Attention

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Cures for David Murray’s attention crash

A few weeks back, my friend David Murray singled me out in a post to his “Writing Boots” blog in which he complained about the stress that social media is causing him. David and I go way back and he’s hoping I have answers for him to ease his frustrations:

I’m over-friggin’ whelmed with the stuff, constantly scrambling from Twitter to Facebook to LinkedIn, round and round, at once amused to have so many going projects but never satisfied that I’m doing enough to promote myself or my projects, via all these online contraptions.

In more colloquial terms, David addresses the “Attention Crash” Steve Rubel insists is headed everyone’s way. I continue to disagree. Attention crash is headed to a lot of communicators, technologists and early adopters who feel compelled to try everything, keep up with everything and take advantage of everything. The average consumer does not mirror these behaviors. If you don’t believe me, pay attention to how these tools are used by someone you know who isn’t a communicator, technologist or early adopter. How many social sites do they scramble to keep up with? For my 20-year-old daughter, Facebook and mobile phone text messaging is the extent of her involvement. She is not overwhelmed.

She is also not alone.

But even among those of us who have a good reason to have a lot of irons in the fire, it becomes incumbent upon us to find ways to manage these activities so they’re not overwhelming. I don’t bounce from service to service all day long for several reasons:

• I receive email notifications from the likes of LinkedIn and Facebook when something is posted related to my interests
• I use third-party desktop apps for FriendFeed, Twitter and the like to stay current, so I’m always connected and don’t need to make special trips to “visit” anything
• FriendFeed is one of those tools that aggregates everything from everybody I’m interested in in one place. Again, it reduces my need to keep stopping into various sites
• I do a lot of networking on my mobile phone during what would otherwise be down time. I can’t remember the last time I was flat-out bored waiting for a meeting or a plane
• I take advantage of services that automatically get my messages into multiple venues. Posting to Posterous, for example, automatically updates Twitter and Facebook with the same item

But the more I read David’s post, the more I began to realize there were other issues in play:

...to have to cold-call all the potential readers to get them to subscribe and then pick each missive up at the printing plant and throw them on people’s porches .... That’s what I feel like I’m having to do for each and every project I’m involved with these days.

The fundamental problem, then, is that David is trying to use these channels for content distribution. Some time ago, my podcast co-host, Neville Hobson, and I reported on the ongoing effort of a PR professional to track the uptake of a press release distributed through social channels. He concluded that social media didn’t work because his release didn’t get any traction. Of course, using social networks to distribute a press release is like using a dead fish to evaluate a doctoral dissertation.

By engaging in communities, becoming a resource, earning respect and trust, you can attract a lot of interest to your work. Engaging in social media is mostly not a project-based activity.

Measurement is another of David’s problems:

You might say I’ve got too many irons in the fire. I say you’ve got too many social media outlets whose effectiveness is hard to measure. (Sometimes I feel like I’m Tweeting down a well!)

Personally, I don’t have much trouble measuring any of the channels I use—assuming I need to know the results of my efforts. But Google Analytics lets me see how many visits my blog gets from Twitter and other social sources. I can count the comments I get to posts on Facebook. I know how many referrals I get from LinkedIn (largely because I ask).

Ultimately, though, measurement starts with knowing what you want to measure. So, I would need to ask David if he has a goal and a baseline against which to measure progress to that goal? Measuring anything anywhere can be a monstrous headache if you don’t know what it is you’re trying to achieve.

But David’s not done:

With everybody being their own self-advertiser, trying to fit their message through a million little pinholes, it makes it harder to get heard, thus requiring anyone who’s serious about wanting to promote a thing to focus on promoting it the exclusion of all else.

Very few people are trying to be heard by everybody. Despite the way, way overdone phrase, “join the conversation,” there’s not one conversation taking place. There are hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of conversations.

