The Attention Economy and Klout

April 20, 2011 at 9:49 am · Filed under Adoption, Business 2.0, Business Intelligence, Business Model, Innovation, Innovator Interviews, Measurement, Media, Paradigm, Relationships, Science, Social Media, Trust, Trusted Space

In the old economy that still lingers you could buy “Attention”. A large advertising budget could force you into the minds of others. But we are becoming numb to this assault. Increasingly we only trust people that we know. “Attention” is shifting from the Institution with the budget to the “Person” with personal reputation or “Clout”.

This transition from the Institution to the Personal is surely one of the most paradigm shifting aspects of the time we live in?

Here is the “Godfather” of the idea of the Attention Economy – Michael Goldhaber back in 1997 explaining this shift from Attention that you could buy to Attention that you could only Earn!

“.. money now flows along with attention, or, to put this in more general terms, when there is a transition between economies, the old kind of wealth easily flows to the holders of the new. Thus, when the market-based, proto-industrial economy first began to replace the feudal system of Western Europe, in which the prime form of wealth was aristocratic lineage and inheritance of land, both the noble titles and the lands that went with them soon ended up disproportionately in the hands of those who were good at obtaining what was then the new kind of wealth, namely money.

With considerable ease, the rising merchant and industrialist class could buy old titles, induce governments to grant them brand new ones, or marry into the old impoverished gentry. The parallel today, again, is that possessors of today’s rising kind of wealth, which is attention, and whom we label stars of every sort, have an easy time getting money.

But now let me point out that the other way round doesn’t work nearly as easily. Contrary to what you are sometimes urged to believe, money cannot reliably buy attention. Suppose it did work that way. Then you could have been paid to sit here and listen closely even if I were to read you something as boring as the phone book or an unabridged dictionary. Presumably it wouldn’t even matter if I kept repeating the same few syllables over and over. If money could reliably buy attention, all I would have to do is pay you the required amount and you would keep listening carefully through all that, not falling asleep en masse, nor allowing your minds to wander. In truth, even if you had been paid a huge sum, this would be most difficult, and if you did it, it would be a testament more to your own deep sense of principle than to a general condition in which another roomful of similar people could be expected to do equally well.

Someone who wants your attention just can’t rely on paying you money to get it, but has to do more, has to be interesting, that is must offer you illusory attention, in just about the same amounts as they would if you had instead been paying money to listen to them — which by the way is closer to the case here. Money flows to attention, and much less well does attention flow to money.”

Attention that people will trust – about an idea, a product, a service, a politician, will come from “Trusted” people in your life and in your network.

Defining and measuring Personal Clout will therefore be very important in the future.

That is why I wanted to speak to the CEO of Klout, Joe Fernandez who very kindly spent time with me on the phone yesterday talking about “Attention” what it is now – how it builds from Robin Dunbar’s research. We also touched on how today’s kids may be having their brains rewired to be able to use a much larger network than was possible face to face.

Here are some of the ideas that we batted around:

• It’s all about how you are as a person - Many newbies still think of Social Media as a big megaphone – they still shout out to the crowd – “look at me” aren’t I great!!!!” – But they most important aspect of the new world is what “Others say about you” and who those others are and how large your and their network is. To get their attention demands that you have something good to say and that you have also won their trust. This then is not easy environment. There can be no instant success.
• It’s all about how you are related in network terms – This is why Klout have set up their algorithms to measure True Reach or the value of your content -  Amplification Probability or how we you are related to the people in your network – how large and diverse is your network – do they find you interesting, safe, or a bore  - and Network Influence or do you influence people with influence. This makes a lot of sense to me. I think that Klout is trying to get a handle on the playing field. I also liked it that Joe kept reminding me that they are at the start of a voyage of discovery. That they may be ahead of others but know that there is so much to discover.
• The online world is likely larger than the personal world - Klout will fond out how much larger. The Dunbar numbers still operate in the personal world and for adults my age I think. But Joe made a case based on observation that he is seeing online Trusted Networks maxing out at about 500 (144 is the max Dunbar number) His own floats between 150 – 350 but he still relies on about 150. The really interesting point he made is that he is seeing a new world emerge with kids.
• Kids have a new social reality – they never lose a friend! – When I was a boy, we moved a lot. So at every move to a new place, a new school etc, I lost touch with 98% of the then friends. Over time they faded from memory. But now, a kid moves or changes school and stays in touch with most of  her friends. Even now as an adult, I am regaining touch with old friends long lost. Joe and I thought that decades of staying connected must have an effect on the wiring of the brain. After all print had that effect by making the left hand side more powerful. The brain is very plastic and can change very quickly as we see with say stroke victims. It is very likely that a child of 5 today who is a keen user of social media, will have a very different brain than I do when they are 25.

