. Lean Startup describes the process you should take once you have an idea and want to test its viability. Similarly, optimization processes like split- and multivariate testing help you determine whether a new idea, incremental or radical, is better than an existing idea.

I think part of the reason critics misrepresent this is that Lean Startup threatens the traditional image of an entrepreneur. We’ve long thought of entrepreneurs as being uncannily brilliant, charismatic, or at least eccentric, and people who define themselves as entrepreneurs benefit from that.

Many entrepreneurs certainly fit that description. But many others, especially now, simply have one or more ideas that they methodically refine into killer businesses—businesses that often look very different than the original idea they began with.

To state that entrepreneurship can be made more scientific, however, and thereby opened to anyone with a good idea, is threatening to people who have long thought of themselves as special, and had exclusive access to investors who thought so as well. (It also threatens investors, since people can start businesses for so little, they may not need them.) So as Lean Startup gets further embedded in entrepreneurship culture, I anticipate a few more last gasps from those who benefit from the status quo.

Image credit: Jared Goralnick

 

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Is venture capital being disrupted?

May 9, 2012 – 12:21 pm

This may or may not qualify as ironic, given how venture capital has historically funded so many disruptive technologies. (It depends on your definition of irony.) But it seems several trends are converging to disrupt venture capital.

As VC Fred Wilson noted recently, these trends include (1) the rise of crowdfunding, and now crowdfunding in exchange for equity; (2) the rise of angel investors, with many more internet millionaires now dwelling in Silicon Valley and elsewhere; and (3) the increasingly poor performance of venture capital investments relative to the stock market, as reported recently by the Kauffman Foundation.

Wilson, who is also a prolific blogger and generally insightful guy, says these trends may force venture capitalists to change their approach, perhaps by offering advisory and advocacy services to crowdfunded companies in exchange for equity.

I’m not sure even that will be a good value proposition, as several online services are poised to help startups without the need for intervention from VCs. AngelList, for example, connects startups directly with angel investors, while Wahooly exchanges equity for advocacy by influencers.

It all reminds me of the pressure traditional publishers have faced from all sides with the rise of digital media. I similarly anticipate that many venture capital firms will shut down, exit the venture business, merge, change their model or go into under-serviced niches (like pharmaceuticals and biotech) that require specialized knowledge and have other barriers to entry for the common crowdfunder (for now, anyway).

All in all, as Wilson notes, it’s a good time to be an entrepreneur, given all the new funding options, but a tough time to be an institutional venture capitalist.

Image credit: apec2011ceosummit

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Privacy is dead: meet the quiet companies tracking your every move online

April 13, 2012 – 9:42 am

Think you're being watched offline? Just wait until you fire up your browser.

I just invaded your privacy. Well, not me personally. On my website I use a social sharing tool called AddThis. It generates the Facebook Like and Twitter buttons you see. It knows a lot about you. And now that you’re reading this article, it knows that too.

You’ve probably seen these buttons all over. AddThis and competitor ShareThis package social sharing buttons into an easy-to-use widget that publishers can add to their websites. By May 2011, the AddThis widget was on nine million websites, reaching a billion unique users worldwide.

How do they make money? Let me tell you a story that I’ve seen few mainstream publications report. It’s a story that should make you appreciate how controversies about Google and Facebook privacy changes are mere details. The big picture: privacy is dead, and even Google and Facebook disappearing would do little to resurrect it.

How advertising is like the stock market

I work in digital marketing. It’s a world obsessed with performance (at the very least, superficial stats like impressions and clicks; ideally, more meaningful outcomes like conversions and sales). Performance tends to improve when you reach the right people at the right time with the right creative. You’ll hear many companies make that promise.

Increasingly, advertisers and their agencies are reaching the right people at the right time with real-time bidding. This effectively makes advertising like the stock market. Publishers dump their excess advertising impressions into exchanges. Advertisers and agencies then bid on those impressions in real-time. When they win the bid, they serve you their ad. It all happens in fractions of a second.

And there is a huge amount of excess advertising inventory. This is because few publishers sell out their inventory directly to ad buyers. Many will dump 50% or more of their impressions into exchanges. The result: impressions sold through exchanges cost advertisers pennies on the dollar compared to the same impressions purchased directly from publishers. Not great for publishers, but at least they make something off impressions that would otherwise cost them money due to ad-serving expenses.

Because of the cost-savings, and the centralized reach provided (advertisers can buy impressions across many websites from one exchange), ad exchanges and real-time bidding have taken off.

Your privacy is sold to the highest bidder

Now, real-time bidding by itself isn’t that great. It’s like randomly buying stocks on the stock market. All else being equal, advertisers prefer to know where their ads show (on what sites, and where on those sites) and who they show to.

For example, imagine you’re Honda. You have the option of buying a highly targeted click on Car and Driver’s website for $1. Or you could buy a click on less targeted websites through an ad exchange for $0.10. If Car and Driver visitors are 10 times more likely to buy a car, it’s worth the extra investment.

