01.03.08

What to tell Google.org

Posted in Uncategorized, meaning as metrics, soft metrics at 8:09 pm by kevindjones

Sean Stannard Stockton is talking to Google.org next week about how to measure a non profit. He asked me to weigh in and I did here.

Sean is also tracking the GiveWell meltdown here and here  that’s also impacting xchangexchange.com blogger Lucy Bernholz, a boardmember of Givewell.

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12.28.07

What to measure

Posted in Uncategorized, economics, India at 3:11 am by kevindjones

This is my response to Shana Ratner, whose work I admire, on what to measure. I have a house in Sonoma California. I noticed today two shops that seem to be doing well. one was consignment furniture, another was consignment couture; people selling their furniture and their high end, glittery gowns and things. I think, in light of the wonderings about recessions, peering under rugs for canaries in the mine, that those two shops numbers (number of consignment sellers, avg. dollar of items sold, throughput of retail stock, etc. factored against new car sales, by price, and new home sales, by price, factoring in time on the market for home sales and slicing in forclosures or other signs of housing distress,and then doing a similar slice by price and item in local newspaper classified ad line sales from individuals those are measurements that would be meaningful and that would let me know whether, for example, i’d want to start a competing newspaper here, or some other business. i believe in measurement where there is an outcome that results in more money flowing or more perception of trends and value over time. i believe in measuring soft things, like you do in a failing community’s assets. in social enterprise, it’s been mostly academic hand jive. additive friction without additive value. measurement should increase the flow of value, not be a net cost.

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12.26.07

Gift Hub touches social exchange

Posted in Uncategorized, attentioneconomy, commonstradingfloor at 11:41 pm by kevindjones

Phil Cubeta’s gift hub blog has touched on the underlying thread I’ve been thinking about; user ownership of what is produced online, and how that value can be exchanged.

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12.16.07

User generated brands

Posted in Uncategorized, usergeneratedbrands, marketsareconversations, cluetrain, disintermediation at 3:33 pm by kevindjones

As you look at user generated currency and other democratic expressions of value that will have to be part of a social stock exchange, you have to look at what I’m calling (I don’t think I’ve seen anyone else call it this) user generated brands. It relates to the crisis in advertising, where intermediaries positions are faltering in the wake of citizen evaluation and product and service presentation; the public’s image of value creation has slipped out of the hands of the professionals. This Business Week story talks about it. Though the line “Advertising is a tax you pay for unremarkable thinking” has gotten the most attention, another quote from Intuit’s Scott Cook sums it up better for me “A brand is what a friend tells a friend it is. Not what a company tells them.”

This is a key emerging element in the first question that social stock exchanges will have to answer: what kind of value social returns create, and how can they be priced into the value of a company’s equity and expressed on an exchange. User generated brands are being built now. User generated currency might find a home on the social stock exchanges.

My thinking on this subject has been moved forward by online conversations with Nicholas Gitovsky. On the issue of what would constitute a meaningingful segmentation of online attention such that you could sell yourself or your group back to an advertiser (not through an ad agency) he suggests this. “Validated intention data coupled with certified profile data, perhaps. “Is that guy a good risk to lend a land rover for the weekend when he’s travelling on business?” Yes, because his driving record, credit report, intent to purchase and affiliations show that it’s not a 20 year old kid just looking for a joy ride, but a guy who owns a 5 year older model back home in Greenwich, where his dealer has stated a willingness to underwrite the insurance for the rental replacement”. Done.

Nicholas thinks about this kind of trade off a fair amount - and “so do people working on Vendor Relationship Management with Doc Searls (author of the Cluetrain Manifesto, which asserted markets are conversations) and his posse,” Nicholas says.

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12.15.07

A dissenting view

Posted in Uncategorized at 6:13 am by kevindjones

A vote against the social stock exchange

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Shift space, commons as trading floor

Posted in Uncategorized, commonstradingfloor, commons at 5:12 am by kevindjones

Shift space is about creating a new kind of online space that people would own, an abstraction layer of digital real estate not subject to vendor intrusion, which is its own kind of value, and that value transforms the creations built on this new kind of real estate, if they can execute, if if lots of ifs, but it’s an interesting test of the market, moving out from technology to free space, a commons, the kind of place you can trade social value.

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media value

Posted in Uncategorized at 4:32 am by kevindjones

A response to how you measure and value attention from a friend.

“We measure things that are easy to measure about some media
like
- time on page, time on site
- click through rate
- conversion rate
- frequency of interaction
- responsiveness of interaction
- “lag”, whatever that is, but everyone knows what it is

In general, media that have small amounts of lag are good for
gaming, because you can play many small bets and iteratively
define a better result.  As the amount of lag increases, the
attention games change, and you start to get out of the realm
of reality-based feedback and into the realm of ROI fictions,
and systems that have enormous expensive command and
control infrastructures.

it’s one thing to hack people’s attention about tomorrow if you
start working on it today, and something very different to plan
a campaign that results in their attention (or the fulfillment of
their desire) 6 or 12 or 18 or 120 months hence. from Ed Vielmetti who should get more attention for what he does.

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