• by Scott Brave , Kathleen Wiersch , February 4, 2009

We all know how wonderful the Web is. It did great things for consumers and it transformed marketing. It turned all of us into publishers, and gave us all a chance at our "15 minutes of fame." Except you don't get 15 minutes anymore. Your little slice of people's attention is getting smaller and smaller. It is a blip. You've got to make that blip count.

This concept predates the Web. Herbert Simon wrote in 1971 that "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." Think of how tiny the available universe of information in 1971 was compared to today. A more recent book along the same lines is Barry Schwartz's "The Paradox of Choice -- Why More Is Less." His book is very focused on the lives of consumers and how individuals can and should limit their choices. That's all very well and good for consumers but what about marketers? How do we adapt?

Technology To The Rescue?

Technology continues to push the envelope and force marketers to adapt, and we do. The ability to publish directly to the Web without going through a "webmaster" was a huge breakthrough. It broke down a rigid approval hierarchy and allowed the voice of individual marketers, those who understood their products and their customers to communicate directly via the Web. It was great progress, but it also contributed to information overload and its cousin findability.

We tried to fix this problem originally by tagging Web pages with metadata, which was supposed to describe what the page was all about. It was a shortcut so that search engines didn't have to rely on unreliable keyword frequency. Tagging played right into our perception that our expertise was needed to make Web site content more useable. We just had to create enough pieces of content and tag it correctly and we would be meeting the needs of our audiences.

There are many reasons why tagging pages did not fix search. Manual tagging was inconsistent and labor intensive. Automated tagging could not anticipate what site users really thought content was about. For example, if site visitors came to an appliance store's Web site looking for ranges and the site has ranges automatically tagged as such, but if users type in "stovetop" for their search, the search result would not turn up what they're looking for. This is a clear example of where automated tagging fails. We were still showing people the wrong content. Our site visitors were not patient, which led to site visitors quickly leaving and looking elsewhere for answers.

Seek And Ye Shall Not Find

Web 2.0 with all its social-ness was supposed to improve the value of content by allowing more people to contribute and for content to be more readily available and accessible in different ways, through wikis, blogs, social networking sites, etc. It was great to now have so many other sources and channels for content, frequently written by folks outside of marketing. It allowed a whole new group of people in your company, from support people to developers, as well as your customers to create content that they felt was meaningful, from their perspective not marketing's. It helped. But also hurt.

Imagine a developer forum where a question is posed about getting the most out of a product UI configuration tool and eventually a best answer is uncovered. With all the content constantly being created, how do you ensure that "best" answer is always on top? Yes, Web 2.0 is wonderful, but it only spread our attention scarcity problem across an exponentially growing amount of content and an-ever increasing number of channels.

Ah, well that just means we need targeting, right? We need to slice and dice people into groups and push them the content that those "groups" are known to want. The problem lies in boxing people into particular groups. As marketers, we think that since our message is targeted to that group, we will address attention scarcity where I'll become an expert on the groups that are most likely to need what my company's selling. The problem is, you can't.

One reason targeting doesn't work is because context always trumps profile. Now as B2B marketers you might be thinking, OK, I understand how that works on a consumer site because I shop for different people and for my different buying personas, but for my B2B site, a technical buyer is a technical buyer, right?

It is a hard pill to swallow but to address attention scarcity today we marketers must take our hands off the controls. Not all controls but definitely the controls that decide which people are shown which content. "Targeting" or "personalization" or "recommendations" all have the right end game in mind. The problem is that individual experts (e.g. marketers) cannot do as good a job as customers and site visitors can. They are the single best source of targeting. And if you have relevant, targeted and findable content on your website, you'll begin to address attention scarcity.

Your Web Site Run By The Crowds

How does this work? As with most sites, there is a glut of content with only a portion of it being highly valuable and useful. B2B marketers in particular suffer from matrices of required support materials, datasheets, solution briefs, case studies, vertically focused content, functionally focused content, etc. Add on top of this all the content created by support, by partners, by developers, even by customers. It is socially awkward to suggest that some content is not needed so we just keep creating more, hoping that some will stick.

I would argue that one of the most important concepts is the focus on implicit rather than explicit evaluation of a piece of content's usefulness. In my years studying computer-human interaction, I saw over and over again how explicit participation altered results. People don't do what they say they do. They don't like what they say they like. You have to watch what they do and really pay attention to both context and intent.

By watching what all site visitors do and make connections between people you can start to re-rank search results or recommend particular pages or documents based on what other "like-minded" people have found useful. This can manifest itself in a number of ways. It can re-rank search results, it can offer recommended content, and it can even create dynamic navigation. In all of these forms it is essentially doing one key thing -- it is narrowing what is available to the site users to material known to be useful. By narrowing choice, you are addressing attention scarcity. It's how you make that blip count.

I am not arguing that marketers and site editors need to relinquish all control over to the crowds. This can be done gradually, one site section at a time. You can compare the maintenance of a crowd-driven area with an old school area. You can also override the crowd through an editorial console that lets you "pin" certain search results or promote certain content, perhaps immediately after a product launch. Since you will have freed up resources that were previously tagging content or pinning results, you can afford to launch other initiatives that also help with your customer experience like multivariate testing.

As marketers, we may no longer have total control over the message, but we can make attention scarcity work for us by narrowing the choices and making them relevant. As Schwartz suggests, people need limited choices because too many options lead to a decrease in satisfaction and an increased paralysis. Is that what you want to do to your customers? Of course not, so make that blip count!