But now imagine you’re Honda and you can target people interested in buying a Honda within one month through an ad exchange on any website. While the contextual environment of Car and Driver might be important, what’s more important is hitting the exact audience you want to reach. Suddenly, you might pay double what you previously bid on the exchange; it’s still five times cheaper than buying directly from Car and Driver, and you’re likely to see better results.

In a nutshell: the more targeted the ad, the more an advertiser will bid and the more a publisher will receive.

You can block, but you can’t hide

Which brings us back to AddThis.

Along with real-time bidding platforms have emerged data management platforms, with BlueKai (through which ShareThis offers data to advertisers) being one of the most well-established. These platforms allow advertisers to target audiences through ad exchanges. And they allow publishers to contribute data to facilitate that targeting, both directly from their own databases, and indirectly using third-party tools like AddThis.

For example, let’s say Honda wanted to reach people interested in buying a Honda within a month. First, they would create a profile of users who fit that description; for example, users who (a) read reviews of a Honda Civic and (b) use an auto loan calculator online. Second, they would target those users online by combining the targeting capabilities enabled by data management platforms with the impressions purchased through real-time bidding.

The advantage for advertisers is clear: while they may pay more for highly targeted clicks, they also get better results. So it’s worth the investment. But there’s also an advantage for publishers: the more data they provide, the better advertisers can target their audience, and the more they’ll make from ad inventory dumped into exchanges because advertisers compete with higher bids.

And if you think you can avoid it, such as by using ad blockers or denying cookies, don’t count on it. Technologies are being developed to track your activity based on a “fingerprint” assembled from various bits of information such as your browser, operating system and internet service provider. No cookies required.

What we need: transparency and control

Is all of this evil? Am I a bad person for working in this industry? Am I being deceptive by using AddThis on my website?

First, I should say that, as you’ve probably noticed, there’s no advertising on my blog. That may or may not change in future, but I would lose too much (like credibility) by slapping up the wrong ads than I’d gain. So there’s no advantage to me of using AddThis, except that it makes incorporating multiple social sharing tools easier.

But more importantly, I’m not opposed in principle to the so-called erosion of privacy happening online. Ask anyone in a small town (or, if you had a time machine, our ancestors living in caves) whether they have privacy. Anonymity is not an inalienable right.

Furthermore, I don’t think, all else being equal, people would choose annoying untargeted advertising over useful targeted advertising. Nor would they choose (clearly) to pay for subscriptions to online newspapers rather than have them be advertising supported. Losing a bit of privacy is, in my opinion, a small price to pay for many modern marvels and conveniences.

However, that’s not to say I’m in favour of some dystopian, Big Brother, panoptican future. Rather, I think that transparency and control are key. We should know who is gathering our data and how they’re using it. We should be able to review that data. And we should be able to control what’s gathered, and who has access to it. (See, for example, what Personal is building.)

But the idea that we can be completely anonymous online, or go back to the brief era of extreme privacy when large cities existed and social networks didn’t, may be wishful thinking, and a distraction from the goal of empowering people to have control of their data and an understanding of how it’s being gathered and used online.

If you agree with me, maybe you’ll share this article with your friends. Just use the AddThis widget.

Image credit: Taz etc.

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Why this recession is different and unemployment won’t get better soon

December 23, 2011 – 11:48 am

This isn’t a very festive post, being the holiday season and all. But being the holiday season, I actually have a few minutes to write it. The topic has been on my mind a lot lately.

Yesterday, I reviewed a number of the year’s “best graphs,” published by The Atlantic. One of the most striking, further inciting this post, was a graph showing how US GDP has effectively recovered from the recession. Shocking, right? Because jobs haven’t. In fact, the US is pumping out a pre-recession GDP with 6.6 million fewer jobs.

That chart supports another that I reviewed recently in The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, showing how manufacturing output in the US actually hasn’t diminished the way some pundits claim. Nor have the jobs all been sent offshore. Rather, factories are outputting more product with fewer people thanks largely to productivity improvements and, critically, automation. In fact, I’ve read that Foxconn, maker or Apple products, plans to start further automating its factories, eliminating jobs from its massive workforce. Capital flows downhill, and eventually flows into computers and robots whose labor is effectively more profitable than even slave labor.

Economists would argue that’s okay, because you need people to make, service and program the computers and robots. But (a) it takes far fewer people to program an iPhone app than manufacture an iPhone and (b) those people need a higher level of education than someone working on a repetitive assembly-line task.

Just compare “new economy” companies like Apple and Google with “old economy” companies like Ford and GM. The former make up to 10 times the profit per employee of the latter, despite having high-priced engineers on their payroll. Put another way, it takes these companies up to 10 times fewer people to produce every dollar of profit. Looking at those numbers, it’s no surprise you have a pre-recession GDP with 6.6 million fewer jobs.

