Hugh McLeod is a genius. After an exchange with Doc Searls that I disagreed with, Hugh shares a seemingly disconnected thought that is so spot on the whole message thing, it’s scary.

What is an Object of Sociability [OoS, or “Ooze” for short]? “Ooze” is simply something that allows you to engage with another person. It could be anything. It could a party. It could be a bottle of wine. It could be a hyperlink. It could be a social gesture. It could be social currency. It could be doodling a cartoon on the back of a business card at a bar and giving it to the cute barmaid. You tell me….

Funny, but this ties in to a conversation I had with Juri about two years ago at a London geek dinner. We were talking about the switch in marketing away from “The Message”, towards something that one has no control over i.e. The Ooze.

The metaphor I used at the time was “wave vs particle”. At the subatomic level, things are interchangably waves or particles, depending on what instruments you are using to observe them [somebody far more scientific than me, please correct me if I’m wrong]. It might look like a wave one day, a particle the next.

A traditional marketing “message” acts like a wave. In the future, I believe marketing messages will behave more like particles [that is, if they want to succeed]. A wave stays connected to its source, a particle does not. Once the particle leaves you, it is no longer yours. You no longer control it, anymore than a dandelion spore controls the wind.

An excellent metaphor. The traditional view of a message, as a wave, suggests centralized control and the ability to modulate it at any time. Particle messages, however, live a life of their own. Once released into the wild, the source doesn’t have much more to do, except perchance to spew additional particles in hopes of redirecting attention, correcting, or augmenting prior messages.

You might call this the “bathroom deodorizor” method of message management.

You see, the human nose responds to particles in the air, unlike the eyes and ears which respond to waves. So, when you have the unfortunate experience of smelling something you don’t like, a common response is to spray a deodorizer which overpowers the unpleasant smell with more favorably smelling particles. Ahhh… much better.

Isn’t this a lot like what happens with catastrophically bad PR nightmares? When a company gets into a public crisis, it smells bad, as countless negative message particles flow into the public nostril.

Companies fixated on the wave model have been known to simply put out a press release denying the stink. Think Intel and the 1994 Pentium floating point bug. Treating messages as waves fails to address the real problem, leaving the public to stew in its own smelly frustration. In Intel’s case, they not only let the aroma waft around on its own, they left the source of the bad smell out there on the living room carpet!

More progressive companies acknowledge the problem and engage the world to fix it. They remove the source (when possible) and put out credible response particles on a massive scale, overpowering and ameliorating the stench of the offense. Think about Johnson & Johnson’s response to the  1982 Tylenol Cyanide Poisoning.

The particle view of messages makes sense in our post-mass-media world where communications are dominated by one-to-one exchanges rather than broadcast blasts from centralized sources.

Particles demonstrate four critical aspects of messages:

1. Once a message is in the medium, the source relinquishes control.
2. It doesn’t necessarily matter what causes a message. If its out there, it affects the environment.
3. The only way to mitigate an unwanted message in the environment is to seed new, credible replacement messages with such potency and saturation that it displaces the previous. (Preferably, one does this without offending the environment.)
4. It pays to shape your messages effectively. Make them smell good. Make them believable and understandable. Make them effective tools at helping your organization. Because once they are out there, they are out of your hands.

Number 4 is the real point of my post about the Demand for Messages.

People need messages to discern opportunities, make good choices, and take action. Modern communicators should craft messages that make the most of the particle model and stand on their own, sufficiently clear and valuable so that users understand, appreciate and propagate them.

The particle-virus addendum:

When users spontaneously propagate messages on their own, message-particles act more like viruses, which makes them even more powerful. They still act like particles, just more effective in saturating the environment. It also makes them more outside the control of the originator, just like good Ooze.

Thanks, Hugh.

Have a great New Year’s everyone! See you in 2007.

There’s been a lot said about the new Attention Economy and a lot of interest in generating value from “Attention Data.” The enthusiasm bubbles up from excitement about a new abundance to reach the conclusion that Attention is now the scarce resource that smart people will use to create wealth in our post-mass-media, post-mass-production world.