This new world is literally unfolding before us. Joe thinks that Klout now is about where Google was in 1997 – the key algorithms are in their infancy but are already able to tell us interesting things. Much more will be possible over time – especially when there is more data to observe.

But 2 things are clear to me – understanding how Clout works is core to the new economy. And that measuring Clout as Klout is doing is going to be very important.

Your reputation is your capital. You and not the institution will have the power.

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Social Media and Crises like Japan – Is the web a private or a public matter?

March 12, 2011 at 3:11 pm · Filed under Barriers, Business Model, Media, Skype, Social Media

I was at a Media conference last week. A Journalism Prof dissed Twitter all night long. How could anyone cover a story in 140 characters? In the last 2 months in Canada we have had a regulatory fight – in essence the web is being seen as another entertainment channel where the most important part of the equation is how much we should all pay for watching movies.

I think that this idea – that the social web is trivial and just about fun is wrong and dangerous. I think that its true importance has to be put on the table politically.

Japan nails this issue for me.

Once again, as a huge story breaks, many of us have found that Social Media has given us a better sense of the event than the traditional news POV.

Big news just cannot get at the scope of such an event or touch its immediacy.

Some like the BBC and Al Jazeera are finding a good way of covering such a story – which is to act as an aggregator. They make it easy – you got their their site – I use Livestation as a portal.

Some like NPR are finding out that their one man news platform – Andy Carvin – who is personally aggregating offers a good view as well. Andy and his readers tend to use Tweetdeck

So what are the lessons for the rest of us?

1. If you are in media – curating and aggregating is the way that breaking news will be covered. So what does that imply? It implies a new model for news. At the centre aggregation and then context setting. For you no longer have to do a 90 second view of an event. You can cover the event 24/7 as see what pattern emerges – while you do this – as the pattern becomes visible – you add context. We can start to get out of the sound bite perspective. This will also cost you a lot less to do and improve your coverage. This works on all scales. If you were my local paper or my local CBC station on tiny PEI – population 140,000 – you could offer a massive range of stories – from ALL the sport every game on the Island – to a breaking weather event this way. Maybe for less money than the current system that can only cover 20 stories a day. The same is true for world news as we are finding out now. News will get better and better the more we go down this road. We will all be more informed and we will indeed all become part of the story. I was riveted by a Skype interview from the BBC in London with a woman stuck in her apartment in Tokyo – what was going on was represented in the most human and direct way. I was there. Old news is trivial when compared with this!
2. If you are in the crisis business – In spite of all the mess in Japan now – imagine how much harder the rescue efforts would be without social media? With good aggregation and intelligent filters it will be possible to get a handle on what is going on in a much better way. Again this works at all scales. Back to my little place PEI. We have been having very bad weather and road conditions recently. The mainstream media are starting to do a good job at aggregating the reports of the citizens. The result is that we all know so much more and in real time. We will all get through bad times better. I bet that in the years to come much of the story will be about how social media saved many lives.
3. If you are in a crisis - Imagine being in a badly hit place in Japan and not having a working cell phone versus having one – Could be life and death for you. Imagine if you are at your office in Tokyo and your family are on the coast. How are you going to find out if they are OK? I recall in the early days of Social Media looking for my lost daughter among the pictures of the dead in Thailand – she was OK thank God! so look ahead and think about how your access to the web is governed now. Will many people be excluded because they cannot afford to pay? Will the system be too vulnerable to survive a big problem? Is the system only about the needs of the IP’s or is there a larger context here?
4. If you have a service or a product to sell - How can you not use this avenue for listening and responding. Gone are the days where you could wait for formal research. Gone are the days when you asked the questions. Now you listen and you see the patterns. Tools like Darwin help a lot here. Will you be held hostage too by the IPs? Will the IP’s be able to levy any kind of tax they want on your business? Can they exclude you?

