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Chapter 13

The New Media University 1001

Attention and Word of Mouth Marketing

In the spirit of the New Media University metaphor, we've now graduated and are pursuing advanced learning, the same way we would seek to earn an MBA in continuing education.

FROM INTROVERSION TO EXTROVERSION

As you may or may not know, I'm a big believer in, and also forever a student of, the social aspects of new media. I've dedicated a significant amount of time to studying the sociology behind the technology, as well as the implications of technology in society and how we interact with one another. Indeed, I believe the implications are much bigger than we think. In many cases, the promise of online sociology are still greatly underestimated.

The staggering adoption numbers of social media bring to light a quantum shift in our behavior. We are, without a doubt, empowering a new genre of digital extroverts, encouraged by what I playfully refer to as the Verizon Network—the armada of virtual friends and peers who journey with us as we traverse online and offline. Perhaps this is more accurately defined as a personal support system or quite possibly a socialized ego system that champions free thought and speech, while instilling confidence and self-esteem with every comment, retweet, reaction, and connection we earn.

This observation is much more profound than we may initially expect. And its implications for the future of media and marketing are not yet fully understood. As we examine the social landscape and our place within it, acknowledging this cultural (r)evolution will only promote individual-focused media. Context, not content, becomes king.

THE NOW WEB

We are witnessing a shift in power. Once tightly controlled by publishers, broadcasters, and corporations, the power to publish and connect messages and stories to people was considered a luxury only a matter of a few years ago—a privilege many of us never would have experienced without the introduction of social platforms. Technology is a change agent, and the capabilities and accompanying benefits that social media offers are liberating our channels of influence. Information is now democratized and we the people are making our voices heard.

The simultaneous advantage and disadvantage of new media is exemplified in its reach, inertia, and volume.

Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and other microcommunities that define the real-time Web (or the now Web) are captivating and distracting our focus. But, while many argue that they're decreasing productivity, they're also engaging a more active and enlightened community of media-literate socialites.

Twitter is the culprit and is proudly holding the smoking gun. When the ability to search the billions of tweets that were flying across our screens materialized, we were bestowed with a gift of instant insight and revelation.

This is the dawn of the real-time Web, and it's further feeding our insatiable appetite for information as it's published.

When it comes to searches, the most notable comparison between traditional and real-time discovery is represented in the difference between human memory and consciousness. The experience of searching for relevant information is personified in the context of what you're doing and not necessarily what you're typing into the search box. The Internet is more biology than technology.

The patterns for real-time search offer an augmented reality, mapping who we are on the Internet. The constructs of what, where, how, and to whom we communicate and share information are converging through related activity and a syndicated architecture designed to connect the dots and amplify our voice. What we're learning through Twitter and real-time search is that people want access to the immediacy of conversations tied to keywords, regardless of the authority, page rank, and SEO.

It's the difference between finding the right content on the Web and finding the right content, right now, across the Web and social media.

As Gerry Campbell, CEO of Collecta, a real-time platform puts it, “I want to know what people are saying about my topic, right now. The minute you put rankings and filters on search, it stops representing real time. Every minute, stories are told on the Web. Yet in traditional search, most are usually ranked out of the results and therefore, people don't get a chance to see them.”

In 2008, I introduced the Conversation Prism, (www .theconversationprism.com), with Jesse Thomas to map the social landscape as a way of gaining real insights into the conversations transpiring across social networks, where and when they occurred. The dream was, of course, to have a search window into the Social Web and the social graph, in real time. Specialized tools such as Collecta, Topsy, Radian6, and PeopleBrowsr's Research.y are peeling back the layers of society, focusing our attention to change how we listen. These tools are also plugging us directly into the conversations that shape perception. We'll discuss these search tools in a later chapter on listening and monitoring.

While searching the entire spectrum of the Conversation Prism in real time is not yet fully realized, it is imminent and it is powerful.

Real-time search of the now Web reveals a river, while traditional search architectures discover oceans.

THE RISE OF THE STATUSPHERE

In 2009, Twitter stole the spotlight with millions of passionate users not only promoting Twitter, but also ushering in a new generation of real-time, searchable conversations. Twitter is one of many social networks that provide a platform to do so, usually prompted by a question for you to answer in your intentionally limited short post or update.

I call this new form of posting the statusphere,1 a play on other descriptors of social media such as the blogosphere, Twitterverse, and socialmediasphere. The statusphere is what defines and shapes the egosystem.