The problem starts with the excitement about a “general abundance” in our newly digital world which Wired famously referred to as The Long Boom in 1997, but we eventually realized was just the Big Bubble. The problem of the New Attention Economy then expands beyond simply a new “Economics of Abundance” with a hubristic assertion that Attention is the secret ingredient for future success, complete with calls to invent an entire new “Attention Economics.”

Unfortunately, Attention is only limited because time is limited. Its value is ephemeral at best and annoying at worst.

We each have just as much Attention in any given day as we have conscious, waking hours. It’s just a function of time. Simultaneously, Attention, once earned, has fairly lightweight value. It can be earned by a distracting but ineffective advertisement and does not in itself indicate anything other than a first-order stimulus response. Put flaming letters flying across the sky, I’ll probably look up at it and pay Attention for a moment. But that doesn’t mean I’ll do anything in response.

So Attention not only presents nothing unique in terms of scarcity, its value is intrinsically frail. That isn’t an exciting basis for a new economy.

Abe Burmesiter over at Abstract Dynamics has a different take on why there is no new “Attention Economy” (worth reading in its entirety):

Somewhere on the edge of academia circulates the idea that economics is defined as the “study of how human beings allocate scarce resources”. It’s a definition that doesn’t show up in most dictionaries, but it has a stubborn persistence…

It’s a curious distortion to make economics strictly a study of scarcity, and like the textbook chaos theory case it starts out as a rather minor disruption. Scarcity is after all essential to the generation of price and value, and economists hold those processes dear to their hearts. There is of course more to economics than just studying scarcity, but it’s not exactly an alien concept. What’s curious is what happens when non economists start latching onto the distortion, what’s curious is when scarcity meets attention from three different directions.

Michael Goldhaber, Richard Lanham and Georg Franck, all more or less independently converged on a phrase, “the economics of attention” in the past decade or so. At the core of their thought (which varies widely in quality) is the observation that in a time where information is becoming, in Goldhaber’s terms, “superabundant” what is scarce is attention…

The first irony is that if economics was really just to be about the distribution of scarce resources it wouldn’t even be about money. For money is about as far from a scarce resource as there is. It can be printed out by any government and by a skilled counterfeiter too. Or it can be generated by any group or organization with enough clout… Money is anything but scarce. The problem is not there is not enough, but that it circulates with a damaging inequality.

Goldhaber and Lanham though don’t seem really want economics to be about money anyways though. They’d much rather refocus it all around attention. It’s an act of overstatement that probably does them far more harm than good. They get to make exaggerated statements about the need for a new economics, perhaps it makes their observations seem bigger, but it also makes it far easier to ignore them. They might want it all to be about attention, but quality and accuracy still have a bit of value left in them. Someone is going to make a career pulling attention scarcity into the wider economic stream of thought, but it just wont have the extreme ramifications the attention lovers vest into it.

In short, thinking about Attention may be intriguing, but it isn’t going to be the foundation for a new economics. It isn’t going to reinvent how we do business or how we work as a society.

So, despite others’ feverish efforts to the contrary, I’ll go on the record as stating unequivocally, 2007 will not be the year of the Attention Economy. Neither will 2008, 2009 or 2010.

For my money, I’m betting on Intention, VRM, and ComplexSearch.

Doc Searls and Hugh McLeod apparently agree that There is No Demand for Messages.

But that’s not really true. There is huge demand for clarity and understanding. And you only get that through messages.

Doc says:

Let’s face it: there are only two kinds of advertising demanded by their consumers: yellow pages and classifieds. It’s not coincidental that they’re both ugly. Beauty isn’t a value when the only purpose is to answer the simple demand for useful information.

This assumes individuals know what they want. Yet, people often don’t know what they want and the yellow pages and classifieds are often incapable of breaking through that disconnect.

Does anyone remember 1994? Where in the yellow pages did you find a good web design firm? (I know, I had to try to tell the phone company which category our firm belonged.) And if you don’t know about the special promotion this weekend at your favorite store, you may never visit the store, even though you definitely would if only you knew about it.

People want to know about unique opportunities. Consider the Thresher phenomenon in the UK, by way of Hugh. 40% off. Limited time only. It was not only a huge sales success, it became a news phenomenon.

Seriously, people wanted that message. And it wasn’t classifieds or yellow pages.

Also, people want to know about their options. We can’t look in the classifieds for something when we we don’t realize there might be something there that fits our needs.