The biggest lesson then for me is that the web and social media are not just toys where I watch movies, hear songs or play games. The web and social media is now the most important part of any society’s social infrastructure.

This implies that it cannot be regulated as merely another entertainment channel. It has profound public value that has to be put first.

Societies that have a healthy and widely used and easily accessed web and social media system – will be better informed and more resilient in the shocks that are inevitable in our future.

The private interests of all have to be subsumed to the public good.

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E2.0: Looking for Goldilocks

November 16, 2010 at 12:36 pm · Filed under Adoption, Barriers, Business 2.0, Business Model, Enterprise 2.0

There are any variety of descriptions and debates about what E2.0 is and isn’t. One of the challenges is that the answer is contextual for each circumstance: there isn’t a ‘right’ answer. But there is a ‘just right’ answer, borrowing a line from Goldilocks.

The potential for E2.0 is to help right the many wrongs that employees face each day, just trying to get their work done. It’s a matter of ‘fit’ — in too many cases, what they’re given to work with doesn’t ‘fit’ the circumstances. It has less to do with usable, than useful, and would preferably be the right fit: just right.

Let’s start with a classic: desktop software. How well does the classic desktop software meet the ‘just right’ needs of employees for the preponderance of daily activities? How much cognitive overload has not been designed out of these tools and related corporate processes?

How do we simplify for ‘just right’? We learn to design business fractals. Fractals are the means by which simple scales, the means by which to avoid too much and yet achieve endless possibilities: orderly chaos = complexity…vs. the complicated littering the halls today, which is simply a collection of stuff with no relevant underlying order (the operative word here is “relevant”).

Here’s where we transition from fairytale to reality. For Goldilocks’ scenario, in each case she was given a choice of three options and from those options she chose the one that ‘fit’ best. The problem is that those choices were pre-staged. There’s a cost to providing pre-staged choices. Because we’re not living in a fairytale, there is no way to pre-design for all the possible scenarios that would determine what would be ‘just right’.

I misspoke earlier. We don’t really want to design business fractals, we want to design ‘for’ business fractals — we want to provide an infrastructure for the fractals to emerge on their own. How do we do that? With structure…’just right’ structure — not too much, not too little.

We provide the means for stuff to happen, but don’t assume that it will happen. It requires active vigilance.

What form does such structure take? Micro-structure, just like the fractals. What does micro-structure look like? Ask any Marine who knows how to apply the Rule of Three. The beauty of the rule is its flexibility.

There is no set size (number of troops) assigned to any specific element. The size of an element of command depends primarily upon the type of unit and mission. For example, an aviation squadron would have a different number of troops assigned than an infantry company because it has a different mission, different equipment, and therefore different requirements.

While the reference used is “rule”, in reality, I prefer to consider it an axiom — something that can be applied in any variety of conditions and isn’t subject to a specific context to remain true.

The word “axiom” comes from the Greek word ἀξίωμα (axioma), a verbal noun from the verb ἀξιόειν (axioein), meaning “to deem worthy”, but also “to require”, which in turn comes from ἄξιος (axios), meaning “being in balance”, and hence “having (the same) value (as)”, “worthy”, “proper”.

