The Attention Stream: Keeping Your Market Engaged in a Constant Stream of Content…

I recently brought up “the attention stream” concept in a brainstorming session with my private group, and I was asked to blog about it and go into more detail…

The Attention Stream is the content that crosses your screen that actually gets and/or keeps your attention.

Tweets, news, Facebook updates, emails, blog posts, instant messages, advertisements – and everything else in between.

Consider the amount of content you “see” on a daily basis. There is no possible way it can ALL engage us. And who would want it to? A big portion of that content is spam – or just plain irrelevant (to us, or at that exact moment, at least)…

Each of us has a mental filtering system, choosing what we will and will not give our full attention. We scan the streams and our eyes are drawn to those things that interest us most, for whatever reason they interest us.

Those things we are drawn to and choose to respond to, out of all the data in our content stream, are what make up our personal Attention Stream.

The Problem

The problem is that there is simply too much content for anyone to possibly consume, and so we miss things that ARE important or relevant to us. Prime example: I missed that one of my longest standing friends had a baby girl. Completely missed it! She happened into my Attention Stream this week, which is when I saw photos of her precious no-longer-a-baby girl.

In the same way, we miss exciting events happening in our own back yard. We miss the window on awesome products or affiliate opportunities. We miss a great blog post we would have – and should have – shared with our list or our followers.

We miss a lot!

And guess what? As a marketer, as an online business owner, a huge portion of your target market is missing most of YOUR updates too.

The Solution

Social Media sites are making great efforts to keep our content streams relevant and interesting. Relevant and interesting to us personally, that is. Their objective is to keep us engaged on their site, to keep us using their service.

They do this by keeping us engaged in the content there. The minute the content stream becomes overwhelming or (majority) irrelevant, it loses our attention. And that site loses its appeal. And they lose us. In the same way that Google strives to serve relevant results to serve their target market: searchers.

How do they achieve this?

Twitter chose to filter conversations (tweets) out of our streams that our friends were having with people who are not also our friend. So if I am tweeting to Joe, and you are not following Joe, you don’t see my tweet to Joe in your tweet stream. If you are friends with Joe, you’ll see our conversation in your stream.

(I didn’t care for this update personally, as that was one of the things I loved about Twitter in the beginning: seeing who’s talking to who and about what. )

Google is playing psychic and trying to guess what you are going to search for before you even finish typing your search query.

Facebook now uses an algorithm to customize our main content stream. So instead of seeing all updates in chronological order like we used to, it shows us updates “based on relevance”. What they deem relevant to us that day, that is.

Just following someone on Twitter won’t make you privy to all of their conversations (tweets). Friending or Liking someone on Facebook doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll see every Status Update they make. So while you think you’re selectively choosing the content you want to consume, it is filtered even further to the pieces of that content that are actually relevant to you.

They are not psychics of course, but their solutions and algorithms are definitely becoming more intuitive.

Marketing On The Intuitive Web

Ever heard the saying: “You are what you eat”? Well, somewhere in the very near future we may be saying: you are what you click.

If the web as a whole becomes more and more intuitive in the way it serves us content, what does this mean for content marketers?

It means that you have to figure out a way to be (and stay) active, relevant and popular. You need to keep your market engaged with your content – linking to it, commenting, liking, voting, sharing, etc.

That sounds like a no-brainer, right? I mean, people have been teaching that for years. We already know all that social media stuff.

My prediction is that what we see happening now… is only a taste of what is coming down the tube. It’s inevitable. People’s heads (or at least their mobile devices) are going to explode otherwise. Content needs to be filtered. We can’t expect the public to subscribe responsibly. Or to even use the tools & filters they’re offered.

Ultimately I see more filtering and streamlining as the solution. You’ll be served what’s popular among your friends, and perhaps the types of things you’ve responded to (clicked or shared) most in the past. Future algorithms may very well be a combination of popularity + personal history. Intuitive indeed.

And this is not so bad. On a typical day I’m a single mother of teens who has a dog and recently quit smoking that goes out for sushi almost weekly and travels a lot but does most of her shopping online. So yes! “Serve me” I say! Show me what’s relevant, what my friends are excited about, what’s local, what’s going on that might actually interest me.

Except… things change. I might get married, get pregnant, start smoking again, rescue 8 kittens, become a vegetarian and actually go to Wal-Mart. Yes, in that order. No worries you say – the algorithms can keep up!

But I wonder. Does this leave us any room to grow, or to learn new things – or about new things? Only if it’s popular with our friends (because then it will show up in our stream). But it begs the question – who will see it, to make it popular?

All this to come back around to the question of how to keep your market engaged. How to stay in their personal attention stream and keep them actively clicking, liking, commenting on and sharing your content.

This is important, even if the web never changes (um, it’s constantly changing). The problem still exists: there is entirely too much content. Even without digital filtering systems, we’ll always have our own personal mental filtering systems.

I think I’ll open this up for discussion…

I’d love to hear your thoughts, and how you engage or interact with your market. How do you get, and keep, their attention? I’d also be interested to know how you came to be reading this post – a tweet, Facebook, email, a friend?

I’ll share my own thoughts (and some strategic tips!) in my next post.

Best,

p.s. Thank you, Google- I needed that extra 12 seconds every day to hunt down my friends on Facebook that didn’t appear in my stream, or to manually look up Tweet streams to see who’s talking to who!

Category: Internet Marketing