We live in a sea of information from friends and media, from which we pick and choose how we might go about filling our needs. Often it feels like information overload. In order to understand our options, we need clarity. We need to be able to discern how specific offers fit into our world, how they create value, and how we can take advantage of them. Only with that clarity can we actually perceive choices, and only from those choices can we take action.

Here’s an example of a failure to communicate, one that is one of my favorite modern branding catastrophes: Tivo, that lovable little device that has reconnected so many people with their addiction to passive entertainment.

I bought my brother and sister-in-law a Tivo for Christmas last year and they didn’t bother to install it for four months. Four months! They had heard about it. Didn’t get it. Didn’t think it would be worth the hassle. Eventually they got around to it.

And now they love it. TV was always a constructive part of their household, with a pro-active stance regarding what & when to watch and a social practice of watching as a family. Tivo made all of that easier, more fluid, and more accessible. In put them in control of when and how they were going to watch TV and it made their life richer.

But before they had the product working, they had no idea.

They never would’ve gone to the yellow pages or the classifieds. They never would’ve gone to Circuit City to buy it. Unfortunately for Tivo, none of the Tivo’s communications managed to deliver a clear, understandable, and memorable message about the true value of the product. If it had, they would’ve bought one long ago.

So, back to Hugh’s original question:

As traditional, Madison-Avenue-style advertising gets more expensive and less relevant by the day, as the traditional mainstream media advertising business model gets continues to nosedive, where is all the client’s business going to move to, as it seeks out greener pastures?

The business is going to move to conversation agents who help them talk with people clearly and credibly about products and services that meet real needs.

Most companies invest far too much in execution when what they first need to do is figure out strategy. Once you understand what your message needs to convey, and who you want to reach, then and only then can you execute–creative concepts and delivery channels–in a way that reliably delivers the right message to the right people.

As media changes, society and markets change, and the execution tactics necessarily change. But the need for a clear message remains.

How do you create value in my life?

That’s the message people demand.

Firms that help companies converse about creating real value in people’s lives will do just fine serving clients in the post-mass-media, post-Madison-Avenue world.

Jeremie recently asked “What does the R mean in VRM?”

The question I ask myself about VRM though is what does the Relationship mean? Many of the situations that have been proposed for VRM to play a role are Vendor (am I the only person to call them VenDUHs in conversations?) selection systems, where you establish a new relationship or transaction.

Absolutely right. I would call much of the conversation so far about Vendor discovery & selection, rather than just selection, but Jeremie’s point is still valid. Where’s the relationship? The idea of a personal digital RFP that people can use get bids from vendors in an open marketspace is powerful, but, by itself, would not fulfill Doc’s vision of VRM. As I mentioned previously, at a minimum, people need tools for the search before the RFP. Many of those searches will by inherently complex and could benefit from a tool that handles Complex Search. But there’s more…

People will also need tools to better handle their relationships. Today, those relationships are often codified in various forms of identity: credit cards, loyalty cards, membership cards, business cards, driver’s licenses, passports, issued by corporations (including public sector/govt. corporations), but they needn’t be. Doc Searls makes it clear in Turning the world I-side out:

All the identities in our wallets and purses, from social security numbers to credit card numbers to library and museum memberships, are given to us by organizations. More importantly, they represent “customer relationship management” (CRM) systems that at best respect a tiny fraction of who we are and what we might bring to a “relationship”. What CRM systems call a “relationship” is so confined, so minimal, so impoverished and so incomplete that it insults the word.

VRM turns that upside down, in part by placing identity firmly in a user-centric context–a context where Identity isn’t just accessible by the user, it is defined by the user. When users can define and apply their identities easily, the entire vendor/customer game changes.

When you can cost-effectively leverage your entire identity across multiple contexts without sacrificing privacy, you get more satisfying products at better prices. Soccer Moms can get time-saving family-friendly offers while twenty-something hipsters get access to a world of services perfect for their late-night indulgent lifestyle. And nobody needs to know when the Soccer Mom by day is also a twenty-something hipster by night. Everyone gets what they want and everyone gets more value without losing the sense of privacy we demand. Vendors make higher profits with more targetted offerings, all seamlessly available to anyone accessing the marketspace, with extremely low marginal costs.

