What happens when innovation is done well?
Well… a lot of things happen. One of them is you get a lot more attention — which is harder and harder to come by these days:
What is it that makes the economy hum, but is not growing? What’s the limiting factor behind all those web pages, business plans, strategies, books and articles, marketing initiatives, partnerships and alliances, and expansion initiatives? An attentive human mind. Attention is the missing link between the “bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion” (to use the phrase of William James, an early fan of attention) of the world around us and the decisions and actions necessary to make the world better.
Today, attention is the real currency of businesses and individuals.
That’s how Tom Davenport and John Beck opened their 2001 book, The Attention Economy.
It’s something I’ve been thinking more about lately; it happened to come up in the course of writing the “Cargo Cult to Cluster Culture” post, and completely by chance, a few hours ago in a comment I linked to James’s classic chapter on the subject).
It’s culminating now, thanks to a couple of developments.
On the weekend I noticed a tweet from David Ciccarelli that Voices.com (the London Ontario-based company he and his wife Stephanie founded) was mentioned in the New York Times.
“That’s pretty good,” I thought to myself, as I continued reading other tweets…
Then the next day I noticed a tweet from Stephanie’s VoicesDotCom account with a link and the title, “The Do-It-Yourself-Economy.” I clicked. It turned out to be not just a New York Times mention, but two long paragraphs in a mo-effing Thomas Friedman column! This is the Pulitzer Prize-winning, bestseller list-owning, Charlie Rose-bantering, Mr. “World is Flat” himself.
He’s one of the few people who gives Malcolm Gladwell a run for his money, popularity-wise. People listen to people like that, i.e. other influential people — “mavens,” to use the term Gladwell made famous in The Tipping Point.
So what did Voices.com do to get in the column? Well they do a lot of promotion, but the very first thing they did that’s beyond doubt was build a great service that has enough value to get used and enough novelty to be interesting…
After that the product or service certainly won’t just promote itself, but you’ll get more attention back for less spent over time.
Whereas if you go straight to promoting something that isn’t inherently valuable and interesting then you’ll quickly reach a point of diminishing returns. In other words, it’ll cost more to acquire your 10,001st user than it cost to acquire your 10,000th, and then it’ll be even more for the 10,002nd and so on (because you’ll have to keep stretching farther and farther to reach out to new people).
But if you nail something both useful and new in the development stage, then you get into a situation of increasing returns, because the people using the service will effectively be promoting it for free, so the more people using it, the more attention comes your way, and the cheaper it gets to convert new users.
A slightly different example is the success the London Free Press has had using Twitter.
Yesterday I saw three tweets about Kate Dubinski’s J-Source post that got picked up by PBS MediaShift, “Lessons Learned from Tweeting a Biker Gang Trial.”
As of now, in less than a day Bit.ly has registered 56 tweets and 377 clicks — a substantial number of whom would be a bit of a who’s who of North America’s new media leaders. I first saw it via Mathew Ingram and later Jay Rosen tweeted it too (amusingly, the line he quoted was part of an earlier argument that comes very close to the kind he normally calls-out [my bad, maybe: the column is here, it's good; the point about consistency is exactly right; my recollection was that the denunciation of bloggers was stronger]).
That’s the power of increasing returns. In both cases most of the work was already done earlier in the process: trying new things, and having the discipline to do them well for their own sake.
(As a partial aside, it’s fascinating how Twitter allows us to really to watch these networks and waves of influence be articulated and measured and visualized before our eyes, as we’ve been discussing here the last few days.)
When The Free Press started livestreaming gimmicky events last winter (and making mistakes along the way) I’m pretty sure a lot of people scoffed, but it was through that process that they could’ve done such a great job on the Stafford story (for example) as it broke and played out.
And I noticed yesterday on her blog that Dubinski is still taking advantage of new opportunities to try doing things a little differently. It’s very encouraging to see. Judging by the comments people aren’t universally impressed… but everything new starts exactly that way and people are paying attention, and that’s what pays off in the long run.