To define it more precisely, the statusphere is any network in which your post is intended to answer questions related to activity or thoughts. The idea is simple: Provide a quick update in a short form and click “update.” This short-form response is much easier to produce than a blog post, podcast, webcast, or video, which may require long and involved production cycles. It made media more conversational.

At the moment, Twitter, Facebook, and other microcommunities define the statusphere and are driving action and determining the direction and course of individual attention.

The statusphere is particularly important for brands, since publishers and consumers are losing the luxury of infinite awareness and qualifying their information sources—meaning that they are narrowing their focus to only those voices and peers who share their interests, passions, and insights. We are at the center of our social graphs, and our connections determine how information finds us. As a result, we are now forging contextual networks within networks, to improve our signal to noise ratio.

We can now readily identify and connect directly to existing contacts and also forge new friendships to create a series of interconnected contextual networks within broader networks. Essentially, we can find the right people who may be interested in our story without having to shotgun our value proposition to the masses. This sets the stage for the social effect, a connection of targeted social graphs, or interest graphs, that propagates pertinent information to the right people.

It's in the way that you use it.

Yes, the statusphere is brimming with unimportant chatter, but it is also overflowing with highly curated and valuable information, important questions and answers, influential opinions and observations, breaking news, trending activities, feedback, and personal insight, all of which would otherwise go unnoticed in the volume of online chatter.

Producing and posting updates that people find insightful, entertaining, and enriching is how you build a meaningful foundation for which people follow, admire, and trust you.

NEWS NO LONGER BREAKS, IT TWEETS

While we may argue over the degree of intelligence behind the wisdom of the crowds, the ability to swiftly spark word of mouth to propel information across the Web is incontestable.

Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks are defeating even the most nimble news agencies and bureaus, and it's changing the way we find and share news.

Without having to do anything other than open the window to your social graph of choice, you have immediate access to information, as it happens, curated by your friends and contacts, even before the traditional media has time to report it. Think about it. Over the last four years, we have had access to the following information in real time, as told by people, who report live from the center of activity:

• News of earthquakes and other natural disasters
• The passing of celebrities
• An airplane making an emergency landing in the Hudson River
• The election in Iran
• Terrorist bombings
• Sports scores and updates
• Earnings reports and stocks
• Gossip
• Updates from live events

Now and in the future, information will find you. And it will be spread through the vision and words of our peers and other citizen reporters who are compelled to leverage their networks of influence to unite people around information that captures the heart, mind, and soul.

The real-time Web also serves as a telltale source for trends and represents a leading indicator for any topic related to your interests or business.

The era of now is fueling new media. The pursuit of now is conditioning us to expect information as it happens, whether it's accurate or developing.

The question is: How will this latest chapter of community-powered news and information production, distribution, and consumption affect your ability to connect with your customers?

As now media continues to mature, its impact is clear. The opportunity for social media lies in our ability to build a two-way information bridge between the point of our content introduction, alternative sources for information, and the people looking for insight and direction. To build a community, we have to be an active participant in it.

Today's news and trends no longer break through traditional news sources, voices, or wires; they're captured through the camera lenses, mobile phones, and laptops of people who serve as both witnesses and reporters.

THE ATTENTION RUBICON

We're experiencing an increasingly thinning state of focus resulting from volumes of information flying at us within our networks of interest. It's affecting how and what we consume, when, and, more importantly, how we react, learn, and share. It's the quest for an unquenchable thirst for something we cannot yet define. And that something is forever vying for our attention, pushing us to do more with less, driven by the omnipresent fear of potentially missing what's next.

For those attempting to capture attention, this section reveals the state of awareness, to help produce a more substantive signal that effectively rises above the noise.

Attention is a precious commodity. And if you subscribe to the theory of attention economics, we're indeed living in an era of information overload that is pushing us to the edge of attention bankruptcy.

Attention economics suggests that human attention is a scarce commodity and attempts to resolve the management of information and its associated challenges through the application of economic theory.2

Linda Stone, a widely recognized visionary and thought leader, observes that attention is “the most powerful tool of the human spirit. We can enhance or augment our attention with practices like meditation and exercise, diffuse it with technologies like email and Blackberries, or alter it with pharmaceuticals. In the end, though, we are fully responsible for how we choose to use this extraordinary tool.”3

The Social Web and new services that continue the permeation into everything we do online are proving that attention is, as expected, not scalable. However, the rate of information that flows to and past us only continues to escalate.

As documented in an August 2009 article in the Wall Street Journal written by John Freeman,

In the past two decades, we have witnessed one of the greatest breakdowns of the barrier between our work and personal lives since the notion of leisure time emerged in Victorian Britain as a result of the Industrial Age. It has put us under great physical and mental strain, altering our brain chemistry and daily needs. It has isolated us from the people with whom we live, siphoning us away from real-world places where we gather. It has encouraged flotillas of unnecessary jabbering, making it difficult to tell signal from noise. It has made it more difficult to read slowly and enjoy it, hastening the already declining rates of literacy. It has made it harder to listen and mean it, to be idle and not fidget. This is not a sustainable way to live. This lifestyle of being constantly on causes emotional and physical burnout, workplace meltdowns, and unhappiness.4

He then asks the reader, “How many of our most joyful memories have been created in front of a screen?”

Freeman's assertions are accurate and I don't disagree with him. As I've long maintained, social media is fueling our Industrial Revolution.

As brands and content publishers, we must understand the psychology and sociology governing the socialization of online information. Those contributing to the egosystem are not yet ready to step off the treadmill per se. We're actively investing in our intelligence and social capital as much as we're defining the new boundaries for discovering and sharing material information.

Instead of inhibiting the pace and breadth of information flow, we must channel relevant details and data.

It's part technology, part science, and part conditioning of the mind.

This is what I refer to as the Attention Rubicon.

A rubicon is defined as a limit that, when passed or exceeded, permits of no return and typically results in irrevocable commitment.5 We have hit an information crossroads and many of us are unknowingly contributing to the Attention Rubicon as we increasingly consume, and interact with, social objects and people.

The Attention Rubicon is the acceptance that our appetite for information has passed the point of no return. Therefore, we must concentrate our energies on innovation, technologically and psychologically, to process and parse data more effectively. Embracing this Attention Rubicon and investing in our ability to learn, share, and contribute is how we will thrive in today's attention economy.

Linda Stone offers a solution to this dilemma. She refers to it as Continuous Partial Attention and defines it this way:

Continuous partial attention describes how many of us use our attention today. It is different from multitasking. The two are differentiated by the impulse that motivates them. When we multitask, we are motivated by a desire to be more productive and more efficient. We're often doing things that are automatic, that require very little cognitive processing. We give the same priority to much of what we do when we multitask—we file and copy papers, talk on the phone, eat lunch—we get as many things done at one time as we possibly can in order to make more time for ourselves and in order to be more efficient and more productive.

To pay continuous partial attention is to pay partial attention—continuously. It is motivated by a desire to be a live node on the network. Another way of saying this is that we want to connect and be connected. We want to effectively scan for opportunity and optimize for the best opportunities, activities, and contacts, in any given moment. To be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognized, and to matter. We pay continuous partial attention in an effort not to miss anything. It is an always-on, anywhere, anytime, anyplace behavior that involves an artificial sense of constant crisis. We are always on high alert when we pay continuous partial attention. This artificial sense of constant crisis is more typical of continuous partial attention than it is of multitasking.

Whatever we call it, we are in truth learning to publish, process, and react to information in Twitter time.

CHANNELING OUR FOCUS: THE ATTENTION DASHBOARD

Attention is engaged at the point of introduction. Retweets (RT) and favorites in Twitter, likes and comments in Facebook, posting shortened links that connect friends and followers back to the source, have changed our behavior.

We are in control of what we read and learn, and responsible for what we share.

As technology transforms, our sources for discovering and consuming information also continue to evolve. With the pace of information published through the activity streams we follow, our attention spans are overloaded and scattered.

Our intentions are limited by available time, daily responsibilities, usual distractions, and the realistic ability to process only part of the sheer volume of data that flows through our social streams.

Conversations and social objects are distributed beyond our reach and they are tugging at our attention and focus.

In 2009, the introduction of tools and services that funneled information from multiple social networks into one aggregated stream gave rise to a new type of reader.

These tools essentially channeled updates from one or multiple social networks such as Twitter and Facebook into one easy-to-read activity stream. This allowed individuals to stay up to date on information and trends, click through to shared content, respond directly in the timeline, and also read and send private messages to their contacts. Tools such as TweetDeck, Seesmic, Co-Tweet, and HootSuite, among others, thus served as the attention dashboards for the social consumer.

