I had a cup of tea today with a marketing colleague who was new to Portland. We found we had much in common, especially when discussing shared interests in social media, new marketing paradigms and the growing intersection between the IT and marketing departments.
These are two departments with many common goals, dependencies and business alignments and (at the same time) few common languages.
I am lucky enough to be able to bridge the two worlds - knowing just enough about IT to be dangerous, but able to find (or fake) my way around with willing compatriots. It’s like going to Paris and making an attempt at speaking French - trying will get you a long way…
Hence, I try to use this forum to speak to both worlds about trends marketers should be aware of AND be able to speak to, and marketing needs the IT department can fill.
Here’s my latest flog at the state of information overload, which is only getting worse (but at the same time it can be so much better through the use of smart tools). I hope the marketers and IT guys are ‘getting’ this. Share this with your favorite “other department” compatriot - you’ll be doing both of you a favor…
Managing and Measuring Attention Across the Enterprise
As any regular reader knows, I’m a big fan of RSS, a protocol web sites use to deliver information to you when it appears. (It’s that good old fashioned notion of having a magazine delivered to your home, vs. going out and searching through the newsstands for the latest issue.)
The problem with RSS?
While it gives you great access to information, RSS dramatically increases the amount of information presented to you (depending on your search parameters) and in itself contributes to information overload. (When I fire up my Attensa feed reader I generally can have more than 700 articles waiting for me. Full disclosure: Attensa is a client of mine; and a tool I use daily for online news, research, monitoring client mentions and competitive information.)
Just like I am, enterprise 2.0 knowledge workers are beginning to understand the value of RSS; and are bringing their personal readers (which are all free, by the way) into their work environment. Suddenly, there are desktops with ALL SORTS of little RSS applications running.
Suddenly, There’s a Problem for IT
It drives IT’s support and service costs through the roof when unapproved, (sometimes poorly written) applications start interacting and mucking with other apps, network services, etc. That’s a bad thing.
The good news? There are enterprise-class, managed RSS systems available now that are not only secure, scalable and reliable (which speaks to our friends in IT); they track a wealth of information that’s invaluable to the business (which speaks to our friends in marketing).
Imagine the possibilities of this kind of understanding within your organization:
- As users interact with information, their behaviors provide clues as to what is important to them, and what is not important.
- Attensa can monitor these behaviors and create a smart profile of each user’s attention.
- These individual profiles drive intelligent filters / views that each user can use to consume relevant information.
As a result, I can focus my attention on information that matters - and not have to wade through the 700 pieces of information it makes possible.
It’s like my iPhone figuring out how I type, and fixing my fat thumb mistakes for me.
It’s amazing to me that a tool can ‘watch’ hundreds of factors and learn reading behaviors and content preferences as readers interact with information. For an entire enterprise full of users, it will watch:
- Which subscriptions are read most frequently?
- How many articles are being read, given the number available?
- How long does each user spend reading an article, given its length?
- Is the information being forwarded to others?
- Is it being tagged or republished?
- Or, is being ignored completely or deleted instantly?
Then, individual reading behaviors are matched to content cues in the articles themselves including:
- Content keywords
- Authors that are read frequently
- Search terms being tracked
As user behaviors change, the “attention analytics” will evolve with them. I am training my RSS reader to prioritize my information for me, and serve it to me in a unique, personal manner. Smart.
Better yet, though, when you add the Feed Server™ , individual profiles are aggregated across workgroups, product teams, even the entire enterprise; delivering rich reporting and analytics that drive a collaborative, more intelligent understanding of how knowledge spreads across the enterprise.
This is waaay more powerful than web analytics. This is attention analytics. Now we’re getting closer to getting inside the heads of our employees; being able to watch what grabs their attention, what keeps it, and what isn’t cutting it. As a marketer, if I could have that insight, I’d be tuned to that channel. Perhaps that’s why RSS is coming soon to televisions…
And for knowledge workers, suddenly the glut of information they’re facing is more manageable - because it’s served up based on their individual preferences.
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