Test that concept in any business setting. Most things in a business called “rules” are only relevant in particular contexts. Change the context: the rule breaks, just like baby bear’s chair — even though it was originally ‘just right’. Look for rules that need breaking or often have to be broken to get stuff done. Study it long enough to find the core truth that needs preserving and claim the underlying axiom. Find ways to make it observable, evident. As Eric Berlow suggests in his July 2010 TED talk, “Hone in on the sphere of influence that matters most.”

In reality, all businesses have a natural order. The problem is that we’ve been deluded into believing that we need to ‘create’ order. We need to embrace the natural order that is inherent — but to do that we have to find it first. We have to adopt eyes that can ’see’ it (like 3D stereograms).

Let Goldilocks be your guide for providing ‘just right’.

Postscript: A grand thanks to @hypergogue for providing much of the sample fodder that uniquely illustrate concepts that have been ruminating for some time — allowing me to get out yet another ‘blog post stuck in my head’.

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Summer’s Over – Going back to email hell – Or Not?

August 25, 2010 at 12:22 pm · Filed under 2.0 Business Model, Adoption, Barriers, Business Model, Collaboration, Community, Connected Enterprise, Control, Culture, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Enterprise Software, Freedom, Information Management, Interviews, Media, Organizational Design, Relationships, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Socialprise, User Revolution, Workplace

Email usage has dropped 28% in the last 12 months! (Matt Forcey)

A recent study by Nielsen that focused on how Americans spend their time online, unexpectedly found that email usage has dropped by 28% over the last year.  Since we’re certainly not communicating any less, what are people doing as an alternative?  Not surprisingly, the data show that social networking use increased by 43% over the same time period.  A separate analysis determined that Mobile Internet use has also increased dramatically.

When I used to have a real job, one of the things I hated about being on vacation was the dread of what woud face me in my email inbox. As it became easier to access email remotely, I began to check in every day just to keep the load and the surprises down. Today when accessing email remotely is commonplace nearly all my pals in the conventional workplace tell me that they do the same. (The full report is here)

The young, under 30, hardly use it at all – they don’t even use the phone.

But what about the rest of us who still work for and with organizations that make email the centre of the communications system? Can you push back and get more productive? Here are two well known people who have confronted this question and have won the battle.

My old pal Luis Suarez at IBM is best known for his war against email and the misuse of it that crushes productivity.

I have been consistently getting less and less email by the week, and, even more exciting, way below the 20 emails per week mark!, which surely is making a good progress from when I started 2.5 years ago. Remember, at the beginning, before starting this experiment, I used to receive 30 to 40 emails per day! And now, 2.5 years later, it’s just 17 emails per week! Yes, indeed, you are reading it right! I’m now averaging 17 emails received per week, while the majority of my online interactions are now happening through social software tools.

So, to me, it is not just a drop of 28% in the past 12 months, but way over 90% of the email I used to get! And, not sure what you would think, but that’s *huge!* Yes! Being able to state how email is no longer the only game in town for me, quite the opposite!, actually, is a good thing. It proves it can be done! It proves I am not the only one who can make it happen. And this is when it gets really exciting! When you see other folks increasingly paying more and more attention as to how they interact with their email Inboxes and how they effectively start looking for ways of reducing such email clutter.

Very exciting, indeed! Even more when you notice it’s folks around you who are starting to ask you how you can help them eliminate most of their incoming emails and instead progress towards a much more receptive adoption of social software tools for business. That’s why I’m pretty jazzed up about seeing a whole bunch of fellow co-workers who are continuing to make efforts to reduce their email workload. To the point where entire teams are figuring out strategies to make it work for them and over the last couple of weeks I have been working with a couple of them where there is plenty of promise ahead! Yay!