I introduced the concept of attention dashboards in 2008 in reference to Twitter and Facebook specifically, as they served as the window to the social world. I suggested that these windows were open for the majority of the day and provided the ability for us to stay connected and keep our ears to the ground, while allowing our attention to focus on other responsibilities. As such, these social feeds serve as our centralized attention dashboards and determine what we read, what we say, and who responds, simply by the information that continually flows through it. We're engaged at the point and place of introduction and bound by context and time.

Businesses must tap in to these attention dashboards for them to earn awareness and, more importantly, build relationships. As we're learning, noticeable content sparks curiosity and dictates our next move and subsequently the next moves and reactions of friends and friends of friends. The most successful initiatives require a personalized engagement strategy to consistently vie for consideration. The laws of attraction and relationship management will support your efforts when you create compelling content and transparently connect it to the people whom you believe will benefit—and through the people who influence their decisions.

It's now our job to identify and recognize those influencers, trust agents, and tastemakers. With each new connection, businesses can appear in multiple, dispersed dashboards and timelines. Worthy social objects, combined with evangelism and clever promotion, will earn visibility and expanded syndication through retweets (RT), link shares, Diggs, Stumbles, bookmarks, tweetbacks, likes, and other forms of social recognition. With each new instance of sharing, content reverberates through extended social graphs.

The ability to provoke a response through the attention dashboard requires creativity, relevance, and a natural understanding of the nuances that trigger desirable action.

THE SOCIAL EFFECT: THE FUTURE OF BRANDING AND WORD OF MOUTH MARKETING

The responsibility is yours to create a dedicated tribe that supports, shares, and responds to your engagement. It's the only way to build a valuable community around you and what you represent.

The challenge, however, is first getting noticed. In the process, we gain awareness, reinforced by our actions and words to recruit peers, empower champions, and establish dedicated communities.

The ability to engage someone directly in the attention dashboard, incite a response, and hopefully have them share their experience with their network is what I termed the social effect, a modern adaptation of the network effect, driven by word of mouth across social and interest graphs.

To better define the network effect, it is the phenomenon that occurs when one user of a good or service affects the adoption and subsequent use of the product by other people.6 In other words, the network effect dictates that a service becomes more valuable as more people use it, leading to an ever-increasing number of users. The most commonly used example of the network effect is the telephone. A more modern example would most definitely include the Internet. And just to stay on the social highway, we couldn't ignore Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. While word of mouth is often influential in the beginning—for example, you may use something because someone you know uses it—eventually the masses will adopt a product or service because everyone uses it.7

The social effect is rooted in similar theory. It determines actual reach, resonance, and the course for social objects and relevant dialogue. The analysis and reverse engineering of the social effect visualizes behavior, conversation paths, and click patterns.

Connections with friends, followers, and their respective FoFs are constantly shifting and never duplicated. The conversations one maintains online produces a resulting expansion and contraction of the network at a particular point in time based on the topics of discussion. I refer to the state of the social graph characterized by time, theme, and connections as the interest graph, aka the relevant net, and, as we've discussed earlier, it is linked by context.

The social effect and its reach and resonance are defined by a series of gauges, measurements, and scales. Studying these elements and conditions contribute to the ability to distract activity in your favor, improving the resonance of your social objects (see Figure 13.1).

Understanding and mastering disruption theory and the social effect unveil the most important factors in making something go viral. Interest graphs and the relationships that define it are discoverable. Microdisruption theory visualizes the true opportunity for resonance and the potential course and reach for the social effect.

Remember, the secret to earning resonance is through relevance and engagement supported by a genuine intent to introduce value into the stream. This is how we build trust, establish authority, and earn significance over time. Brands, too, can become influencers.

NOTES

1. Brian Solis, “Coining the Statusphere: The Social Web's Next Big Thing,” Channeling Brian Solis (March 9, 2009), http://briansolis.tumblr.com/post/85090914/coining-the-statusphere-the-social-webs-next-big.

2. “Attention economy,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy.

3. Linda Stone, “Continuous Partial Attention—Not the Same as Multi-Tasking,” BusinessWeek (July 24, 2008), www.businessweek.com/business_at_work/time_management/archives/2008/07/continuous_part.html.

4.John Freeman, “A Manifesto for Slow Communication,” Wall Street Journal (August 21, 2009), http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203550604574358643117407778.html.

5. “Rubicon,” Dictionary.com, http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ rubicon.

6. “Network effect,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_ effect.

7. “Network effect,” Marketing Terms, www.marketingterms.com/dictionary/ network_effect/.