Where is your attention focused?

Photography, Travel, Innovation & Entrepreneurship

Where is your attention focused?

November 3rd, 2008 Comments

Critical Mass, Chicago, IL
Critical Mass | Chicago, IL | Nov 2008

It is not known how many office robberies take place every year because there is no Wikipedia entry for office robbery statistics. (link)

After I heard this I instantly searched for “office robbery statistics” on Wikipedia and the Internet. Did you?

And I was a bit disappointed to find nothing. Why didn’t “The Office” create a special page to show up high in natural search? Why didn’t they create a mock Wikipedia page?

Need another reminder that this is not an either / or world?

This is a multi-channel world because we are multi-channel people. Our eyes, ears and minds are open throughout the day to a variety of mediums and messages. As a marketer, choosing only one is not the answer; not only do people have divergent access to and usage of a variety of mass-market and niche channels, but our attention is scattered.

In a low-attention economy, the scarce resource is time, effort, passion and attention.

Marketers: how can you help people find more time? Solve questions faster? Find authoritative sources faster? Make decisions better, with less thought, less information and less need to second-guess and sort through opaque messages.

Focus less on our money and more on our time. In an economic environment where we may be less likely to part with our money and even more confused and stressed by our lives, there are still significant problems to solve, create mindshare and build a business.

—

UPDATED: A good summary of the back-story on the Wikipedia back-and-forth over “office robbery statistics”.

By Taylor Davidson. Posted November 3rd, 2008. Category: Innovation & Entrepreneurship Comments

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Jun Loayza

Hi Taylor, I completely agree with you. Time, much more than money, is becoming the "commodity" that we value most in our society. Marketers have so many resources that they can use to brand their company, resources that are completely free. I feel that spending the time to build a community around your company is much more effective than buying an ad on a tv commercial or magazine print.

How cool would it have been to see "The Office" create that Wikipedia page. Now that you have pointed it out, I wonder if there are any creative ways that I can further market Future Delivery.

Keep writing great stuff!

- Jun Loayza

Taylor Davidson

Time has always been important: what's different is where we are on the scales of quantity, context and awareness. We've moved up the scale in the amount of information we see, with greater available context, and we're more aware of the message, its sender and its intent. We've adapted over time; we've become able to process more information, more requests, more decisions.

But we've also had to learn to pay attention to a lot less, ignoring and discarding a lot more noise. Finding signals is harder. Knowing what to do with it is harder. And that's a real problem available to solve.

The channel choice depends on your audience. Figure out what they do (and don't) pay attention to: what messages, what channels, what time, what context, from who, etc.

I believe heavily in building a community around a product, but don't forget that communities can exist online and offline.

I really was disappointed. It would have been great to see a fake wikipedia page show up in natural search...

And thanks!