Education is composed of a string of “learning moments.” The problem is that like the buying event, it appears quickly and can disappear just as quickly.

The fact is that timing is everything. The best one can do as a teacher is to create an environment that maximizes the emergence of learning events. The best one can do as a salesperson is be readily accessible when the buying event occurs.

If a teacher had the real time information on a students behavior, timely interventions can be made. The primary issue is time. In the world of high school dropouts in the States, it’s clear that failing a course in 9th grade is a pretty good predictor of a student falling into a higher risk bucket that will play out with the student dropping out. Bad attendance is another clear early warning sign.

The real problem is not curriculum, textbooks, are most of the things that fill the public discourse. It’s a relatively simple signal v noise problem. The educational enterprise is too filled with noise to act on the clear signal of 9th graders failing a course. Unless the intervention happens immediately, it becomes a huge sink of time and money.

Consider this use case: A kid gets a homework sheet with a RURL customized to them. A “click” with a scanner or cell phone, indicates if it was done or not. As appropriate it triggers an SMS message to mom’s cell phone.

The particular configuration of the tech sensitively depends on the situation on the ground. But in every case the principle is to get real time behavioural metrics in front of the person with the power to do something about it.

Many have been blind to this opportunity at the bottom of the pyramid, because of the noise about curriculum, teaching practices, etc etc. There is also a common meme that kids and parents at the bottom of the pyramid “don’t value education.” That notion is merely another version of blame the customer that we see every day in the world of selling.

First a congratulations on demonstrating an elegant solution connecting Twitter and Print. This is the first time I’ve seen it done, instead of being told it can be done. In the context of the goals you set it sounds like you met them admirably.

My quibble is when you say you have identified “prospects.” In fact I think you have identified suspects. To my mind a prospect is someone who has expressed a need for your service. A qualified prospect is someone who has the power to pay for your service.

A suspect is someone who has contacted you. It’s a necessary, but not close to sufficient, event for a business justification.

From a business owner’s point of view, what matters is a well defined path to revenue streams. That requires numbers at each stage and a thought model showing how what can work on a small scale can also work at a massive scale for a global or at the appropriate scale for any enterprise.

The new opportunity for print connected to the web is to deliver real time process metrics for the “sales” process.

It holds the promise of tracking the movement from many suspects to fewer prospects to fewer customers to fewer clients to fewer evangelists. As the numbers and models are refined through testing, it becomes easier for a brand to move a person from one bucket to the next.

On a more general level, most of the important events in education, health and government can also be modeled as a “sales” process. In education the student gives time to get something of value. In health the patient gives time to get information or comply with a treatment protocol.

The more real time actionable information can be delivered to brands, the closer one gets to the “why wouldn’t I want to do that” stage of decision making.

I look forward to other demonstrations and more and more sophisticated applications of a pretty cool technology.