Replies: 3 comments
You profit from attention by selling it.
You can sell your own attention, or you can direct the attention of those paying attention to you, to someone willing to pay you for directing others attention to them.
However, if attention was a currency in itself, it would not need to be turned into monetary profits.
If someone had enough attention they could get anything they wanted in exchange for devoting some of their own attention, or in exchange for directing the attention they have from others to someone willing to give them things in exchange for it.
Both of the above two scenarios happen all the time, and most of us are on one side or other of the attention equation daily. (You rub my back and I'll rub yours).
Personally, I doubt that attention will turn into a business currency any time soon, because it is too hard to manage. If someone could figure out how to 'keep the books' of attention, with proper accounting and auditing etc., it might become useful to think of it as a business currency, but the very concept of this is so complex that it lies years and years ahead in the future. --For most people it is hard enough to manage your own attention at a profit let alone trying to do it three steps from the pulse on the behalf of a company you joined three months ago and will be living in six. Still, some companies will manage, to a limited degree, but just like people, these attention beacons will be few and far between.
Lyle
Posted by Lyle B. Højbjerg-Clarke @ 09/19/2001 12:05 PM EST
This "attention" thing looks like the next marketing hot-word for "brand exposure", just as "globalization" and "localization" are hot-words for the ethnography aspects of usability engineering.
Alan - thanks to HTML emails, there's an easy way of telling whether or not your emails have been open (read, if you wanna stretch the assumption). Simply place an image in the email (company logo, whatever) located on a server. When the email is opened, the image is called from the server. Using standard access logs, you can tell how many times an email has been opened. I know, it's not very accurate, but it's a start :).
Posted by Francis @ 09/19/2001 09:25 AM EST
I'm not sure how they made the leap from attention to profit either. There's an obvious link from attention (as defined by them) to corporate efficiency, which perhaps leads indirectly to profits, but...
On the subject of 'are people reading your emails', I was reminded of one of Jakob Neilsen's old articles, which I found useful - http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980906.html
Posted by Alan @ 09/19/2001 07:17 AM EST