Marketing Director

Information Fatigue & Attention Scarcity

"What does an abundance of information create? A scarcity of attention."
- Herbert Simon, 1971.
Original Photo By: obo-bobolina remixed under Creative Commons License
I stumbled onto a video (check it out below) by social media and wine guy Gary Vaynerchuk making some groundbreaking personal statements about the way that Twitter, conference calls, webinars, advice giving and speaking gigs have burned him out and he wants to 'play more basketball' among other things. His comments are fair and honest. I have noticed this kind of social media and information fatigue among users new and old. The video starts at the point when he says he's going to give up using Twitter and I think he is pointing out a fundamental flaw in the current online economy; we are not considering the scarcity of attention. Join me for more after Gary's Video:







Attention Scarcity and information fatigue don't just effect people like Gary Vee and Oprah. We all know lots of people, some experts and others newbies, who are currently experiencing information overload and I am sure you do too. I came across the Attention Economics on Wikipedia. Where it is defined as "an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity, and applies economic theory to solve various information management problems".
The entry is very thorough and discusses taking advantage of these technologies for financial marketing and sales benefit lending to its origins within sales and marketing particularly online. The Looming Attention Crisis is discussed briefly in this post. Fast Company's John Hagel does a great job discussing the problem and ROA (return on attention) in this post. ReadWriteWeb covers the Attention economy in a smart way in this post. They quote a group calling themselves the AttentionTrust who created these basic consumer rights in the attention economy:
  • Property: You own your attention and can store it wherever you wish.
  • Mobility: You can securely move your attention wherever you want, whenever you want to.
  • Economy: You can pay attention to whomever you wish and receive value in return.
  • Transparency: You can see exactly how your attention is being used.
The Value of Attention comes from three rules:
  1. You have CONTROL
  2. You have the ability to TRANSFER your attention
  3. Your attention has WORTH
Does your attention have worth? Are you experiencing information atigue? Do you battle attention scarcity? What do you do to overcome attention scarcity? What tools do you use?

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Embed Twitter and Facebook on your website or blog

Here Comes Everybody is a great book by Clay Shirky. It's all about how everyone can be a publisher and producer now. If this guy can anyone can. A lot of people want to know about embedding elements of Facebook and Twitter into a web page or blog in non-technical speak, so here goes...

The Short Answer:
These options can create dynamic content on your site whether embedding a relevant Twitter search window (as below) or placing Facebook widgets into your page to link to many different elements of Facebook it's easy to be a cut and paste coder and it can help you cross promote and show visitors what your 'community' looks like. Be sure to watch design and keep things clean and manageable for visitors. My site for example has far too many links and text unrelated to the main body and too many widgets, but I like information ;)


The Longer Answer:
I have created a document  about how to embed Facebook badges or elements and embedded it at the end of this post or download or view it online here on Slideshare (one of my favourite web tools for storage and display). The easiest way to embed Facebook elements is through their Facebook Widget site it's great and easy  to use. You can also check out my earlier post previewing Facebook Widgets it's from September 2009 when they were first released, so check the Facebook widget site for what's new.

If you want to put something like the "Follow Me On Twitter" badge, or the Retweet button or Share/AddThis bar at the top of the post you will need to know how to either cut and paste code or put an image on your page and link it. You can use a service like Twitter Buttons or click the above links for the respective tool.

Twitter Widgets: It wasn't easy to find them but here is the link. I strongly recommend you check out Twitter's Widget offerings first before trying the ways listed below:


Twitter's widgets are awesome and totally customizable. I am showing the Profile widget in the right column on the blog and the Search Widget is displayed below with a few tweaks and a custom search:



Tweetizen: The directions are straight forward and allow multiple types of embeds. Tweetizen offers a number of options to customize what appears on your page and can include searches or tweets from specific people. It's a good tool but doesn't have the all-out customization of Twitter's Gadgets.

How to embed Facebook onto your webpage or blog:






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Facebook Advertising Undressed

Facebook has passed Google in terms of market share of weekly visits in the US highlighting it's position as America's favourite website. With no end to the growth in sight Facebook Advertising is a must for any online advertising campaign or is it? This post will reveal how your information is 'given' to advertisers by Facebook.
People love Facebook but Facebook advertising is many things to many people. I asked my network on Facebook, "What do you think of Facebook Advertising?". The perspectives varied especially between those who use Facebook ads and those who can't stand to even see them. In this post I am addressing this complaint which came from more than a couple of the responders.

This is something of a common complaint about Facebook. The user's 'cut' is the entire Facebook ecosystem: the communication, the games, the quizzes etc. Facebook doesn't 'sell our personal information'. They provide advertisers access to a targeting system based on information you enter into Facebook. Your information is never revealed to advertisers and doesn't leave the site. This is the kind of information that advertisers receive:

Sample 'Responder Demographics' Report:


The information on the far right is: % of Impressions, % of Clickers and CTR. (m1317 = Male 13 -17 years old)




Sample 'Responder Profiles' Report:
 

*NOTE: Facebook's reporting system is imperfect. When a column is empty it moves items from columns to the right to the open column on the left. IE: the only books or movies listed by clickers were 'twilight series' and 'twilight' respectively, but 'rap' is a Music interest which has been pushed left because there was no 'Book' or 'Movie' in the second position. I hope that's not too confusing. The columns are: Interest, Book, Movie, Music, TV Show.

This may give an advertiser hints about what kinds of people click their ads but in no way does it release your personal information to advertisers. Besides choosing TV programs to advertise on what else could this be used for? Facebook offers advertisers and promoters many opportunities that are hard to find online especially when it comes to targeting. This is how Facebook turned a profit last year, ahead of schedule. Any business or product that employees people has to have a revenue model to grow. That is what Facebook is doing and ultimately it is to benefit the users. The history of the creation of Facebook is a fascinating read from the Business Insider.

What do you think of Facebook advertising? Love it as an advertiser? Hate it as a user? Or don't even notice it. These seem to be the three perspectives I have found I would love to hear yours in a comment below. Watch this space for a new post "Facebook Advertising's Benefits: Beyond the Click".

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