The past decade has witnessed a momentous transformation in the way people interact and exchange information with each other. Content is now co-produced, shared, classified, and rated on the Web by millions of people, while attention has become the ephemeral and valuable resource that everyone seeks to acquire. – Bernardo A. Huberman

Last week, I attended the 2011 Windsor Lecture at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, with Bernardo A. Huberman, Senior HP Fellow and Director of the Social Computing Lab at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. The talk, entitled “Social Media and Attention,” was full of great insight into the dynamics at play in giving and receiving attention in the digital age.

Huberman discussed the shift that is occurring in the way that information is consumed, content is created, and the impact all of this is having on our attention in an age of information abundance. He described how social attention determines the production and consumption of social media content, how it can be used to predict future trends, and how it determines the public agenda.

Shift in the information economy
Information abundance is an economic issue. As theory states, things that are plentiful have little value and things that are scarce have greater value as well as power. Information is becoming less valued now that there is more of it. The speed at which it is being consumed and its relevance is also changing. Information is increasing at a dramatic rate due, in part, to the subtle effect social media is having on the speed of thought and decisions across work, the social sphere and play. As a result, people are having to make faster decisions which increases the chance of making mistakes.

The scarcity and currency of attention
The shift in information has given rise to another issue: the scarcity of attention. Attention is now the desired form of currency. While many of us focus on information and content creation we need to also shift our thinking to focus on attention as a primary objective. As Huberman notes, almost anything else except attention can be manufactured as a commodity. Therefore, premium brands are only premium because they are able to attain a surplus of attention. Productivity (meaning creation of online content) exhibits a strong positive dependence on attention. Creators of online content, whether YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, or Twitter, are being paid in attention and this is often the main motivation driving them to generate content.

Changes in how information bubbles to the top
Traditionally most of our thought agenda is based on the frequency of media and the repetition of messages. They don’t tell us what to think, but they tell you what is important to think about. Issues bubble to the top due to this frequency of distribution. Now that “standard media” is changing, what determines what bubbles to the top? For the average person, it’s not easy to know how the Internet, where millions create content and behaviors like crowdsourcing is becoming commonplace, causes some information to bubble to the surface. However, there are factors that contribute to what people focus on including popular opinion, influential leaders within groups and communities, and the persistence of trends.

Actionable takeaways on how to improve your digital marcomm approach:

• Develop opportunities to spotlight, promote and aggregate the content of others
• Identify your target audiences, assess their needs and the flow of their content
• Determine who is getting attention and has influence within these communities
• Focus on the quality of content being created over the quantity of content
• Distribute information in real-time or in a way that reflects the specific channel

How have you shifted your approach to marcomm and your overall content strategy in light of the volume of digital information? How are you getting the attention of your target audience?

(Image courtesy of colorblindPICASO, Flickr)

Integrate Social Media into Your Strategy

Nothing says old school, traditional PR like a trade show appearance. That doesn’t mean your PR strategy has to be ancient as well. Embracing social media into the pre-show and week-of communications strategy can significantly elevate your client’s show profile. Use your client’s social media presences as platforms for getting on the radar of both attending prospects and press. For example, encourage your client to tweet about the products it will be showing or the trends it will be discussing at the upcoming show using its hashtag. If they have a corporate blog, ask your client to do a post a week before the show that predicts the event’s top conversations, and share it with press to include in their pre-show preview stories. During the show, urge your client to blog and tweet about what they’ve seen and discussed with other members of the industry. All this content can be used as pitching fodder before, during and after the event.

Meetings and Coverage Are Not Mutually Exclusive

Put yourself in a journalist’s shoes. The Internet has made trade shows pretty painful for them. Reporters and bloggers are asked to attend an enormous and crowded show, meet with dozens of companies and often post several stories a day from the event. But you can make their lives easier. If you’re in the position to, offer press a pre-show briefing and copy of an embargoed release so they can file their story on your client before they go. If this isn’t possible, when the news is announced, send them all the information they need to post a story without a briefing. This includes additional data points and executive quotes not included in the release, photos, customer and analyst references, pricing and availability information.

