Tag: interest

  • Information & Interfaces

    I’m still stuck on the narrative of consumption – both on the intent and interest front, as I wrote in Intent, Interest & Internet Dominance, as well as on the interfaces through which it will happen, something I started writing on in Consumer- facing AI : Phase One.

    In this era of abundant choice, a device I use when fighting battles with myself on personal consumption is the can-want-need framework. ‘Can’ is made increasingly easier now because of convenience, ‘want’ by the choices around, and sticking to ‘need’ is a very difficult task! I read a really good post which has mirrored this in the (consumer) technology space – “How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds…“. (more…)

  • Intent, Interest & Internet dominance

    Facebook’s new move to dominate advertising by expanding its audience network to non users got me thinking about its interest based approach, and in contrast Google’s intent based approach. While both approaches have their place in the scheme of consumption, it reminded me something I posted a while back on a completely different context – choices.

    We live in an era of (relative) abundance and are spoilt for choices. Consequently (to generalise) it has become more difficult than ever to stick to conscious choices. Increasingly we consume more because we can (largely influenced by our social network) than because we need. I see this as a parallel to interest & intent. I also think that the more data Facebook collects across its properties about users (and non users) the closer it will get to making intent an even lesser part of our consumption than it is now.  (more…)

  • Attention everyone

    It was a strange coincidence that I watched the 62 Super Bowl ads back-to-back, (thanks to this aggregation effort by Mashable) on the same day that I read this very insightful post by Steve Rubel on “Attentionomics“. The slideshow is also embedded below. In addition to the key takeaways – the lifespan of content created on popular networks, it also suggests ways to overcome this.

    Attentionomics Captivating Attention in the Age of Content Decay

    The interesting thing was that I would have watched the Super Bowl ads without any prompting. Which makes me wonder whether the logical and scientific way proposed above to ‘game’ the attention economy is the best approach. I think my discomfort stems from the fact that this leans more towards the ‘media’ in social media and looks at the social platforms from an information dissemination perspective.

    My consumption of the ads was more out of interest. The term ‘Intention Economy‘ springs to mind immediately in this context.

    The intention economy is an approach to viewing markets and economies focusing on buyers as a scarce commodity. The consumers’ intent to buy drives the production of goods to meet their specific needs.

    The thought is whether/how this can be applied to consumption of content. If it can, then the approach would be to make the content as easy to find and accessible as possible, to ‘appear’ at the time of demand, and create different contexts to drive that consumption.

    There is another perspective too. The easiest way to  elucidate it would be with the example of Google Reader/ Twitter Lists, where I pay attention to certain content creators, because I trust and value the content they produce. As Edelman’s Trust Barometer would tell you, the ‘trust in experts’ has actually increased this year. Their appeal does not really depend on the attention metrics.

    Can’t think of any other ‘angles’, but if you do, please drop me a line, or comment.

    So perhaps like the owned-paid-earned forms of content, brands will have to work on all 3 fronts. Harness expert power (employees and others), seed efficiently, create and use contexts effectively, and be easily accessible (like the brand-stream I proposed last week)

    until next time, at ease now 🙂

    PS: New research on why consumers ‘break up’ with brands on email, FB, Twitter, could be taken as a pointer to look at   alternatives to information dissemination.

  • Food notes

    For the last few weeks, I’ve been hooked on to MasterChef Australia. (the show’s site reveals the winner, this is the wiki entry) For those unfamiliar with it, its a cooking competition-show that airs on Star World.

    I’ve always liked the idea of food – more the consumption than the creation, of course, as you probably know. While I’ve begun to appreciate nuances these days, instead of focusing on solely gobbling up the food, cooking is still far away. My most famous exploit (and that’s only reheating) thus far has been the aluminum-foil-packed-food-inside-the-pressure-cooker-incident. I have a restraining order from D – I am not allowed to handle steel vessels and the microwave, when they exist in close proximity. D, as you probably know, has to show a lot of restraint anyway.

    But we digress. The show has interested me even beyond the awesome cooking that happens on it daily. I’ve never really been a fan of the music and dance reality shows, and after I began watching this show, I wondered about it.

    I enjoy music, but have always flipped, channels that is, when i watched those shows. Maybe its the one-upmanship games of the judges, or the showboating, or the SMS driven degradation of a god given gift, but they have never worked for me, though i have noticed some supremely talented performers.

    There is a passion in the cooking contestants, all of them – maybe they’ve managed to capture it well – a will to win, and they work hard for it. We can see the efforts, and the judges’ appreciation and backing – a sense of fairness. Perhaps I haven’t watched enough of the song and dance shows to notice any of this.

    Though both require honing, music (vocal) is perhaps a talent and cooking, a skill, to which creativity adds layers. So the latter, I thought, would require more of an interest, and more hard work. Does that mean the passion for it would be more than that for a talent, which might be ignored, because it has been given without asking. I guess either would be okay, if you had the passion and perseverance  to get it to its logical conclusion. Interest without talent, and talent without interest, both are sad states to be in.

    until next time, fortune cookie 🙂