David Barrie

Capturing attention online

One great mystery of our time is how to hold an audience.

Simon Cowell seems to achieve it: so cosmetic dentistry is one answer.

But the rise, rise and rise of real-time apps like Twitter and OneRiot and then linked apps like Twitterfall suggest that capturing attention is about to become more infuriating and elusive than ever, as the age of handling things in nicely timed, spaced batches disappears. 

In their excellent survey of Media Predictions, consulting firm Deloitte says that in the online social media part of this elusive world, people are wrong to look to make money out of collective engagement upstream but should go estuary:

If members are hard to monetize, the focus may need to shift to generating revenues from the aggregated value of their actions and behavior.

Fine. But that doesn't offer much of a clue as to how to do it. 

Filtering content and trending topics may be in vogue. But to capture value from stuff that happens in real-time, there's a need to do more than track and edit.  

Call me old-fashioned but to extract significance from something, it needs to be held in a space or place that allows value to be captured, aggregated, indexed and extrued. 

A recent story in the London Financial Times gave a slightly Guantanamo/psychodrama name to this, pulled from the ideas of Ronald Heifetz of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

In the 1980s, Heifetz suggested that leadership was not the same as authority or management but instead it was the activity of mobilizing "the community" to tackle difficult problems.

A key to mobilizing communities, Heifetz' suggested, was to create a holding environment, defined as

any relationship in which one party has the power to hold the attention of another in order to help them face up to their problems.

The term (apparently) originates in psychoanalysis to describe the relationship between the therapist and patient.

Could it be applied to the ebb and flow of not just social but also digital relations?

YCN, 72 Rivington Street, London

On the telephone the other day, I ended up staring at this: 72 Rivington Street, the new HQ of design agency Young Creatives Network.

In the window is a display of piled books by Anna Lomax and Lauren Davies of Jiggery Pokery:

 
What's great about the location is that a genius(ish) has decided to turn the downstairs of the building in to a public space and offer a lending library. 

A few years ago, I worked with a group of community activists in the town of Castleford, England and turned this empty furniture store:

in to a white-walled, wannabe Saatchi gallery:

The refurbishment was supported by several public agencies, including Arts Council England, English Partnerships (now the Homes and Communities Agency), Wakefield Council and social welfare charity the Coalfields Regeneration Trust.

The space has since been enjoyed by thousands of people and hosted art exhibitions of work by artists like Cuban Carlos Garaicoa and local abstract painter Blue Wilson:  

The U.K. Government recently launched a programme to revitalize vacant retail units on recession-hit High Streets and turn them over to community uses. 

This is great. The space in Castleford cost just £25,000 (USD$40,000) to refurbish, has now been extended to a property next door and has a permanent member of staff.

But the important thing raised by YCN is that private, as well as public places and spaces can be turned towards hosting and delivering different kinds of public experience.

Some empty stores in the U.K. are now being turned over to community services, like policing and children's learning - and I'm helping a chef  turn an old carpet shop in to a co-operative, grocery store.   

But the idea of turning what could be any old foyer or exhibition space in to a public lending library is a brilliant one.

Main street recession, mutualism and pop-up anything and everything suggests these kind of practical, public-facing, can-do projects are about to have their moment.

Question is, who's brave enough to go the whole way, commit to a supposedly "post-selfish" age and say, turn a disused branch of Woolworths in to a shop, use the income to buy the upstairs and turn the entire building in to a Christiana-style Danish commune?

It's been done countless times before.

Tempted? Visit Wanna Start a Commune?

Images courtesy of Guy Archard and YCN.  

An expresso needs more than a coffee bean and a cup

For the last few years, it's been a cliche of the commercial world that to operate in the middle of a market is suicidal.

The story has gone that it pays either to be an artisan at work in a shed or the employee of a corporate giant bloated on acquisition.

Scale has been a touchstone of competitive advantage.

To be middle-sized has been to be dull, fuzzy, a failing Old Maid kind of business.

And don't bother securitizing one mortgage. Wrap a bundle of them and find a better tomorrow.

Now all of this may be true. But I am starting to wonder.

In The Venturesome Economy, Professor Amar Bhidé of Columbia University takes x-ray specs to innovation:

For any new product, the underlying know-how ranges from the high-level general principles, to mid-level technologies, to ground-level context specific heuristics or rules of thumb.

Bhidé surveys a landscape of products that range

from high-level building blocks or raw materials (microprocessors or the silicon used to make them), to mid-level intermediate goods (the motherboards that contain the microprocessor in laptop computers), to ground-level final products (laptop computers).

And many of the more successful venture capital-backed companies Bhidé studies in his book operate at the mid-level, in a context where

different forms of innovation interact in complicated ways, and it is these interconnected, multilevel advances that create economic value.



Now none of this denies the value of the exceptional execution of an ordinary idea.

Or signals the commercial promise of a middle-sized business that lacks focus or is in the wrong market. 

But it does serve as a reminder that to make a great expresso, you don't just need beans and a cup but an efficient, effective coffee roaster.

It affirms the value of ideas, initiative and forces that operate at the mid-level - see my previous post on China -  phenomena that act as an interface between the high- and ground- levels in society, politics and culture.

Images courtesy of About_some.