But it gets better! Because over the last few weeks as well I’m starting to notice how even customers want to figure out ways on how they themselves can get rid of, or reduce substantially, their incoming email. And they seem to keep finding me out there as they search how it can be done (Double yay for #lawwe), which is really good news, because I have been invited a couple of times already to go and present to them how they themselves could live “A World Without Email“.

Why and how did Luis do this? Here is a link to an excellent interview with Luis conducted by the Doyenne of the Social Media world in Canada, Nora Young at Spark (CBC Radio). The interview was almost exactly a year ago and as with this post was timed to appear as we all struggled back to work and a full email inbox.

Luis’ main issue with email is that it makes it too easy for someone else not to care or know if you are busy and to impose work upon you or to engage you in their politics at no real cost to themselves. For instance – if I was to send you a large document as an attachment – there are many steps that you must take to read it – and then it all gets even worse if you wish my comments etc. Far easier to share a document. For instance, how many times have you got a “Cover my ass” CC or BCC? When what was really needed was a real debate? How many tomes have you been really busy and have a colleague impose a deadline on their stuff on you? This is the kind of behavior that Luis objects to.

Or what about all those newsletters that you don’t have time to read? Or those missives from on high from senior management that tell you how great they are or how we all have to ull up our socks?

Luis is not the only person pushing back. Jason Fried CEO of 37 Signals has an impassioned plea about how the workplace itself crushes productivity.

Yeah, my feeling is that the modern workplace is structured completely wrong. It’s really optimized for interruptions. And interruptions are the enemy of work. They are the enemy of productivity, they are the enemy of creativity, they are the enemy of everything. But that’s what the modern workplace is all about, it’s interruptions. Everyone’s calling meetings all the time, everyone’s screaming people’s names across the thing, there’s phones ringing all the time. People are walking around. It’s all about interruptions. And people go to work today, and then they end up doing most of their real work after work, or on the weekends. So, people are working longer hours, people are tired – I’m working 50-60 hours this week. It’s not that there’s 50 or 60 hours worth of work to do, it’s because you don’t work at work anymore. You go to work to get interrupted.

What happens is, is that you show up at work and you sit down and you don’t just immediately begin working, like you have to roll into work. You have to sort of get into a zone, just like you don’t just go to sleep, like you lay down and you go to sleep. You go to work too. But then you know, 45 minutes in, there’s a meeting. And so, now you don’t have a work day anymore, you have like this work moment that was only 45 minutes. And it’s not really 45 minutes, it’s more like 20 minutes, because it takes some time to get into it and then you’ve got to get out of it and you’ve got to go to a meeting.

Then when the meeting’s over, you’re probably pissed off anyway because it was a waste of time and then the meeting’s over and you don’t just go right back to work again, you got to kind of slowly get back into work. And then there’s a conference call, and then someone calls your name, “Hey, come a check this out. Come over here.” And like before you know it, it’s 4:00 and you’ve got nothing done today. And this is what’s happening all over corporate America right now. Everybody I know, I don’t care what business they’re in. Like when I talk to them about this, it’s like “Yeah, that’s my life.” Like, that is my life, and it’s wrong.

And so I think that has to change. If people want to get things done, they’ve got to get rid of interruptions.

Email is just part of this uncritical work culture that forces many to do their work after hours at home!

So what do Luis and Jason offer up as an alternative?

Luis still thinks that email has a place – in calendar management and in private one on one matters such as salary etc. But he has found that he can push back and negotiate a better way for nearly every category of work. Want me to work on your document – then share it with me! Have an issue to solve – open a conversation in public! Want to avoid being put upon by others – work in public so that people can see when you are busy – so if you use shared documents – people can see you are editing or drafting.

The whole point is to learn how to protect your time.

Jason has  the same advice.

