Community About Communities

The scarcest resource in the social media industry… is your company fighting itself for it?

I found the “Leading You: Where Is Your Attention?” article by Susanne Biro (Bluepoint Leadership Development) extremely interesting and thought provoking in several ways; but (as it is the key objective of this blog) let’s keep it to social media /online communities.

Through this article and its references I came across this Wikipedia entry about the “Attention Economy”; quoting one note from it:

“many designers of information systems incorrectly represented their design problem as information scarcity rather than attention scarcity, and as a result they built systems that excelled at providing more and more information to people, when what was really needed were systems that excelled at filtering out unimportant or irrelevant information (Simon 1996, p. 143-144).”

This brings me back a concept I tried to present in a post some time ago: let’s say you work in a medium to large company where your target audience will likely overlap across your services and products; what is the approach you should take in regards social media / online communities? What I have seen happen in my company is that each group aims to create its own online community experience branded as appropriate.. I guess this is quite natural; but in the context of the “Attention Economy” concepts; wouldn’t it make more sense for all groups targeting a specific audience to focus on the needs of that audience and figure out the experience and how to present the relevant information filtering out other aspects?

Other references:

The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business Book by Davenport & Beck

Filiberto Selvas