Old economy versus new: "New economy" companies like Apple and Google make up to 10 times more profit per employee than "old economy" companies like GM and Ford (all data from Wolfram|Alpha)

And that trend will only continue. As Marc Andreessen has pointed out, an increasing amount of stuff is becoming software. Everyone from dedicated hardware manufacturers to toy companies are seeing the trend, with do-it-all gadgets like the iPad eating into their physical product business. When 3D printing goes mainstream (I guesstimate around 2013), that trend will only hasten the decline of traditional manufacturing. Combine that with the trend of collaborative consumption, with services like Zip car and AutoShare, and the number of factories and manufacturing jobs will only plummet further.

I’m not sure what this means for the economy and employment, but I’m pretty sure that business-as-usual and government-as-usual is not the answer. The fruits of productivity gains need to be shared more broadly, and more people engaged in the new economy in some capacity, or things like Occupy Wall Street will seem quaint and cute in comparison to the more violent protests of hungry, bored young people (particularly unemployed young men) who have nothing to lose.

Fundamentally, this isn’t your grandparents’ recession. There is a structural change going on here, and 1920s solutions won’t cut it. The cloud of political rhetoric around tax breaks and spending cuts is mostly a distraction. The economy is shifting beneath our feet. The signs are there for anyone to see if they’d simply look.

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Calculating the attention tax

June 19, 2011 – 9:09 pm

How much is a minute of your time worth? If you’re a consultant, you probably have a good idea. If not, you may have never considered the question.

It’s not an easy question to answer. After all, it depends on who’s valuing the time. Each of us will tend to value our own time more than others, since we can’t use other people’s time to extend our lives. Until, of course, we find ourselves in a situation where someone else’s time can save us time, in which case their time becomes valuable in relation to our own. Or perhaps, in the case of a doctor, their time can extend our lives and our time, and therefore a minute of their time could be literally worth years of ours, and we’re willing to pay accordingly.

This isn’t mere angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin musing. In our information-based society, and despite coming out of a recession, our time and attention are becoming increasingly more scarce and valuable than money. After all, even those who unfortunately find themselves unemployed must wade through reams of information online to find the best, most trusted source of recommendations in order to take action and improve their financial situation. In an information-based society, knowledge precedes action. And with the pace at which that knowledge grows, and the increasing ease with which people can publish, filtering that knowledge becomes harder and harder.

All of which leads me to the concept of an attention tax. Just as we now all look at our sales receipts and income statements to gauge the extent of our financial taxation, and use strategies like registered savings plans to reduce our tax burden, so too must we start as a society paying attention to taxes on our attention. How many aspects of our societies are non-optimized for attention, even if they’re optimized for monetary value? In the private sector, for example, telemarketing may raise GDP by employing lots of people, but it decreases our GDA (“Gross Domestic Attention”) by distracting us. And cutting taxes won’t feel so good if it results in a reduced bureaucracy that increases the amount of time and attention we must spend on even the smallest task, having few experts available to help us.

So, now that financial tax season is largely behind us, maybe we can all take a bit of time to think about our attention, and what it’s worth. And for things that are distracting us, maybe we need to find some good tax strategies to minimize unnecessary expenditures.

Image credit: Dave Dugdale,  learningdslrvideo.com

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Digital marketing is an ecosystem, not a pet store

June 3, 2011 – 4:45 pm

Cross-posted from the RightSpot Media blog. You can also read it there: Digital marketing is an ecosystem, not a pet store.

Over the past decade, digital marketing has changed a lot. But one thing has stayed fairly consistent: the extent to which people obsess over tactics at the expense of strategy. More specifically: the extent to which people obsess over the latest hot tactic—search, social, email, local, mobile, whatever—and seek related gurus to show them the way.

It’s hard to change people’s orientation to think strategically, to define a plan with measurable objectives, then implement tactics and analyze the results. To help, I’ve been increasingly referring to a more holistic approach to digital marketing as a “digital ecosystem.” I think the analogy is fit. Here’s why.

In an ecosystem, nothing survives and thrives in isolation. Lions can only be king if they can eat smaller mammals that in turn eat vegetation. And that’s a gross oversimplification, as ecological networks are extremely complex (lions, after all, can also be eaten by vultures when they die).

Digital marketing is similarly complex. Search marketing may drive customers to a landing page where they complete an order. But if those customers have been exposed to a display ad in a premium environment, they will be far more likely to convert, thereby driving down your cost of acquisition. And if your website has a high search ranking, because you filled it with great content, your quality score will be higher, and therefore your cost per click (and, again, cost per acquisition) will be lower still.

I could go on, but I think you get the point: too many people pick a pet tactic and obsess over it. But digital marketing isn’t about having lots of pets in cages. It’s about cultivating an ecosystem of tactics united by a common strategy that delivers measurable results.


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