Push for an On-site PR Presence

In my experience, the volume of press coverage secured and future opportunities uncovered is strongly augmented by the presence of an on-site PR representative. Many reporters only book a few meetings, and use the rest of their time to stop by booths. Having a PR person on-site will ensure that not only are all opportunities captured, but this person can also proactively engage with press and set up on-the-fly appointments. Additionally, the opportunity to forge in-person relationships with key press and bloggers is instrumental in laying the groundwork for future coverage. Clients’ trade show budgets are traditionally very limited and don’t allocate for an on-site PR representative. That’s why you need to get to them early. Several months before the show, recommend budgeting for a PR representative to attend and outline the many valuable reasons why it’s worth the investment.

Do you have any other best practices to share for maximizing your client’s presence at trade shows? I’d love to hear them.

Image courtesy of shop.bingtown.com

Social media tools and technology can help to cultivate a community or provide online locations where communities can exist and grow. The execution of social media strategy can achieve deeper levels of success and engagement due to the presence of a community. Conversely, social media effectiveness can be limited by its non-existence.

Myth: If you build it they will come.

Truth: Creating an engaging community through a website, a blog, a Twitter profile, a Facebook page, or private customer facing online social network takes time, resources, and most importantly, commitment. It means first establishing how these online spaces and communities fit into a larger marketing, PR, and/or customer service strategy and align with the target audience.

No matter why type of platform you are looking to use to connect with your customers, clients or employees it’s important to start with the development of a solid foundation.  There are key foundational elements the can help you to build this foundation as well as enable your community to engage with your product, service, brand or organization:

• Content: What will your content consist of? This of course will be linked to your broader and more detailed communications marketing strategy, but content is always your starting point. Your content should resonate with both your audience and your overarching messaging objectives.
• Measurement: It’s important to identify your engagement goals and establish a means of measurement. This will help you to stay more focused on the measurable goals of your social media channels as well as enable you to revise your approach as necessary.

  Radian6 offers great ideas on how to measure community impact and effectively define community success, “How you measure community impact largely depends on how you want to define what a “successful” community means for your business.”

• Guidelines: Developing user or community guidelines can be incredibly valuable and help promote engagement. Users need to know how they can participate, what are the rules and expectations, and where they can access support to assist them to do this.
• Boundaries: Organizations need to assess their own expectations, policies, and legal needs that might impact what is and isn’t allowed. A posted Terms of Use or a legal disclaimer can help notify the community of content restrictions and moderating.
• Moderation: Moderation of comments or other community content is important for several reasons. It shows your investment and commitment to the community, and it enables you to keep conversations focused and relevant to your readers.

Utilizing an online community, whether Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare or a blog, as part of your communication marketing and/or customer service strategy can be powerful. To help you maximize that potential remember to develop a solid engagement foundation.

Taking the time to execute content, measurement, and engagement in a strategic and thorough way can help your organization build a engaged community that welcomes participation, promotes loyalty, and generates value while enabling you to effectively manage potential challenges and hurdles that might develop along the way.

Being able to engage with customers, prospective customers, peers, and business leaders is an opportunity that should be nurtured and allocated the appropriate amount of commitment and time.

What foundational elements do you find are important? What tips do you have for organizations when creating an online presence and cultivating community engagement?

(Image courtesy of katiedee47, Flickr)

If you are not on Twitter, well, um, you should follow us: @sandrafathi, @lesliecampisi, @yasminbendror

And if you missed our tweets, I thought of summing up the best ones over the passed week. I hope you’ll find them useful:

- If the Twitter community was 100 people… see the picture. I love this…. http://om.ly/?DAFs

- Chart from @MarketingSherpa: Information Sources for Large Purchase Decisions Changing http://bit.ly/eiPDN

- Interesting article on Mommy Bloggers & swag – Why don’t folks begrudge celebs more for their free swag http://bit.ly/2mhcut

- Word of Mouth Research: Brand names that are easy to pronounce are worth 33% more on the NYSE http://is.gd/1SNjn

- Need a job? Show them you can Twitter http://bit.ly/18UL9p

- Why SM is critical to small businesses too – Managing an Online Reputation. Tips from NYT http://is.gd/1W34F

- How to Use Twitter for Business: An Official Guide Finally Arrives ReadWriteEnterprise http://bit.ly/Abwz3

- Do you think iPhone owners are happier than most folks? iPhone App tracks happiness for Harvard researcher http://bit.ly/5SSk5

