Hagel, Goldhaber, and Attention
John Hagel has a blog. You should read it - John is an old-school e-commerce strategy guru. His thinking has informed a lot of my arguments.
He has a great post about Media 2.0, citing
my presentations, relating them to Goldhaber's Attention Economy.
I read Goldhaber a while back - and while I agree with the premise somewhat, and, like John says, I guess it's kind of unconsciously informed my notion of a coming era of attention scarcity, the thing that turned me off about the book was the latter two-thirds.
Goldhaber's strategic advice, I thought, was kind of mystifying - IIRC, he said everything has to become a 'performance' with everyone as an 'actor'.
I think this is exactly the
wrong thing to do, because in a networked economy, where consumption externalities reveals consumers' satsifaction with the goods they've chosen, to put it bluntly, bs walks.
Investing in quality is a dominant strategy, and investing in 'performance' - ie marketing - gets easily dominated, because viral and network effects are superior economic forces to marketing scale/scope economies.
Uh oh. Looks like I've managed to offend one of my intellectual heroes.
Not old-school as in...uhh...obsolete - old-school as in you've been thinking hard about this stuff since it began to happen, and I only started relatively recently (so you're somebody I pay attention to).
Old-school as in Grandmaster Flash, not as in Vanilla Ice (to use a terrible analogy).
Either way, apologies.