So, this isn’t really a plug, but we use our product called Campfire, which is a real time chat tool. That is our office. Campfire is our office, and that’s a web based chat tool where there’s a persistent chat room open all the time. Anyone who has a question for anyone else in the company posts it there and in real time, everyone else can see it if they’re looking at it. But if they’re busy, they just don’t pay attention. And then if non one responds, then that means someone is busy. Not like, I’m going to keep calling their name until they turn around. That’s what it’s like in most offices. Or you ring someone and they’re not there and so you call their name, and they’re not there, so you go to their office and you bang on their door. If someone doesn’t respond in Campfire, it means they’re busy. And unless it’s a true emergency, where you really need an answer right now, then you just let them be and they’ll get back to you in three hours. And the truth of the matter is, there are almost no true emergencies in business. Everything can wait a few hours. Everything can wait a day. It’s not a big deal if you get back to me later in the day for me to know right now.

And the other thing about interruptions and calling people’s names, and ringing them on the phone and stuff, it’s actually really an arrogant sort of move because you’re saying that whatever I have to ask you is more important than what you’re doing. Because I’m going to stop you from doing what you are doing for me to ask you this questions that probably doesn’t matter anyway. So, we’re very cognizant of this, and we make sure that we only ping people, that’s what we call it, digitally and in ways that will not really get in their way if they’re really busy.

He uses his own tool but of course there are many tools that we can use – the tool is not the key it is the idea of working in public that is.

How do you get others to play? Well if you are Jason – it’s easy you are the CEO! But Luis is not the CEO. He publicly told the world that this was his intent. He pushes back and negotiated with his own team and colleagues – and the value of this spread out.

Here is a mind map from Luis that shows you his process and his results

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2.0 Another View – A way to deal with the biggest threats to your enterprise

September 16, 2009 at 12:35 pm · Filed under 2.0 Business Model, 2.0 Design Thinking, Bryant Park Project, Business Model, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, NPR, PBS, Platforms, Public Media, Public Radio, Public TV, Relationships

I was talking yesterday to a CIO of a major financial services firm. He and his colleagues have been wracking their brains over how a 2.0 view would make a difference. Of course a lot of their discussion revolved around technology and the social aspects both in the organization and outside it.

I bet that many organizations are also having the same internal conversations and being as frustrated as he is.

Looking at where the death threats are is a more productive area of discussion.

For public media Death lurks here – We have to have a much wider based and much larger public that thinks that we are not merely important but VITAL to them. If we don’t we wont make it.

“Wider based” means that we have to break out of our current demographic – of on TV being over 50, mainly white middle class and well educated – on radio of being over 40 and the same.

The challenge of doing this has been the restrictions of our “Air”. We have only 24 hours and one place on the dial.

So to change programming enough to bring in a very different demographic is to piss off the existing foundation with no real chance of adding the new. Example, the CBC have quite good show on the Native Canadian world – my bet is that most of the traditional audience switch off immediately and that First Nation’s people are not going to be tempted to become enthusiastic listeners of the CBC based on one program. This type of programming is lose lose. For NPR it was a new hip morning show called Bryant Park. What station in its right mind will drop Morning Edition for a new entrant aimed away from its main audience?

So long as Public Radio and TV have a secure foundation on their Air – they cannot expand their audience.

Also loyalty and more important financial and voting support merely based on liking content is no longer enough. When I came to Canada in 1972, I was used to the BBC and became a fanatic PBS watcher. There was no other source of good content then. Now there is tons of great content elsewhere. The old tie to content is much weaker.

So how then can Public Media avoid DEATH? How can it expand its reach to a much wider and diverse public? How can it deepen the connection beyond the relatively weak one of content?

An answer is appearing in the work of 70 plus stations working in the 32 worst hit markets in the US where the Economy is destroying the middle and lower classes. In this project – called Facing the Mortgage Crisis – stations are working with each other to pull together/convene groups of community support into a platform that can help people cope with this the greatest crisis to hit most Americans since the 30’s.

This is where the DEATH threat can be answered and this is where Social Media and the whole 2.0 perspective is invaluable.

