When something is broken, that’s when innovation happens.  (Is Search broken?)

The Radiohead example: they allowed buyers to set their own price.  So, what if you give control over pricing to the consumer?  What could be more radical than that?

“The best experts on your products are not on your payroll” (it’s your customers).

The Old CEO search – hire an executive recruiter, wait 6-9 months, pay $100,000 fee.

The New CEO search – blog about it!  Use LinkedIn.  Email people. The result: months saved and no recruiter’s fee.  BTW, Powerset is looking for a new CEO – I offered them the AltSearchEngines Job Board, $49 instead of $100,000! We’ll see.

Finally, people are people, not “users” - a banned word.  At AltSearchEngines we have banned the word “contacts.”  We have relationships with the Alts, they are not “contacts.”

Your job as the consumer is to consume, not to produce.  So if you ever wonder why you can’t just have just one profile instead of one for every single site that you visit, it’s because you’re not supposed to ask for things, you are just supposed to be asked to do things – for the vendor/site.  Vendor “agreements” take 1,000s of words to essentially say that you have no rights at all.

Some people want to rage against this machine, “I am a person, and not a market segment!”  So, what if we could influence vendors, instead of just being influenced (and usually without our knowing – see last session).  In other words, what if there was VRM - Vendor Relationship Management instead of just CRM (Customer Relationship Management).

What if there was parity between companies and their customers?  I listen to them and am affected by them, but they listen to me and are affected by me?  What if we co-owned my data?  (Or if I could access the raw data, but not their proprietary profiles of me.)

That was the question for this panel, do you feel ignored by online merchants?  Are you mad as hell and not going to take it anymore?

The problem: consumers don’t really know what’s going on with all of the data captured about them. Nobody really reads disclosure statements (do you?).  In fact, she commented that when you see a disclosure in ALL CAPS ITS BECAUSE THEY KNOW ITS HARDER, NOT EASIER, TO READ, THAT’S WHY. 

A lot of information is derived information, marketers trying to figure out what type of person you are by what you have done on line.  But when companies start to sell that data, the consumer really loses touch with what is known about them, who knows it, and what the heck they’re doing with it.  The argument here is that consumers should have the right to this profile of information that is being assembled about them.

As a former banker, this is what happen to credit reports.  Banks were making important loan decisions based upon data that you might not have been aware of – and of course it might be wrong.  Nowadays you can request a free report from Equifax, et al, dispute incorrect information, and so on.  (You just can’t delete the bad stuff.)

Is it possible to similarly motivate consumers to insist on seeing the internet-related information that has been collected about them?

This is really a question for you – this is what Esther was asking – are you worried about this issue? Please leave a comment.

This session was on Trust.  What’s the basis for trusting someone?  The tried and true motto is “past behaviour predicts future behaviour” (Canadian spelling).  So, look at what someone has done in the past, and go by that.

We teach our kids to “never trust a stranger,” unless that stranger has a uniform like a nurse or fireman, right?

But of course as adults life is not that simple, and so we often rely on “intuition” (I just had a good feeling about that hitchhiker…)  Or we trust friends of friends, referrals, “introductions,” etc. And of course we trust some brands / products / institutions / certificates / documents / IDs…

In the digital world, we have new challenges and new tools:

Analysis / regression analysis / identity theft / fake documents / stolen information

But intuition can fail you – how can you have intuition about an Avatar?  How many people have put up false profiles, one million, ten million…?

We know that we can’t trust 99% of the emails that we get.  When I signed up for my PayPal account (one of the speakers at Defrag is the CEO) I got the confirmation email – and it was not them!  I had one friend ask me to always embed items within my emails – they would never click on an attachment, she wrote.

As a banker, I remember when the little SSL “lock” icon came out to show that a site was safe enough for yes, personal financial information – until they just started pasting the icon on fake websites -carbon copies of actual bank websites.

“Trust but verify” seems to have become “Don’t trust, there really is no way to verify.”

How about you?  How do you know who to trust on line?  Anyone? Ever get burned?

I think Alex can explain his work much, much better than I can, so please take a look at these Read/WriteWeb posts on Structed Attention:

October 2007 The Structured Web: A Primer
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/structured_web_primer.php

July 2007  Toward the Attention Economy: Will Attention Silos Ever Open Up?
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/towards_the_attention_economy_opening_silos.php

March, 2007 The Attention Ecenomy: An Overview http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/attention_economy_overview.php