- The Joy of Tech: Warning Labels for Bloggers http://bit.ly/32dhM0

- No one has a better take on the Zappos/Amazon deal than Seth Godin. Read his blog on this at http://bit.ly/wZ63I

- Twitter Cracks Down On Spam Accounts, People Lose Followers http://tcrn.ch/YIx

- Twitter isn’t for kids – Did you know 84% of Tweeps are 25 or older? And 20% are over 55! http://bit.ly/P60U1

- Great Lessons “5 Critical Lessons from a Social Media Campaign Gone Horribly Wrong” http://is.gd/1RiVK

So, Samir Balwani has a blog called Left The Box where he blogs about Web strategies and social media and of course, he’s on Twitter @LeftTheBox. He just blogged about a recent experience he had with Yoostar.com and its blogger outreach program: Yoostar invited key bloggers to NYC to demo their new product (check it out, its loads of fun), go back home and blog about it, spread the Word and create a big BUZZZ!

Samir was one of the bloggers invited. His blog is all about what Yoostar did right and why it was such a success. Please read his blog, its worth it.

I’ll sum up my key take aways:

- Give people (after all, bloggers are people too) enough lead time. They too have lives, schedules. Don’t send an invite a week before the event, please.
- Personalize and individualize the invitation. Do your research about that person and tie in his/her blogging and coverage with why you want him/her at the event and why it will make all difference.
- Give them some added-value, something fun, unusual or novel to experience over and above the event itself.
- Give an enticing, interesting, passionate presentation or demo. Nobody, but nobody, wants to sit through another boring PowerPoint.
- Be creative, think and do something out of the box. Bloggers love this.
- Make sure the information in the press pack is easily accessible. USB flash drive is a great idea.

And last, but definitely not least, maybe the most important, treat each person like gold. Don’t rate or “value” the blogger by the amount of traffic on his blog, or how many followers he has on Twitter. Each person is important. Each person has taken the time out of their busy schedule to attend. Pamper or spoil them – not necessarily with gifts, although that’s nice – but with attention and the right attitude. Make them feel super special. But be genuine.

I know I will keep this top of mind for our next blogger outreach program.

Thanks Samir for blogging about this and sharing with us. Awesome stuff.

PS: I wrote a blog in October on Pepsi’s Rebrand: Reaching out to Bloggers. That seems like ages ago. Things have changed since then, hopefully…

Photo by My TwiStEd wOrLd

I have had so many discussions lately with marketers and PR folks that are practically in a panic about how to engage in social media. Suddenly, their CEO or their clients are adamant that they need to be on YouTube, FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, blogging…. and a host of other activities. They want them to go from zero to 100 miles an hour by Friday. With budgets shrinking and appetites increasing for customer engagement and revenue generation, executives are right to turn their attention to social media. But, it can’t ALL be done overnight if you want it done right. So, here are a few tips:

1. Pick one medium – one form of social media – and do it right. You don’t have to be on every channel. Pick one, commit to it, own it.

2. Incorporate social media into what you are already doing. Can you add widgets to your website to allow people to save, share or discuss topics? Can you expand your profile on LinkedIn or add a button that says ‘Follow Us’ on Twitter to your existing web campaigns?

3. Set Expectations. You’ve read about the runaway successess that companies have had with social media campaigns – you might not. Set realistic expectations and work towards those goals. Once you meet them, raise the bar again.

4. Get some ROI. Make sure you are picking a platform to invest in that is going to give you some tangible ROI (to show your boss). Will it increase web traffic? Sales? Downloads? Registrations? It’s good to listen, engage, and keep the customers happy, but usually the person paying the bills wants something a little more hard core to budget dollars and time against it.

5. Find an expert  – in or outside of your organization. If you aren’t sure where/how to begin, find an expert that can help you. You can hire a big gun at a pricey agency, or small guns (like us!) that can be affordable and efficient. Surprisingly, you might just have one in your organization as well – an employee with an active blog, a master networker on your sales team with 1000 Facebook friends, a Twitter addict on your IT team. If you don’t have the budget for outside counsel, use your internal resources or search for free ones on the Web.

6. Collaborate. Putting together any successful social media program usually requires interactivity – with customers and influencers on the outside as well as on the inside of your organization. Check in with legal, take the pulse in IT, talk to marketing and see if you can pool resources and brain power to make it work.

