Mary Schmidt Marketing Troubleshooter

This just in from C-Net: A cure for e-mail attention disorder?

A Silicon Valley start-up called Seriosity has come up with an e-mail management system that borrows heavily from the virtual economies and currencies found in WoW and other large-scale online games.

Known as Attent, Seriosity’s system is essentially a new currency, called the Serio, that corporate e-mail users spend to indicate a message’s importance: the more important they believe the message is, the more Serios they spend on it. Recipients keep the Serios in the messages they get.

Similarly, when someone receives a message with Serios attached, they can indicate how important they believe it is by responding with an appropriate number: none or very few if they think the message wasn’t valuable, an equal number if they want the sender to know they appreciated the message, or more than the original number to show they agree that it truly was crucial.

But Serios is a currency, and therefore a scarce resource, so people get a limited amount. The idea is that they have to spend the currency wisely, always making sure they have enough to send more with future messages.

I agree that e-mail is a huge problem. But, enabling people to define the importance of each as a consensus exercise? Hmmm. The underlying cultural problems - wanting/needing to copy everybody for CYA and political purposes; real versus perceived importance based on person’s title and/or power - will remain and may even worsen. “Nyah, nyah, nyah, I’ve got more Serios than you.” And, one person/group/department’s junk is another’s treasure.

While I applaud Seriosity’s creativity, I wonder are they really solving a problem or just adding a layer of complexity and confusion? Anybody from the company want to comment?

And, wonder how this would work with Seth Godin’s idea of rotating email crops?

Related Post: “Everyone” Knows (Not)

Tags: email, productivity, mind candy and brain food, Seriosity