Return of Attention and Return on investment

Controlling an attention economy and filtering out the mess via personal relevance in the over pour of information, gets urgency. In the return of attention economy our most scarce resource is time. It’s a two headed dilemma: Am I wasting my limited attention capacity on things I could do without? Am I missing, in all that noise, things I would have wanted to give attention to?

The reply to both questions is context, personal relevance as an essential to web interactions.

Relevant to me

In my context

Relevance turns the overwhelming over pour of web interactions into a humanizing selective experience. It’s the difference between search ability and find ability, an influx of data and a manageable part in which I have got my awareness targeted on what is really of worth to me and me in which I can selectively connect.

Relevance is predictive. Based on my earlier interactions, my upcoming future needs can be attended to. Companies pay a lot to try and get closer to my relevance - so that their offerings surface above the general marketing noise and get my attention. They measure it in terms of ROI (return on investment) - how much will it cost them to reach me, the individual. But once they do, how relevant is their offering to me? Again, the closest they can get through paid targeting is to what I am looking for right now, in search, siloed sites that keep my profile and based on current interactions in social platforms.

As users we want to interact with data that replies a desire we have. For that relevance is the key. To date there is no holistic context of me that can capture a full relevance scale and be federated by me. My context is fragmented, dispersed all across the web. From a users’ perspective personal relevance should be viewed from a holistic point of view. There is one me, interacting all over, and not site or service I have interacted with.

Relevant to me is what is going to capture my attention the most and can transform my attention into an ROA (return on attention) for my personal calculating range. Once my relevant context (my data) is established, my attention can be bartered, treated as an alternative currency - the economics of context - Contextonomics.

Contextonomics is the economical model for attention bartering. It means exchanging consumption of digital goods or services with attention.

To help you attain a higher ROA I will be ready to watch choices, communications and specific ads based on their relevance to me. To achieve an effective ROI companies will be willing to invest in context based food chains that get them there.

In the vision of the semantic web, including my context as a factor in the targeting and related process changes the final results, a transformation from searchability to findability, dependent on personal context. I can ask the world and the world will answer - but will it answer me in my particular colors, language and frame of mind. Providers will have to negotiate with me, or my avatars, based on my context.

New food chains can be constructed all around that ROA-ROI equilibrium. The traditional foundation of transactions will be reversed. Rather than a vendor negotiating with a cloud of users, it will be anchored in a pull model, where the user negotiates with a cloud of vendors for similar offerings and a variety of paying methods, in hard currency or attention equivalents.

Through the economical sense of relevance centered transactions, a pull based user relevant food chain, it suggests that every transaction completed, can easily be monetized in complete and paid straight or traded, fully or partially, for alternative service. Providers will have automated context based offerings and banks of advertising, ads will be pulled and the advertiser rewarded for each ad sent in a pull model to a viewer. One consumer, one movie to watch for 50% discount + 3 ads that may targeted to interests and lifestyle, or one movie to watch full price = same value, but not necessarily same interest. Yet, choice, value and preferences are individual.

This article is from Icentered.com. Author frequently writes about contextification, social web and social marketing. To know further about Return on Attention, Web 2.0, internet, web marketing, new business models, digital advertising, and user centered initiatives, you can check out this article and many more articles from author at Icentered.com