FOR someone who chides himself for 'never having had a good idea in life', Dr Andreas Weigend certainly has a good idea of what works and what doesn't in e-commerce.

Page views are dead. Visitor count doesn't count anymore.

Customer attention is the new currency, said Dr Weigend, the former chief scientist of Amazon.com, where he specialised in online consumer behaviour for two years until 2004.

In the economy of attention, people tune out if they can't benefit from reading a website or marketing message or if the content is irrelevant.

This makes e-commerce all the more about targeted marketing on an even more granular level.

For instance, an online business should know whether a customer who bought the book, The Lord Of The Rings, also belongs to an online photography club, so it can anticipate the customer's wants more accurately and deliver personalised messages that will incite a response.

In the same grain, businesses that use a cookie-cutter approach to customer service will lose out.

His observations come from more than 15 years of studying and making sense of what people do on the Web, or what he calls the 'digital exhaust' of Netizens.

'You used to have to milk data from five-digit zip codes. Today, people volunteer information on blogs and leave comments on websites, motivated by the promotion of self.'

What better way to gather the wealth of consumer intelligence than from the Web?

Consumers might be familiar with Amazon's highly personalised product recommendation system, which suggests what products they might be interested in and what people with similar interests have bought recently.

During his two-year stint at the online retailer, he revamped the system.

Recommendations today are no longer based on customers' long purchase histories with and product reviews on Amazon, but also annotations on external blogs and social networks like Facebook.

An algorithm developed internally trawls the entire Web for book or CD reviews, analyses the profiles of the communities that commented, and matches the likes and dislikes of these online communities with the interests of its customers. The programme then makes educated guesses on what a customer wants and sends him marketing messages relevant to his interest.

The new recommendation system also takes into account buyers' search terms. For instance, a customer who looked for 'Canon EOS 40D' on the Web store will be treated differently from one who typed 'digital camera'.

'If a customer searched for a specific name, he obviously knows what he wants. Amazon can offer a 10per cent discount, for instance, if he buys the camera there and then,' he said.

Such highly-personalised reach is the new face of e-commerce. The objective: Get the customer in the door before he clicks on another e-destination.

He who has an ear

The Sunday Times caught up with the amiable German at Pregos restaurant a day before he addressed a crowd of 150 students and businessmen at the Singapore Management University last Thursday as part of the Shaw Foundation Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series.

While he was here for a week, he met with the Media Development Authority, Singapore Airlines and OCBC Bank, sharing his vision.

Since leaving Amazon, Dr Weigend, 49, has been an independent consultant to renowned firms, including Lufthansa, MySpace and Nokia, advising them on how to please and win customers.

Given his specialisation in customer service, it is no wonder he was miffed when Pregos said it did not serve freshly squeezed orange juice, which he had ordered.

He said the key to winning customers is to heed the information they reveal about themselves, their friends and products - now 'freely available online and in informal day-to-day conversations'.

'Companies should react by listening, then in an authentic way, enter these conversations,' he said.

But instead, most are enamoured with rules.

He recalled a recent encounter with an Asian airline when he flew from Los Angeles to Bangkok, with a one-week stopover in Singapore.

On arriving in Singapore, he went to the business class lounge to request access to showering facilities. But he was turned down because shower rooms are meant for departing passengers only.

'They said: 'Cannot. You can use the transit hotel.' But I was a customer; I paid $5,000 for a business class air ticket.'

He got his shower eventually but only by bringing forward his Bangkok trip to qualify him as a departing passenger that day. He later changed his flight back to the original schedule.

'It probably cost them $50 to make those changes but got them an unhappy customer.'

Exception handling in the online world reflects that in the offline world. By the same token, 'change is not easy' for most businesses in Singapore, he said.

'The new world of e-commerce is more about people revolution than technology revolution.'

By that, he means a round- the-clock service culture that is 'limited only by one's imagination'.

Data, right questions produce answers

He studied electrical engineering, physics and philosophy at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Trinity College, Cambridge and The University of Bonn.

He holds a physics doctorate from Stanford University, and was a researcher at Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre (where laser printing and the Ethernet were created) and at the Santa Fe Institute.

Dr Weigend has 15 years of teaching experience and 100 scientific papers - mainly on machine-assisted data analysis - under his belt.

He started as an assistant professor in computer science and cognitive science at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and then was an associate professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University, where he examined Wall Street traders' behaviour and built predictive financial models.

During the Asian financial crisis in 1997, he helped the Central Intelligence Agency unearth how the US missed the crashing Thai baht. The conclusion was a set of data fell off the radar.

While serving as Amazon.com's first chief scientist in 2003, the Statistics Department at Stanford asked him to develop a course on data mining and e-business.

This year, he also created a Web 2.0 marketing course for UC Berkeley. He still teaches at both universities today, as well as conducts a digital economy course for the Tsinghua-Insead Executive MBA programme.

An energetic speaker, Dr Weigend has also spoken at international events such as the Digital, Life, Design Conference in Munich last month, as well as the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin in November last year.

His study of Netizens' digital tracks is a natural extension of his love for physics, in which he examined 'the traces that particles leave'.

'My father was a physicist, who taught me that answers will come only if the right questions are asked. This has been the principle behind my teaching and consulting work.'

itham@sph.com.sg