Here stations are helping people who do not and will NEVER watch our mainstream Air. BUT they do interact with our specialty Web Sites that are focused on this issue and hence on them. More we do a lot face to face. Sometime at the station and many times in libraries and other places of trust such as churches. More, we give the community partners a face and a voice too.

It is the 2.0 web that is at the heart of this ability to offer something meaningful to people who will not connect to our traditional content on our traditional air. Ironically, as the crisis affects all, many of the white middle class are now in the same boat. They too use our 2.0 world as a new resource. In time a common crisis, as in war, brings all together. All people share a common fear and grief. All wonder what to do and how to keep going? All worry about their kids.

I predict that something great can emerge from our web – but it is not about getting more people to watch Nova or listen to All Things Considered.

So what then was my CIO’s Death fear?

I offered up this to chew on. They are in the mutual fund business. Their funds are sold by brokers who do not work for them.

Trust in Brokers, in the market and even in the idea of getting rich by punting in the markets has been weakened. Fund managers still tout their ability to realize performance that can only be achieved by taking huge risk.

What would happen to their business if we had a 1933? After the crash in 1929, the market recovered as it is today. But like today, the market came back independent of how people lived and how the economy at the human level existed. It was a second bubble. The market crashed again and the great depression hit full force. Employment did no rebound until 1941. Stock prices and activity in the market did not return until 1954.

What if we have another 1933 in 2010? Would such a collapse end all faith in the current financial system? What is the risk of that happening – 10% – 30 % – 50% – 60%  – whatever the risk is substantive and worth planning for.

My idea of his DEATH threat was that if they did not do something to show that they could be trusted, that if we had a 1933, they would disappear as did most people like them in 1933.

So how could they become legitimately trusted? How could they hold onto to a public that had lost trust in the system? My advice was this.

Most people are fiscally illiterate. Most know nothing about household economics in the Greek sense of the basics of the human financial life cycle. People know nothing about how to save and why, borrowing, cash flow, how mortgages work, compound interest. Most know nothing about the value of and how risk works. Why you can take risks early but not late in life etc. If they did most would not be in the trouble that they are in now. Most think that it is normal and to be expected that they can get Maddof returns year after year not seeing that such returns imply impossible risk.

The entire fund business is like the food business – we have been trained to seek something that is not sustainable – double digit returns for ever and cheap food forever. Can we train people to be more real? I think not but people can train each other.

Most people now are waking up to the fact that they don’t know enough about money and how it affects their life. They are hungry to learn more. To take control over their financial lives, just as many today are using the web to take control over their health.

What if this firm was to set up a foundation to act as the Trusted Place on the web where people could teach each other all these things?

Here is where all the rules of 2.0 would come into play. The web, interactivity, social groups, partners – the whole gamut of 2.0 is here. By learning how to do this here, the old firm will also then see with new eyes what else they can do back in the mainstream.

I asked in closing what would this mean in terms of the brand and the industry if they were to do this? What if they did a really authentic job of providing the trusted space where people could help each other take back their financial power?

He could see in a heart beat that this would change the relationship – just as I am seeing signs that FTMC is changing the relationship with Public radio and TV.  At first the two worlds of the “Academy” and their traditional business would be separate. But over time there would be some kind of convergence. For who of us knows as much as we should and who of us does not have something to offer?

In time the very nature of the business would change too as will in the end mainstream TV and Radio – but this way the change would be shaped by the active participation of millions of people formerly known and “audience” or “Clients” who right now don’t even have a name.

For what is the label for a person who is part of the ecology that is the new wider enterprise?

So what do you think? Can you radically change your foundation offering without killing the golden goose? Think GM or the Newspapers – all their cash flow came from the old – but DEATH was waiting for sure. How could they have found another part of life where they could have added real value and so attached a much bigger group of people to them?

I am sure that there is an answer. Do you have one?

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