Stewardship: Curate a context to self-organize and master the reward schedule

Marketeers don't like to squander marketing dollars on people who have no intention of ever buying their product. That means marketeers want to know more and more about what makes each of us 'tick', our motivations, behavior, attitudes, and buying habits.

With the exponential increase of 'big data', companies can improve:
1. The efficiency of their marketing dollars
2. The personal relevance of their 'offerings'
3. The level of engagement of people with their 'offerings'

How? Use sensors and capture 24/7 what millions of people have done and carefully calibrate the rate, the nature, the type, the intensity of rewards.

The neurotransmitter associated with learning is called dopamine. We are beginning to be able to model mathematically dopamine levels in the brain.

This means that:
A. We can predict learning
B. We can predict enhanced engagement
C. We can identify the windows of time in which the learning is taking place at an enhanced level.

The biggest neurological 'engagement turn-on' for people is other people. It's not money, it's not being given cash, it's doing stuff with our peers, watching us, collaborating with us.

Individual engagement can be transformed to collective engagement, by applying the five psychological and neurological lessons learnt from measuring & observing people that play online games:
1. Allow people to set targets by setting calibrated targets, by using elements of uncertainty, by using these multiple targets, by using a grand, underlying reward and incentive system, by setting people up to collaborate in terms of groups, in terms of streets to collaborate and compete, to use these very sophisticated group and motivational mechanics we see.
2.Offer people the grand continuity of experience and personal investment.
3. Break things down into highly-calibrated small tasks. Use calculated randomness.
4. Reward effort consistently as everything fields together. Rewards could be calibrated precisely. Use the vast expertise of gaming systems.
5. Use the kind of group behaviors that evolve when people are at play together, these really quite unprecedentedly complex cooperative mechanisms.

Conslusion: Media companies that will survive are the ones that create and facilitate arenas for brands to connect with their customers on; companies that curate a context to self-organize and master the reward schedule by using their observations of millions of human hours and plowing that feedback into increasing engagement.