Recently, Pear Analytics got a ton of media and online coverage for its Twitter study that showed most tweets are “pointless babble,” which the company defined like this: “These are the ‘I am eating a sandwich now’ tweets.” If I see these in the public timeline, yes, they are pointless babble. When I see Neville tweet, “My wife just brought me a glass of red wine,” it’s far from pointless. I know Neville. I know his wife, Laura. I can picture her bringing him the wine. If it’s meaningful to me, it’s not pointless, even if it is pointless to you.

If you’re part of a community that is interested in your topic and you have something interesting to say, you will earn their attention. Even newcomers find this to be true.

Incidentally, knowing how to pull this off is the point of “Trust Agents,” the new book by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith I’ve been mentioning over the last couple days. When I’m done reading my copy, I’m sending it to David. In the meantime, my best advice is this:

David, stop trying to push content through social channels and start becoming a useful member of the communities in which you participate. Your content will be the beneficiary.

Thursday, April 09, 2009

What are you willing to barter in exchange for content?

Back in 1984, Stewart Brand uttered the words that have become the slogan of the free content movement: “Information wants to be free.”

Those who advocate free content, however, are taking Brand’s statement out of context. At the first Hacker’s conference where he made the statement, he was talking about the tension between the value of content and the vanishing cost associated with distributing it. Here’s what he actually said:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

While the free content movement has embraced the latter part of Brand’s quote, paid content advocates haven’t adopted “information wants to be expensive” as a motto. Maybe they should. At the same time, maybe they should argue that compensation for that content doesn’t have to assume a monetary form. In the world of barter, there are things besides money that have value.

KPMG, the professional services firm, has found—in the UK, at least—that Internet users are willing to tolerate a brief delay in getting to otherwise free content to watch an advertisement. In its third annual Consumers and Convergence study—produced by the company’s Communications and Media practice—KMPG found that more than 60% of British consumers said they were willing to receive the Internet ads as long as the reward of free content awaited them at the other end.

If people are willing to pay for “free” content with their attention, you have to wonder what else they might be willing to give up. Contact information? Participation in a brief survey?

Ultimately, it’s a question of convenience. The free content movement has a point when they argue that there’s so much free content available that nobody has to dig into their wallets to get at it. But there’s plenty of free music available, too; yet people seem more than happy to give Apple (or WalMart or Amazon) 99 cents rather than go through the hassle of finding and downloading illegal music via Bitorrent or Limewire. Convenience makes it worth the 99 cents.

The same concept can easily apply to other kinds of content. Sure, if I dig around long enough, I might find an alternative source for the information I need. But if getting to the easy-to-find, original, authoritative document only costs me my name and email address (for addition to a lead list), four answers to questions on a poll, or 20 seconds with an ad, I’ll be happy to enter into that bargain. It’s more convenient than starting a new Google search and assessing the quality of the resulting links.

In the survey, only 16% of respondents said they would rather pay for the content and avoid the ads. This suggests different views of what it means to pay. Money is the issue, not other kinds of exchanges. Of course, this is the UK we’re talking about. Worldwide, more than 40% said they’d rather pay than receive ads. That’s a lot more than 16%, but it’s still a minority.

Tudor Aw, KPMG’s convergence partner, said, “This willingness to view adverts in exchange for free content is good news for advertisers and is perhaps a pointer in the ongoing debate over whether advertising or subscription is the right revenue model.”

Ultimately, this could be one of those rare cases of having your cake and eating it, too. Content can be free and yet you may still be able to extract something of value in exchange for it.

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Why there will be no attention crash

The Motrin incident (USA Today article)  that unfolded over the weekend reinforces a fundamental dimension of the entire social media phenomenon: If people care enough about something, they’ll make the time to engage in the communities and conversations where people are talking about it.

This is nothing unique to social media. A typical person, in addition to the hours he or she devotes to work, will hit the links for 18 holes with friends, get out to a PTA meeting, go to church on Sunday, attend a neighborhood activist meeting, take a night class, attend a chapter meeting of their professional association, chat with family on the phone, chat some more with neighbors over the backyard fence, and go out to a sports bar to watch a ballgame with the gang.