Bringing this back to Jeremie’s question, my answer is that Vendor relationships are both dependent on, and assertions of, Identity. You can’t have a relationship with a vendor unless they can tell who you are.

Amazon can’t recommend new books unless they know the user. I can’t pay my gas company bill without my account number (or other way to identify myself).

Sometimes people leverage their relationship with one vendor at another, like I use my KCRW fringe benefits card to get a discount at Borders. The KCRW membership card is both a statement of my identity–as an assertion of my relationship with KCRW–and it is a modifier of my relationship with Borders–giving me discounts. I have a Borders membership card, but I haven’t figured out if I can link my KCRW identity with the Borders identity so I have to present both every time. If I could just have both relationships show up automagically when I use one of my credit cards, that would certainly make life easier. If I could set it up so that any company (or maybe just select companies) that offers KCRW fringe benefits (and no one else) automatically knows about my KCRW membership when it helps a transaction, I’d get all these benefits without hassle. And as long as the cashier reminds me of it, I’ll be able to spread that appreciation to both the KCRW and vendor’s brands appropriately. Private, automatic benefits, with explicit acknowledgement and branding.

In other words, give users control over their identities, and you give them control over their relationships. And everyone wins.

VRM needs interoperable Identity systems. VRM applies Identity to give users control over both vendor relationships and individual transactions. Vendor selection and discovery turn personal digital RFPs into new relationships while giving vendors you already have a relationship with an opportunity to participate in the process. As new vendors are discovered, they become new relationships, and the wonderful cycle continues.

VRM is definitely more that just vendor selection. With the power of Identity, it can truly reshape how people relate to vendors.

This year’s Man of the Year from Time Magazine is You.

All hail the power and relevance of the user centered revolution that started with Pong and continues into the future with VRM.

Pong? Yes, Pong, that simple little game that created the interactive entertainment industry. The great ancestor of Quake, The Sims, and Second Life. A bit of interactivity that started the great reversal of the industrial era of media. Mass production and mass media led to literal generations of couch potatoes and an American mono-culture dominated by the big three TV networks and the Hollywood Studios. Mass production of passive entertainment taught people to sit back, relax and just enjoy the show.

Interactive entartainment was, and is, fundamentally different. To get any value, you have to do something. You have to. It isn’t an option, it is a requirement. Fail to move the controller and the game ends in short order. No points. No advance levels. No victory animations. No stirring love story and climactic ending. While mass media teaches passivity, interactive media teaches pro-activity.

The Internet took the interactivity of single-context video games and extended it to a worldwide network of infinitely variable services and content. One of those services, the World Wide Web, made that interactive network visual and immediately accessible to hundreds of millions of people.

Now we have a new generation of entertainment, commerce, society, and even politics  built upon interactivity, where users’ actions drive the outcome. Powerful stuff. No wonder Time Magazine makes You Man of the Year for 2006.
Vendor Relationship Management, or VRM, is another one of those services built upon the interactive capability of the Internet. VRM creates an open marketspace where, with a single gesture, a person can create a market of one, where vendors compete on-demand for their purchases and relationships. As VRM goes from an inspiration to a working system, we will see users gaining even more and more control.

That makes me wonder, if this year’s man of the year is You, what does Time Magazine do when VRM really hits its stride?

Last week I attended the Internet Identity Workshop 2006b. It was amazing. Not only was it a source of much varied and in-depth information, the people and community were world-class, all engaged in an “unconference” format that was truly the most effective self-organizing and productive community effort I’ve ever seen. Major thanks to Kaliya Hamlin and the crew for moderating the whole program and to everyone who participated.

Three huge things were clear:

1. Identity systems that address the goals of Kim Cameron’s Principles of Identity are now largely integration and product management problems.

With open source OpenID (wikipedia), Microsoft’s CardSpace (wikipedia), and the Liberty Alliance (wikipedia) all having deployed solutions, the hard part, technically, is arguably over. Now we have to figure out interoperability (still non-trivial) and how to communicate with users, grow usage, and complete the feature set. With most of the large technology players supporting Identity in some fashion, this is set to be one of the next major developments in people’s interactions with the Internet.

