Before or After the Click?

[Jay Deragon]

Social media continues to evolve as both an art and science aimed at building relationships for whatever purpose. The science involves keeping track and applying the latest and greatest social technology for specific purposes. The art evolves around what it takes to get people’s attention, attraction, affinity and ultimately the audience.

The web has unleashed unlimited amounts of information to us. There is more information than we can possibly consume so the question is always how to find the most valuable information. If you look at this from a business or advertisement point of view instead of a consumer view then the value of information is not the issue. Instead the issue is getting people’s attention before the “click”.

Where Ever Attention Flows Will Money Follow?.

Kevin Kelly writes: In the attention economy it is all about attention. Getting a user/consumer to pay attention to you, your product, service or advertisement is very difficult.

There are several ways to draw the attention of a user. You could provide valuable service or information. That might get attention, but competition is fierce. You can take a shortcut and instead work on your findability. Google Juice, Self-linking, SEO strategy to get your site higher ranked than others can draw attention. You can engage with users, become part of social communities, build up trust, reputation or whuffie.

No matter what you do, it seems everyone else is doing it too. The web has brought us democracy. Anyone can do what anyone else can do. You don’t need to be an expert or professional. The web brings you all the tools to start. It’s what makes professional blogging so hard. There is competition from thousands of other blogs, professional or amateur.

I guess that is what the attention economy is about. The only thing left that is scarce in this mad world, is attention. While thinking in terms of attention can bring us a lot of good, it also comes with a downside. The biggest downside in my opinion is that we seem to be quickly moving into an era where attention is captured in one-liners.

It’s the rat race for attention that makes soundbites more important than substance. Media need soundbites to get the attention of the consumer. And it seems all we care about is to listen to soundbites. The complexity of everything is reduced to a one-liner.

Do One Liners Make You “Click”?

It is one thing to get people’s attention. It is another thing to keep it. Keeping people’s attention means creating an attraction to a subject matter or a project. Keeping attention by providing attractive content and conversations creates the affinity which draws people to come back to “your space”. When they keep coming back you’ve created an audience to serve.

Creating the “click” is more about human relations than it is technology.

What say you?