While some people try to cram too much activity into too little time, they deal with it by missing a meeting or skipping church one Sunday to sleep in a few extra hours. They don’t crash. That is, they don’t just stop all their activities. But for some reason, there’s a pervasive belief among many that this is exactly what’s going to happen in the online space. As Steve Rubel put it in a post back on June 11 last year:

We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing. The demands for our attention are becoming so great, and the problem so widespread, that it will cause people to crash and curtail these drains. Human attention does not obey Moore’s Law.

Steve added this past April…

By 2009, the Radicati Group predicts that we’ll spend 41% of our time managing email. Now add to that the IMs, documents, Facebook pokes, RSS feeds, Twitter tweets and text messages coming at us and we’re officially way oversubscribed…Unfortunately, the problem will not abate. Human attention is finite. It doesn’t scale. Worse, the pace of change today is so rapid there’s a huge need to stay digitally savvy.

While email overload certainly is an issue, it doesn’t plague people who simply don’t use it, which includes a huge slice of those under, say, 25 years old. My daughter, who’s nearly 20, doesn’t list email among the tools she uses, and when I remind her that I know she has an email account because I use it to send her email, she responds, “I know. That’s why I have an email account.”

As we move to other channels, email is taking a back seat. The vast majority of email I receive is made up of mostly newsletters to which I subscribe. If I don’t have time to read them, I don’t read them. Those that look interesting get shoved into a folder I open when I have time, mostly on planes. But much of my interpersonal communication has shifted elsewhere, including Twitter, Facebook, and Skype IM, each of which is more effective than email at what I’m using them for. I other words, I’m reallocating my attention to better channels. And I’m not alone.

Nobody is forced to respond to Facebook pokes any more than they’re required to avail themselves of every conversation at a cocktail party. (I have never sent one or responded to one, and I don’t feel like my Facebook experience has been diminished one iota.) RSS feeds allow you to consume more information in less time—not the other way around—and text messages take a lot less time than email (a quick question gets a quick answer and I’m done).

People will avail themselves of the communities and tools that interest them, fuel their interests, feed their passions…just as the MotrinMoms did. Many of those participating in that conversation may have felt like they already had plenty of information coming their way, but I doubt any of them felt that keeping up with the hashtag and blog posts and YouTube videos was an additional burden weighing them down.

Anybody who feels compelled to engage with everything all the time probably is dealing more with a personal addiction issue than a simple excess of inputs. (In case you hadn’t heard, China has codified Internet Addiction Disorder as a legitimate diagnosis.)

Just as we make time for the interactions and communities that satisfy and define us in the real world, we’ll do the same online as the Net becomes the new commons. I just don’t believe there’s any great attention crash on the horizon.

Saturday, July 05, 2008

Tagged! How I keep track of most of it

Mitch Joel has tagged me (and several others) after responding to a query from Kevin Behringer, author of the Fly-Over Marketing blog. Here’s Kevin’s question:

How do you manage it all?!?

You read a lot of books, blogs, etc. How do you record it all or track it to actually use it? One of the things I’m struggling with right now.”

The easy answer is that I don’t manage it all. Undoubtedly, stuff falls through the cracks. I’m not aware that I’m letting them fall untilI try to recall them later and can’t find them archived anywhere. As a result, I either spend too much time tracking them down or just give up.

That’s the exception, though, and not the rule. Here’s what I do to keep track of, if not all, most:

FeedDemon

Mitch offers his unqualified support for the Google Reader. Despite regular pressure to adopt it, I remain a committed FeedDemon user for RSS feeds. I haven’t found anything Google Reader does that FeedDemon doesn’t; then there are the benefits specific to FeedDemon, mainly the synchronization feature. I have a copies of NewsGator’s software on my desktop and my laptop. I maintain a NewsGator Online account. And I have a copy of NewsGator Go! on my Sprint Mogul. Whenever I do anything to my account on any one of these platforms, it automatically updates the others. I’m also able to select items to include in my link blog and can store others in a bin that will remain available, exclusively for my eyes, for as long as I want to be able to refer to them.