2. The community of people who have made this happen is truly amazing. I don’t know how to do justice to the spirit of open, respectful engagement that pervaded the entire workshop nor to the passion and quality of everyone there. In fact, I won’t even try. Instead, I’ll extend that spirt by inviting you to join us at the next Internet Identity Workshop in 2007.

3. VRM is ripe for development. Although VRM isn’t strictly about Identity, Identity enables ways for VRM to work without compromising the implicit privacy and security we have come to expect when buying.

I spoke about this last night with a colleague of mine who would love to be able to publish a bill of materials as a personal RFP for his company’s products, sort of a corporate VRM. The problem is that if he simply published that RFP on his blog, all of his competitors would see what they are ordering. This was in fact a useful World War II espionage technique: spy on factory orders to discern future battle plans. [Thanks to NPR’s Morning Edition for their recent story on WWII spy Virginia Hall.]

Interoperable Identity systems would avoid that problem. Instead, you could publish an RFP with restrictions on who could read it, requiring them to be a valid vendor, including a legally binding assertion of the same. Further, you could hide your own identity so that even valid vendors don’t necessarily know which company is shopping around for those goods. You could also provide vendor-restricted information that only particular vendors see, such as customer IDs, which could help them prioritize and price more competively based on your existing relationship with them. You could even send it to specific vendors only or to both the open market and preferred vendors. Eventually, all of this will come together in a relatively seemless technology framework that creates a market of one on demand, when you are ready to buy.

There is still a lot of work to do, both with Identity and VRM, but I’m excited. It is amazing how far along Identity systems have come in the last two years and how close it is to mainstream viability, thanks largely to the energy and spirit of the community at IIW. It was also inspiring to see how quickly people warmed to the VRM idea and stepped up in a similar spirit to start working through the details. Doc Searls has already proven it can work in isolated examples (his VRM Gesture for a new phone worked like a charm.) Now to scale it to larger and more meaningful applications.

Effective, distributed, and automated third-party Identity systems will touch and change just about everything on the Internet. (Tip of the hat to Kim Cameron for the proposal and work behind that link.)

For the last few months I’ve been exploring how VRM and Complex Search might be augmented with an Internet Identity Meta-System (IIM). The first idea was simple: provide special product offers or search results based on identity. If you are a member of a particular affinity group, it would be useful to target promotions and advertisements automagically.

For those who don’t know how IIM works, think about it as third-party authentication where the second party need never see your secret information.

Instead of giving your Social Security Number (SSN) to a potential lender so they can check your credit rating, IIM uses a form of token-passing to let you authenticate directly with the credit bureau (who already knows your SSN), who then tells the lender your credit rating.

Make sense? Essentially, you and the vendor agree to use IIM and swap tokens. You go to the credit bureau with that token, and authenticate yourself directly. The vendor goes to the credit bureau with their token and gets your credit score. Result: vendor has the credit report and never required your SSN, name, or other “secret information” that might enable identity theft by an unscrupulous lender or middleman. [Note: this isn’t quite how it works, but it correct enough for the explanation.] In a fully realized IIM, all of these tokens are created and exchanged magically and nearly invisibly, just as SSL today makes it trivial for users to establish secure communication links between web browsers and servers without really paying attention to certificates.

The nice thing about a ubiquitous and inexpensive IIM is that it will make it possible for practically anyone to host an identity service. Any entity with a meaningful relationship with you could validate that relationship instantly. The result for Complex Search and VRM: relationships that support and improve your search and/or shopping experience.

If you are a million-miler at United Airlines, I’m sure there are hundreds of vendors who would like to offer you special promotions and discounts. Ditto for AAA and AARP membership, or even military affiliation. IIM integrated into VRM and/or Complex Search makes that possible, even simple.

The more I thought about it, the more possibilities emerged. In particular, distributed, secure Identity allows for a new kind of reputation network.

Equifax and other credit bureaus already offer digitally empowered reputation services. Lenders transmit a shared secret (the individual’s social security number or SSN) to Equifax. In return, Equifax gives the lender a real-world financial reputation report based on the identity associated with that SSN.

eBay, Digg, and Technoratti use similar reputational effects to help people buy things and find things.

It’s easy to see reputation being a factor in VRM as well, including countering the concerns some people have raised about “window shopping” the VRM system.