On a final note – don’t let the fear of making a mistake paralyze you from making any progress. If you have good intentions, you’ve done your research and you’ve thought out your strategy, you’ll probably be in good shape. As the wise Rob Key, CEO of Converseon, once said on a panel with me regarding what your social media usage policy should be – “Just Don’t Be Stupid.”

Good luck! Let us know how it goes.

Here’s the one I found most interesting by Jennifer Van Grove: “40 of the Best Twitter Brands and the People Behind Them” on how these brands use Twitter to their best advantage.

Funny, the only two identities Mashable didn’t unravel were of the people behind the Burger King and Popeyes Chicken accounts. See Abbey Klaassen’s great blog.

Conclusion: “Brands Absolutely do Belong on Twitter” blog by Lon Cohen.

If you’re not following Mashable on Twitter, you should be: @mashable

I thought it was a great gathering: The keynote speaker was Ray Kerins, VP Worldwide Communications, Pfizer. The panel that followed was moderated by Melanie Milstein, author of Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution with Dave Armon, President PR Newswire, David Sacks, Founder of Yammer, Paul Gennaro, Chief Communication Officer, AECOM, Morgan Johnston, Corporate Communications Manager, JetBlue, and Marc Monseau, Director, Media Relations, Johnson & Johnson

The forum then broke out into roundtable sessions moderated by professionals in PR and Marketing who are involved and active in social media and real-time communications.

It was exciting to actually meet and talk to all of these good people that are the front-runners in embracing and using social media and real-time communications to strengthen their brand and connect and communicate with their customers.

I must say, it was mostly in a B2C context, but the forum tried to cover B2B as well.

Everyone was fired up; the room was abuzz with talk, questions, and networking. All the social media buzzwords you could find were flying around: Twitter, YouTube, FaceBook, MySpace, Flickr, blogging, tweeting, video, RSS, IM, email, wikis and on and on…

I felt that people could not get enough information. Everybody was thirsty to learn more.

The questions seemed to be unanimous and ubiquitous:
How do I start?
What does it take from a tactical point of view? One person or a team of 10?
What are the risks?
What are the benefits?
Can I calculate ROI?
How do I get executive management on board?
How do I manage a crisis?
What is a fast response? Two days, two hours, 2 minutes or 2 seconds?
How do I control what’s out there?
How do I manage and aggregate all the different platforms for RTC?
What about traditional media?
How do I get buzz going for a small company that’s not a JetBlue or J&J?

Some questions were tackled and answered, some were not, some got an honest “we don’t know the answer to that yet”.

My key takeaways – and I hope this helps all of us – were:
- Start by discovering what conversations are going on in the social media space like Twitter, YouTube and blogs
- Monitor these everyday by getting RSS feeds through Google RSS or Google Alerts
- Make sure you understand and define your goals and what your communications strategy is
- Don’t be afraid to dip your toe into this fast-flowing social media river.
- Conversations are happening about your company anyway, so get involved
- Depending on your corporation or business, you should decide how to become part of these conversations and who should be answering
- Key: BE HONEST, BE TRANSPARENT
- Employees are spokespeople for the company – they are out there using Twitter and the likes, so they should be brought up to speed
- To do this, and do this right, in a big corporation, there needs to be a mind shift from the top down. Changes in the organization need to be made. Processes need to be streamlined. The social media spokespeople need to be empowered to reply quickly
- To quote Morgan Jonston from JefBlue, “This is about humanization of the brand!”
- Be careful not to seem like the overbearing “big brother”, don’t be intimidating
- Open up, LISTEN to your customers, be committed to change
- Remember and be aware: The line is thinning between traditional media and social media – many journalists have left traditional media and are now influential bloggers/tweeters

Lots of *stuff* to take in…

I look forward to a follow up event, which, in my opinion, could be a full day event, instead of half a day.

If you’d like to hear the two main sessions they are available here.

*Please* add your comments – I would love to hear your opinion and additions!

So you can tell? Yeah, I’m a Seth Godin fan.

If you’re not subscribed to Seth’s blog, you really should be.

Here’s are links to last few blogs:
How to send a personal email
What to do when the new thing doesn’t work
Teaching people a lesson
Do ads work?