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".
- 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.
- You have CONTROL
- You have the ability to TRANSFER your attention
- Your attention has WORTH
Embed Twitter and Facebook on your website or blog
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:
more documents from Kemp Edmonds
Facebook Advertising Undressed
Sample 'Responder Demographics' Report:
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".
Understanding Social Networks: Delivery
The three major social networks or as a Pakistani gentleman who repurposed my presentation calls them "The Three Amigos" Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter should be considered the essential social networks for most users. Niche Social Networks are a different beast altogether. I want to discuss the differences in 'Delivery' for the Three Amigos.
Linking together different social media profiles is all the rage these days and it does save time, but it may do damage to people's networks that they may not consider. Consider how you felt the last time you read something you didn't understand. This may be how your network on LinkedIn or Facebook feel seeing RT, @ or # in a message you post. They may not understand what it is.
Twitter is different from Facebook and LinkedIn in that it has symbols and key strings you wouldn't normally see when using the other networks. If you are someone who has only heard of Twitter but hasn't come to understand these words and symbols it can be challenging to understand and off putting. Remember what it was like the last time you read something that you didn't understand completely.
I recently linked my Youtube with Twitter and Facebook. The problem was when I favourited things or added videos to a playlist I do it a whole bunch at once flooding the stream. Once I saw it I changed the settings which had a lot of good options, like it would only update my networks when i uploaded a new video. Let's look at a few examples of messages across social networks.
This is an example of what a Facebook post looks like from April Smith. Notice the logo and the meta description pulled from the page automatically by Facebook. April has also posted this to the DNC Fan Page wall by using Facebook's mention function neither the graphic, the meta description nor the mention appear when cross posting as below:
I don't mean to call out my friend Jeremy Lim he is a busy professional in high demand so I understand him using cross posting to save time and get out his message but one just has to read the comments section of his post to understand the reaction of users who didn't know what a hashtag (#) was.
This post could have appeared on Facebook in this way:
The big difference about the social networks is the different audiences. We can't treat them all the same. On Twitter the hashtags become links to searches about the topic (EX). This is what Jeremy's post looked like on Twitter:
On Twitter the message looks perfect and fits in the Twitter ecosystem, but on Facebook it looks out of place and makes at least one person feel like they 'haven't learned the tricks'. Jeremy reveals that in fact he is cross posting to almost a dozen different social networking sites with the same message. I believe doing so is taking a risk.
Lastly, one of my favourite independent local marketing people, Rosa Meyers. Rosa cross posts from Twitter to LinkedIn. Rosa is starting out in marketing and LinkedIn is one the best places for her to find and connect with current and future clients some of whom may have never seen an RT or a # because they don't use Twitter. This is what her cross posted tweet looked like on LinkedIn:
Cross posting from Twitter to LinkedIn is a problem due to the differences in frequency for people using each platform as well. The biggest risk here is that the audience and potential audience on LinkedIn don't appreciate the 'cryptic' and very frequent updates as much as the audience on Twitter does. We only get one chance to make a first impression and when someone sees a status update on LinkedIn that they don't understand they may be less likely to connect with us.
In conclusion, as more and more people start using Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn it's important that they feel like these ecosystems are easy to understand and I believe cross posting makes that more difficult. This post started out as one but will now be made into two: Delivery and Frequency, which I will cover in a later post.
For people who talk regularly these different messages are not a problem, they talk about it and someone learns something. It's when you don't speak to someone who only sees you on LinkedIn or Facebook, that the sight of these characters and symbols, which they don't understand, can put them off of communications and as the poster we may never know as they hide our updates on Facebook or LinkedIn. What are your thoughts on cross posting? What social networks do you use? Do you notice these differences in symbols and language? What are your feelings about it?
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