Attentionomics: An idea proposed by Steve Rubel

What do you get when you link attention with economic value creation? Attentionomics, which Steve Rubel says is a combination of infinite content options (space) but finite attention (time). Where is Einstein when you need him?

Rubel is EVP/Global Strategy and Insights for Edelman - the world's largest independent public relations firm. He starts by looking at Twitter. They have a staggering 110 million tweets a day and it’s growing. But the problem is that each tweet decays almost as soon as it is released. There are 71% of tweets that get no response. 6% get retweeted and 23% get an @ reply. Some 92% of all retweets and 97% of replies occur within the first 60 minutes, according to Sysomos.



In some ways the situation is worse on Facebook where a highly personalized algororithm called EdgeRate curates feed based on personal affinities, content formats and timeliness. There’s not just one Facebook but 500M Facebooks. Most people, according to Vitrue, participate at the top and bottom of the hour. So you want to post to your Facebook page in order to create a social surge well before the top and bottom of the hour. If you don’t, your content decays within the hours.

So you are now aware of content decay. Yes, you were aware of it before; but you didn’t have a name for it. You sure didn’t have a clue what to do about it.

Rubel offers some hints. You need to make this work in your favor by obeying the laws of attentionomics, in other words time and space.

Let’s start with space. You need to hand craft content for each social media. You want your employees involved in the process and you should carefully watch how your employees use the media.

As for time you need to practice mindfulness with a bifocal awareness, a thing related to monitoring, but different, to optimize the best times to engage in social media. You will need to test, retest, plan and measure.

Rubel offers readers a new tool from Flowtown, Timely, that helps you optimize your tweets and track their performance. You can see the number of clicks, retweets and reach for each tweet.

The ultimate goal Rubel offers is that marketers should view the entire ecosystem and how the different parts impact each other. It’s not enough to look at your consumer and your content. You need to be aware of content decay and the best time to post. You have to factor in such things as time and space—attentionomics.

Based on information from Steve Rubel at http://steverubel.com/

Related articles

• Attentionomics: Captivating Attention in the Age of Content Decay (via Steve Rubel) (smbar.posterous.com)

• Steve Rubel: State of the Twittersphere - Q4 2008 Report (via delicious) (hubspot.com)