Look at me!  Read me!  Listen to me!  A thousand times a day we are bombarded with requests for a “moment of our time.”  The problem is, we only have a limited supply of those moments; and the demand for them is skyrocketing as the supply of information explodes.  People can surf among a hundred television channels, movies streaming to their television “on demand,” satellite radio, and they have on their desktop a window to the world.    Information isn’t a river.  It’s a flood.  And people are drowning in ads, pictures, videos, news and gossip.

We have been told we live in the “information economy.”  That simply is not true.  If economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources, then to call this an information economy is, at best, a tragic mislabel.  Information is not scarce at all.  There’s an avalanche of it, everywhere, all the time.  What’s “scarce” is attention.  Each of us only has a “bank” of twenty-four hours in a day; and we have endless places to spend that time.  Herbert Simon, one of the pioneers of our understanding of the new reality, put it this way, “…in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

The entrepreneur in the attention economy swims in the information flood; desperate to capture a few eyes and ears.  The marketer understands that the true currency in the information economy is viewers, listeners, readers.  Capture peoples eyeballs, and you get rich.  “If you have enough attention,” wrote Berkeley scholar Micael H. Goldhaber, “you can get anything you want.”  We are now well into a transformation in the way people consume information.  Gone are the days when a few newspapers determined the news.  Newspapers are vanishing.  Television ads are “Tivo’d” into oblivion; as people are unwilling to spend a few minutes of their attention watching the very thing that pays the bill for the medium itself.  Ads pay for content.  But with the technology available these days, TV ads struggle to capture that all important, and vanishingly scarce, commodity: the viewers attention.

Goldhaber writes in “Wired” magazine, “Attention has its own behavior, its own dynamics, its own consequences. An economy built on it will be different than the familiar material-based one.”  To succeed in the attention economy business must go where the eyes are!  There simply is no denying where that is: social media.  The reason for social media’s growing dominance of the attention economy is simple.  Social Media has given people a sense that they can at influence, if not control, the information they receive.  Rather than drowing in information, people can dip their toe in the flood as they choose to.  They can choose their “friends.”  And they can “unfriend.”  They can follow who they like.  And, when they have an interest, they can google it; and read blogs that seem most likely, to them, to provide information that is relevant.

Social media is where people are reading, talking, exchanging family photo’s and gossiping.  It is where they praise a product they like and condemn one that didn’t do what they hoped.  It is where they shop.  The savvy executive unerstands that, even if people aren’t shopping for their product or service in the social media, they are talking about it there!  They know it is critical to their success to be part of that conversation.  This trend is not going to reverse itself.  It is going to get stronger.  The business that does not involve itself in social media is, effectively, hiding it’s product from view.  Because nobody is looking for it anywhere else.

Communication Steroids