Attention is your biggest cost

The final part of the "Conversation" chapter in The Conversity Model is all about attention: how to grab it and how to hold it long enough to activate your audiences.
Everybody wants attention: individuals, organisations and companies alike. Attention for ideas, products/services or commentary. In ‘Trust Agents’, author, journalist and marketing consultant Chris Brogan talks about attention as currency, and also about the idea that there are multiple types of this currency:

Attention is and will continue to be our scarcest resource.

The most classic tactic to grab attention is by running an advertising campaign. Some campaigns will do anything to stand out from the crowd, by using pop-ups, take-overs, stunts and hoaxes, and even by spamming. But no matter how hard these campaigns try to interrupt people during whatever it is they are doing, this tactic is past its sell-by date: ‘interruption marketing’ is dying. People no longer just sit back passively and wait for things to be brought to them. They now go out and seek things for themselves.

UK regulator Ofcom published their Communications Market Report last year. Click on the bubble chart to see the proportions of weekly reach (= attention + importance) of activity of different consumer media:

Based on these UK audiences, email, mobile calls and mobile texting get most of our attention, while radio and recorded tv programmes score the lowest. Media that are important and grab our attention are interpersonal media – and not mass media – the only exception being print media.

Social media (or social networking, as they are called in this report) sit somewhere in the middle. They now account for nearly a quarter (23%) of all time spent online. This has been driven by the growth of Facebook, whose reach rose by 31% to reach a unique monthly audience of nearly 25 million in the year to May 2010. This is remarkable, since communications activities such as emailing, texting and social media all command high attention and high importance scores from consumers.

Further reading:

• Ofcom Communications Market Report 2010 (.pdf) @ stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk