Micro Economies of Attention

The term "attention economy" is one that receives lots of...attention. It is the natural progression of the information economy. The production of information outstrips the growth in users, meaning that attention is a scarce resource. Hence the notion of "economy".

Hewlett Packard's Social Computing Lab released a paper that evaluates the motivations of employees to participate in organizations' social software applications. Revealing the long tail in office conversations studies the interactions, social graph and participation motivations in H-P's WaterCooler social media platform.

Included in that report is the term "micro economies of attention". The context is that since individuals control their own attention and what content they produce, each employee has a supply-demand curve for user generated content. The importance of understanding this dynamic is that adoption by employees is key to the success of Enterprise 2.0. And an important part of the adoption is understanding motivations for participation.

From the H-P research:

When employees perceived increased visibility of their contributions, they were more likely to actively participate and to report positive experiences.

This idea of "micro economies of attention" got us thinking here. In a recent presentation, we discussed three ways to increase information's reach. How would those use cases look plotted as supply-demand curves?

Supply and Demand for User Generated Content

If you've ever been a student of economics, the graph below will look familiar:

 

The graph reinterprets the scarce resource as user generated content (UGC), with attention being the "price" associated to that content. Here's a quick explanation of the curves:

• Supply = the more attention an employee receives, the greater the participation

• Demand = the more attention required to find and take in content, the less content will be consumed

"Attention" is this context essentially means share-of-mind. An employee has taken the time to read and consider content, and may reach out to its creator and use the content for her work. Closely related to attention is time, as there are only so many hours in the workday where an employee can read content.

A single demand curve masks the differences in use cases for consuming information. Here are the three ways in which employees consume information:

1. Search = purpose-driven activity, to solve an immediate need
2. Serendipity = happen across information that is relevant
3. Notifications = purpose-driven activity in that notification related to something of interest to the user, but lack the immediacy of solving a problem

Let's examine the different content demand curves for these use cases.

Demand Curves for Three Content Consumption Use Cases

The charts below segment employees' content demand curves by use cases:

 

Search is an activity related to a need of personal importance to an employee. She has to find information to help her move forward on some work. She will invest a meaningful amount of her scarce attention on content she finds when she's running a search.

Serendipity has a different curve than Search. If it requires too much attention to view random information, expect very little content to be consumed this way. Employees don't have time to go through a stream of content with the hope that they'll find something useful. The less obtrusive and time-intensive you make Serendipity, the higher the amount of content that will consumed. As the curve's shape indicates, the amount of attention required has to be fairly low before an employee takes in meaningful content. Serendipity really works best with quick views of information, in-the-flow of an employee's daily work.

Notifications sit between Search and Serendipity. Because an employee has actually opted into these, they will receive more attention. Whether RSS or email, Notifications can command more attention from employees than Serendipity. But there are limits. Providing effective filters for notifications ensures that there isn't a deluge of content for a given topic of interest.

Quick Example of the Effect of the Three Demand Curves

The chart below plots the three content demand curves by use case:

Following the blue dotted line...

• For a given quantity of user generated content, employees are willing to invest more attention on Search than on Notifications or Serendipity
• For a given "price" of attention, employees will consume more content via Search than for Notifications or Serendipity

It's About Employee Adoption

Understanding these curves is an important element of increasing the visibility of employee contributions. In the micro economies of attention, different content demand use cases command different levels of attention.

All three information reach use cases are important, for different reasons. A smart social software implementation program will leverage all three.

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