Evernote

I’m becoming more and more hooked on Evernote, which is like having a memory that doesn’t fail. Anything I want to remember—a web page (or a snippet from the page), an email, an image, a note I create myself, you name it—goes into Evernote which I can access from a web interface or an even more useful app on my computer. Want to make sure you don’t forget anything? Evernote’s the answer.

del.icio.us

The big drawback to any feed reader, whether it’s the Google Reader, FeedDemon, or some other utility, is that you can only manage items in the feeds to which you subscribe. What do you do with links you find elsewhere? For me, del.icio.us is the answer, primarily because of its tagging foundation.

Jott

While the tools above are great when you’re on your computer, what do you do when you want to remember something and you’re nowhere near a computer? I call the note into my Jott account, which is programmed into my cell phone. I hear something on the car radio or read it in a book while sitting at an airport terminal, I just call Jott and dictate what I want to remember. It shows up as an email reminder right away, so I can then save it to del.icio.us.

The Bat

For a variety of reasons, I gave up on Outlook some time ago. The Bat is a simple, fast, clean email client that still gives me the ability to create folders and subfolders to manage the flood. Three key folders for me are REPLY NOW, RETAIN, and READING. Their functions are exactly what the labels suggest.

I Want Sandy

The Bat, as great an email client as it is, has a lousy calendar/scheduler. But that’s okay, since I use I Want Sandy anyway. Sandy gives me my day’s agenda and reminds me as appointments are coming up. Sandy also stores my to-do’s, all of which can be accomplished by sending Sandy an email or CCing her on an email to somebody else. I can even forward my Jott reminders to Sandy and they show up in the right list. Couldn’t be easier.

Cell phone notes

Finally, I keep about a dozen notes on my Sprint Mogul, items to which I may need to refer from anywhere. For example, I have all the login information to the two servers I manage, and the sequence of actions for addressing a database meltdown on my primary server.

Passing the tag along

Since Mitch tagged me, I feel obliged to tag others. So, how do you keep track of it all…

• Pete Blackshaw
• Neville Hobson
• Dan York
• Katie Paine
• Mike Manuel

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

My new link blog and a request

Having subscribed to several for years, I’ve finally started my own link blog. It was reading Nick Bradbury’s post on attention that finally got me off my ass. Nick pointed out that, in FeedDemon, the “News Bin” lets me not only keep a list of items I want to refer back to, but also publish them via NewsGator (which owns FeedDemon) as an RSS feed. This was so easy I slapped my forhead more than once over not having done it sooner. The feature is similar to one in the Google Reader, but I love FeedDemon and have no intention of switching.

The rest of Bradbury’s post (which Neville alerted me to) is a good read, too, looking at how subscribing to a number of link blogs and then using FeedDemon’s “Popular” report can turn up interesting topics about which many people are talking, helping further refine my ability to focus my attention on what really interests me. So now I gotta find more good link blogs to subscribe to. So I’m asking: What link blogs do you subscribe to?

Sunday, July 22, 2007

The myth of the coming “attention crash”

Years ago, before social media, I did a presentation at an IABC conference that addressed information overload. The blogosphere didn’t exist, there were none of today’s social networks, no Twitter/Jaiku/Pownce, no media sharing sites, no social bookmarking or ranking sites. Yet email and the web alone seemed to be causing a panic. People overwhelmed by the volume of content lamented the good old days of the gatekeeper who pointed us to what was important. My friend Roger D’Aprix worried that the web turned everybody into a publisher, confronting people with billions of pages that could be read while it still takes as long to read a page of text (Roger said) as it did during the Reformation.

I opened my presentation with my personal definition of information overload:

Too much crap about stuff you don’t care about.

If you don’t care about it, it’s crap to you, even though it might be gold to me. The point is this: There really is no such thing as information overload, as long as the information is content that is useful to you. We can’t get enough information about the stuff we care about. That’s why celebrity addicts gobble up every word about Paris Hilton, political zealots consume every source of political gossip, and sports fantatics devour every sports site and magazine and radio/TV sportstalk show.

Internally, I argued, the trick to managing overload was for the organization to deliberately manage the culture so each communication channel was used to its best advantage. Typically, IT departments rolled out new communication technologies using the “Godspeed” approach. (Remember when email was first introduced to your company? IT got the system up and running, installed an email on your client, and then vanished saying only, “Godspeed.” You were left to your own devices to figure out how to use it as a business tool.) I argued that companies needed a “Message Mission Control” function—funded and staffed—to weave best communication practices into the way things are done in the organization. I remain convinced that bad messaging habits represent a far greater threat to productivity that non-work-related online activities.

Now, social media is raising the same old fears. As Steve Rubel put it:

We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing. The demands for our attention are becoming so great, and the problem so widespread, that it will cause people to crash and curtail these drains. Human attention does not obey Moore’s Law.

It seems that everything that goes around comes around—this is almost word-for-word the same fear expressed a decade ago. And I still don’t buy. I still believe that we can’t get enough information about the stuff we care about. As I noted earlier, we’ll simply get used to it, make necessary adjustments, apply new tools to help us filter the stuff we care about from everything else and everything will be just fine. (Those of you with teenagers know that they don’t fear an attention crash; my 18-year-old daughter has integrated it quite nicely into her very active life, thank you very much. This is a worry held only by those of us who are technology immigrants.)

Internally, such adjustments can be managed by organizations that have the will to address the situation. For society at large, it’s simply a matter of incremental adjustment. If you don’t believe me, look at how the younger generation have all but abandoned email, one of the great early online sources of overload. That’s evolution, and it’s happening before our very eyes if we only stop to notice it. The same incremental adjustments are inevitable in the world of social media.

Tuesday, January 03, 2006

Another way to focus your attention

I don’t know how I missed this, but thanks to Dave Winer‘s latest Morning Coffee Notes podcast, I’ve learned about and become an instant fan of Top 10 Sources.

Winer interviewed John Palfrey yesterday for MCN. Palfrey is founder and publisher of the site; he’s better known as director of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

The idea behind Top 10 Sources is simple. A staff picks a topic, then culls through blogs and podcasts to identify the top 10 sources in that subject. The Yahoo!-like index of topics makes it easy to find the subject you’re interested in. Under “Health and Science,” for example, you’ll find Women in Science, Environment, Yoga, Women’s Health, Astronomy, Science News, Weight Loss and Controversial Science. A new topic is added daily.

Click to the topic page and you’ll find an introduction from the editor who pulled together the sources followed by the latest posts from each of the 10 identified blogs/podcasts. I checked the Guitars listing under Music, and found a truly useful set of blogs. The posts are listed in “river of news” style, with each page serving as a feed aggregator. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed for each page, pulling the updated contents of each topic into your own news reader; alternatively, you can get the OMPL file to update your OPML reader on a daily basis.

The home page is handled a lot like Wikipedia, with different featured topics appearing every day.

In a press release, Palfrey said:

Top 10 Sources is about adding a human element to searching and sorting through the increasingly great syndicated content on the Web. Much like Yahoo! brought a hierarchy to the early days of the commercial Internet with its browser, Top 10 Sources organizes information in blogs, podcasts, wikis, photoblogs and other sources into ‘reading lists.’ The goal is to foster an active conversation among readers, authors and editors that is about, and results in, great online content with context.

The site launched in early December, so it’s not surprising that the Business category is anemic (Venture Capital and Your Money are the only two topics listed so far), but I expect that’ll change as new subjects continue to be added. In the MCN interview, Palfrey also promised that editors would keep an eye on the topics, deleting sources that lose their relevance and adding new ones that rise in prominence. It’s a site—and an idea—to keep an eye on.