Pay Attention...............

The NMK event last night was on Attention, one of the latest Web 2.0 buzzmemes trying to grab headspace. I was pleasantly surprised by the evening, as I have read so much uncritical blather on this subject (Advertisers have always wanted your attention, its just they have to do it in different ways now that we are all fragmenting), and was concerned that it would just be a long hymn to the dudes.

George Nimeh, MD of Digital Iris moderated, and had Chris Seth, MD Piczo; Alan Moore, co-author of‘Communities dominate Brands’ and CEO of engagement marketing firm SMLXL and Sam Sethi, of Vecosys (who has Information Constipation apparently

The initial talks were short and sweet, and really were just setting the scene, but this format allowed lots of time for interactive questions and that was where things got interesting. Here are a few of the goodies:

Firstly, Chris Seth noted that Piczo were fortunate because brands are more relevant to the Yoof, whereas the older demographic sites struggle more to make brands relevant. I was fascinated by the implication - ie the Yoof are the gullibles, not the media savvy little bug...people that they are often held up to be. Piczo have also grasped the fact (with both hands) that a SocNet ( Social Network ) is not a happy democracy, its a sodding great power law and they are busy empowering the UberUsers (called "Insiders") - as so many have done before, if you digg what I mean....I was also quite worried about the implication that the Brands that were being talked about were the Cool Skool - Nike, Coke etc - what do you do if you are, as Colin Donald noted. say Toilet Duck or Damnitol?.

Alan Moore mentioned that 3 laws ran this area - the first time, apart from a talk by AOL's Meg Pickard, that I have heard anyone bring any theory into a SocNet discussion. These are Sarnoff's law, Metcalfe's Law and Reed's Law (some of our comments on these laws are here). We would also argue vehemently for Zipf's law and the various studies on small world and scale free networks to be added, and some stuff on Memetic algorithms to boot - there is some serious maths behind all this!

Sam argued for the need to eventually pay people (in cash or kind) to contribute their time or information about themselves, as only so many people can be UberUsers and get all the karma kookies - whats in it for everyome else. It's an interesting idea*, and one can see various challenger websites trying it on today to attack YouTube etc - though the game theory of a paid-for service is different to a status based or collaborative one, so we suspect they will work in very different ways.

Both Alan and Chris alluded to the point that there are actually different types of SocNets, with different properties depending on the application. This is something we've very seldom heard overtly mentioned, ( because the science is so new....or most people don't realise?) Another interesting point made was that many SocNets are global, which causes major ructions in companies trying to execute them with regiona power structures and/or keep different content windowing deals in place etc

Other buzzmemes that bubbled up were Continuous Partial Attention (but I'm a man.....can we do that?), the Move to the Edge, from Interruption to Engagement - and OpenID and widgets of course - plus the usual interplay on Attention Metadata between those who believe in machine readable tags and the Semantic Web, and those who are much less certain about it's usefulness.

I was also quite struck by the coexistence in the discussion of both the call for more Ad creativity and the realisation that Google et al are putting in more and more analytical horsepower - I'd hypothesize that if anything one needs less creativity per Ad if The Numbers are known.

However, the thing that gelled in my head tonight is that the Attention Economy is just one step in an overall system of Getting Your Message Across. First you have to Engage, then get my Trust, then make it through my FoFNet, and only then will you get Attention - not yet Acceptance, or even any Action.

(Postscript - forgot to note the other thought, that this is all about Stuff that wants attention when we don't really want to give it - for Stuff we do want to give attention to we will make all the time in the world available)

To close - a great quote from the Old Attention Economy....from Prof Herbert Rotfeld of Auburn University:

Tivo didn’t really change that much….Consumers were always able to avoid mass media advertising. Television breaks would be the time to make snacks or go to the toilet, magazine readers could turn the page and newspapers could have entire sections tossed aside by readers. Since the advent of preset buttons on car radios five decades ago, commuter audiences would shift between alternative stations as the string of commercials outran the listener's ability to tolerate the repetitive messages.

The advertisers' "solution" to audience avoidance of their messages was to increase the number of messages, so even the effort of commercial avoidance becomes a source of audience frustration. Television commercial breaks are longer and the commercials are shorter, so there are more spots appearing per break. Even when time-shifting favorite television programs, the zapping of the increasing quantity and length of commercial breaks gets tedious.

This increasing advertising-to-editorial ratio is really a function of simple media economics. With the decline of the former mass media into more segmented and targeted options, the total audience size of even the largest vehicles is greatly reduced. With smaller audiences, the vehicles need to sell more time or space to make the same amount of money.

And yet, if the clutter were less, each message would have greater impact and the advertisers should be willing to pay more per audience member reached, or so you would intuitively think, assuming it is well targeted. Despite claims to a highly targeted media environment, advertising is still often placed without much regard for each vehicle's audience, resulting in the equivalence of Internet spam.

Quite.

* Though not a new one, I recall people in the mid 90's discussing this with the emergence of the early Web 1.0 SocNets (on eGroups, Mosaic etc). It's interesting in that it wasn't really tried in web 1.0 - was that due to system problems or does it ultimately just not work?