To refresh, VRM allows customers to specify their needs in a sort of digital RFP, send that RFP to a distributed marketplace, and vendors reply with bids to fulfill those needs. But what if the customer isn’t really going to buy anything? What if they are just window shopping? Isn’t that a violation of the intent of the system?

Actually, it can be both a feature and an opportunity. It’s a feature because people should be able to window shop. If I’m planning a vacation, I want to be able to evaluate my options before committing to a purchase (one reason I rarely use any of the priceline buying models). Perhaps I won’t be offered binding contracts when “window shopping”, but I should be able to browse, to see what discounts might be offered for my various affiliations or because of the timing of the purchase, even when I’m not yet ready to buy.

On the other hand, if people claim they are in the market to buy and don’t, that is an abuse of the system. The answer: a reputation network.

A reputation could be integrated with the marketplace, as it is at eBay. Or there could be distributed reputation management, like lenders have with credit bureaus: Markets would inform the Reputation firms about ratings and disputes and Reputation firms would aggregate reputation over multiple markets. In fact, there is no inherent reason that people couldn’t use their reputation at eBay to endorse VRM transactions at other markets, as long as we have an interoperable IIM in place. eBay then makes money by selling access to that reputation, just as the AARP might make money validating the identity of its membership, as it does today.

In short, IIM is an approach to identity that scales with the Internet, without centralized bottlenecks, with all the value and security one requires when checking identity. On top of the underlying autonomy and anonymity of the Internet, there will emerge a parallel fabric of self-organizing accountability and identity. The value and potential uses of such a fabric are just beginning to be defined and understood.

Consider how such a system might allow a reinvention of blacklist/whitelist approaches to SPAM. Or how it might protect children from sexual predators. Or even provide seemless, anonymous access to semi-restricted public services like disaster relief programs.
There’s still a lot of work to do. Once we get the infrastructure fully defined, toolmakers will need to integrate it into clients and developers will need to build services that utilize it. But once the pieces start clicking into place, it should be interesting to say the least.

If you can make it to the Internet Identity Workshop this next week, please say hi. I’m looking forward to meeting folks engaged in this space. I’m also looking forward to learning more about the current state of development, especially how current approaches inter-operate.

Following up on yesterday’s post, tThe NYT’s coverage of the Supreme Court hearing on Global Warming continues:

On one level, the argument was about the meaning of the Clean Air Act, which the Environmental Protection Agency maintains does not treat carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases as air pollutants and thus does not give the agency the authority to regulate them.

On another level, the argument was about whether the dozen states, three cities and many environmental groups that went to federal court to challenge the agency’s position had legal standing to pursue their lawsuit.

Intriguing. On the issue of standing:

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., along with Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel A. Alito Jr., expressed strong doubts that the plaintiffs, represented by Assistant Attorney General James R. Milkey of Massachusetts, could meet those interrelated conditions by showing that global climate change presented a sufficiently tangible and imminent danger that could be adequately addressed by regulating emissions from new cars and trucks.

“You have to show the harm is imminent,” Justice Scalia instructed Mr. Milkey, asking, “I mean, when is the cataclysm?”

Mr. Milkey replied, “It’s not so much a cataclysm as ongoing harm,” arguing that Massachusetts, New York, and other coastal states faced losing “sovereign territory” to rising sea levels. “So the harm is already occurring,” he said. “It is ongoing, and it will happen well into the future.”

I doubt Scalia’s hyperbole is going to carry the day. After all, harm need not be cataclysmic to be regulatable. The Times also points out that the claim that Congress didn’t intend for the EPA to regulate CO2 seems particularly specious. The attorney for the EPA didn’t seem particularly effective on this point:

Mr. Garre referred several times to “the conclusion the agency reached,” an unusual locution that seemed something short of the full embrace that lawyers from the solicitor general’s office usually offer the agencies whose positions they defend.The Bush administration’s conclusion that the Clean Air Act does not authorize the E.P.A. to address climate change marked an about-face from the agency’s previous view of its legal authority.

Still at the end of the day, it appears that we can’t yet predict the outcome:

By the end of the argument there appeared a strong likelihood that the court would divide 5 to 4 on the standing question, with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy holding the deciding vote. His relatively few comments were ambiguous.

For now, we wait while the justices work through the details and develop their decision. Either way, it will make for an interesting news day.