Attention Deficit
Monday morning I did a telephone interview with Tom Ahern for an article I’m writing on nonprofit communications, and we ended up having a ninety-minute free-wheeling conversation that was one of the most fascinating, stimulating, entertaining, informative, educational, and frankly just downright brilliant discussions I have had in a long time. And one of Tom’s most endearing traits is that while he may be the smartest guy in the room, he makes the other guy feel like the smart one. How does he do that?
Ernest Hemingway once said that writers need a “built-in, shock-proof crap detector.” Well, I came away from that interview convinced that Tom Ahern has a drop-forged, precision-machined, jewel-movement, laser-leveled, multiaxis-oil-bearing, gyroscopically-aligned, atomic-clock-calibrated crap detector that can guide a missile to within a centimeter of its target before breakfast.
Anyway, enough gushing. One of the topics we covered was social media for nonprofits, and he had an interesting story to share. He had just come back from a conference in Australia where he’d met someone who was actually raising some serious money for his nonprofit using social media as his primary communications tool. His secret? He spends 80 hours a week on it, and has something fresh every 20 minutes or so. Presumably except when he’s passed out from exhaustion between cattle-proddings.
So this chart popped into my head, which when I described it Tom said was brilliant (he was probably just being too polite to tell me that he’s already written a dozen articles on the same idea). The theory is that our communications technologies are moving toward this reductio ad absurdum where it will take more and more content to get fewer and fewer eyeballs.
With physical media you have natural brakes on the flywheel. It takes time to lay out and print newspapers. It takes time to truck them to the places where they will be sold. Books, same thing plus the time it takes to deliver them from warehouses to the purchasers. There’s a lot of friction built into those systems that slow things down to a human-scale velocity. I put newspapers at the intersection because they seemed to hit that sweet spot of getting just the right amount of information to just enough people just often enough to make readers feel like they got what they needed and to make advertisers feel like their money was well spent.
Increase the level of abstraction by reducing or removing time (for printing) and space (for transport and storage), and you start letting off on the brakes. That was the miracle of radio and then TV. But with those you still had few channels and one-directional flow to slow things down. Add the infinite channels of the web, and then the feedback and self-distribution of social media, and now you have a virtually frictionless system. The trend is toward an infinitely large amount of information being pumped at an infinitely small number of eyes.
What did they used to call that? Oh yeah. Junk mail. Spam. At this rate, everything will become spam. (In the time it takes you to read this sentence, Seth Godin will have written and published Everything is Spam: How to Win in the Frictionless Economy and Cory Doctorow will have churned out at least one dystopian novella based on the idea. You’re welcome, fellas.)
Anyway, this is just a thought exercise. I don’t have any arguments or conclusions to make off of it yet. So don’t read too much into it, but please do think about it.
Categorised as: Drorings | Life the Universe and Everything
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And it just occurred to me that the x axis also roughly plots length of discrete content unit. From books (long) to tweets (short). Make of that what you will.
You might have raised one of my key questions about social media effectiveness; what’s the real ROI of social media marketing, especially once you’ve considered the opportunity cost?
In other words, are small businesses and non profits really supposed to invest 20 hours a week “just keeping engaged” when they could invest a tenth of that time — and get 10x the results — doing something traditional like cold calling or even sending letters?
You’re also skirting the edges of another effect I’ve mentioned several times on my site; as everyone moves to “frictionless” channels, will “friction-rich” media (I think I just invented that) like direct mail be viewed as more exclusive (and valuable) by recipients, who no longer have nearly the same-sized stack of DM sitting on their desk?
Great questions, Tom, and I see them as joined at the metaphorical hip.
Part of the problem, as I see it, is that people keep talking about “the conversation” as if there was only one kind. It’s like I argued here in Comment #2: you can spend X amount of time chasing after people who like reading tweets about ice cream, or spend it courting people who want to pay you for your product. If some of those people are online, fine, meet them there. If others prefer phone calls, call ’em. If others like getting stuff in the mail, mail ’em. This whole monolithic approach of firehosing everyone through a single channel is making a basic mistake: conflating the medium with the message.
That suggests that the most valuable message is the one that reaches the person the way they like to be reached. How’s that for oracular? It shows that you actually know their preferences, and respect them.
Your comment also made me realize that the x-axis also roughly correlates to decreasing unit cost. Hmmm.
[…] tweet led to this article from the website “Soto Voce“, which if you must know is that thing you do when you […]
I have a feeling that trout anglers were not your intended target with this post but here we are (I got here via owljones.com). Your firehose analogy above is appropriate. I have (reluctantly) tried the social network thing but ran away, screaming, from too much stuff coming at me all at once. When presented that way, everything is given the same importance (conflating the medium) and, to me, it is cheapened. Just a bunch of debris streaming past.
You used the phrase “information country road” in a comment on Owl’s post. I am a pot hole in that road and I like it like that.
Nice to hear from you Quill, and it’s a pleasure to make the acquaintance of the trout anglers. I never learned to fish (growing up in the desert will do that), but I get the feeling that I might enjoy the tranquility it seems to offer.
Like River Mud said over on Owl’s post, “If I don’t have new content, I don’t write.” For me, it’s also “If I don’t have anything to add, I don’t comment.” So overall I’m a really spotty presence on blogs and social media. I’m not a social butterfly, and being in a room (physical or virtual) full of people all talking about themselves really burns me out fast. I’m the guy in the kitchen having the quiet conversation next to the vino.
For my writing and editing business I should really be more active on Twitter and my business site’s blog, but I find that it becomes a real trap to “have to” say something every day just so that people don’t forget that I’m there. There’s this whole attitude in business social media of “Oooh, he’s always writing something, so he must be one of those people who Knows What He’s Talking About.” But I’m beginning to suspect that it’s a con. The only people I’ve seen who truly believe that constant writing equals expertise are the people doing the constant writing. Everyone else looks at them and thinks “jeez, I wish this guy would just shut up.”
So from a business perspective, I haven’t found that sweet spot yet. But from a personal perspective, I’m much more comfortable being quiet. Which is why I think I might like fishing!
“I’m a pothole in the information country road” — that would make a brilliant t-shirt.