More on the Attention Marketplace

Previously we’ve talked about Return on Influence, the splendid paper-cum-manifesto from Chris Brogan and Julien Smith. Now from the “First Monday” journal published by the University of Illinois at Chicago comes a fascinating paper on the expenditure of personal credibility as it relates to email. We all have the person(s) in our lives who send us every photo of birds-n-kittens that they can find, who promulgate Chuck Norris truisms as if there were no tomorrow, and so on. Virus warnings. Project updates that neither pertain nor inform. In the legal profession especially, I can say from firsthand experience that we are slaves to the email. When half of that email is meaningless, it can seriously impede our ability to get to the meaningful stuff.

(Sidebar - It was actually as I was reading about Clear Context’s new Outlook plug-in that I found out about the paper, so before I forget to point it out, by all means, go check out ways to optimize your Outlook experience. You might also want to take a gander at Xobni.)

The paper investigates the use of a virtual currency that users are asked to assign to each email. The latest LOLCat obviously has currency zero, while feedback from the client on project X is going to have a bunch of coins applied to it. The long and the short of it is that, as a rule, people who engage in this sort of valuation fell that they are more effective emailers.

It’s an interesting supply-side solution that you may want to integrate, especially if your teams are frequently on the road, reside in different towns, or generally are intensely reliant on their inbox. When people are forced to consider whether they are adding value, the quality of the conversation goes up.