It was a strange coincidence that I watched the 62 Super Bowl ads back-to-back, (thanks to this aggregation effort by Mashable) on the same day that I read this very insightful post by Steve Rubel on “Attentionomics“. The slideshow is also embedded below. In addition to the key takeaways – the lifespan of content created on popular networks, it also suggests ways to overcome this.
The interesting thing was that I would have watched the Super Bowl ads without any prompting. Which makes me wonder whether the logical and scientific way proposed above to ‘game’ the attention economy is the best approach. I think my discomfort stems from the fact that this leans more towards the ‘media’ in social media and looks at the social platforms from an information dissemination perspective.
My consumption of the ads was more out of interest. The term ‘Intention Economy‘ springs to mind immediately in this context.
The intention economy is an approach to viewing markets and economies focusing on buyers as a scarce commodity. The consumers’ intent to buy drives the production of goods to meet their specific needs.
The thought is whether/how this can be applied to consumption of content. If it can, then the approach would be to make the content as easy to find and accessible as possible, to ‘appear’ at the time of demand, and create different contexts to drive that consumption.
There is another perspective too. The easiest way to elucidate it would be with the example of Google Reader/ Twitter Lists, where I pay attention to certain content creators, because I trust and value the content they produce. As Edelman’s Trust Barometer would tell you, the ‘trust in experts’ has actually increased this year. Their appeal does not really depend on the attention metrics.
Can’t think of any other ‘angles’, but if you do, please drop me a line, or comment.
So perhaps like the owned-paid-earned forms of content, brands will have to work on all 3 fronts. Harness expert power (employees and others), seed efficiently, create and use contexts effectively, and be easily accessible (like the brand-stream I proposed last week)
until next time, at ease now 🙂
PS: New research on why consumers ‘break up’ with brands on email, FB, Twitter, could be taken as a pointer to look at alternatives to information dissemination.