The Decline of Shipwrecks and Email Distractions

• Author: Amitai Givertz
• Posted: June 11, 2007
• Category: Business Matters, Blogging
• Tags: No Tags
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With a close enough reading, anyone who has followed my 12-month career as a blogger will know where I am coming from as a marketer and where RCI now hopes to go with what’s been learned, starting here on Bells & Whistles and continuing to develop on our website.
 
Along the way I have had the support and trust of a faithful sponsor, CEO Mike Moore. Mike has given me a lot of latitude to explore this thing and research all the possibilities for achieving a broad range of marketing and other objectives. Really, Mike has entrusted me to leave the dock with a few boats and some gutsy buccaneers to head off in an anticlockwise direction. I know he expects me to bring some bounty back, as do I.
 
I have also been lucky to have had guidance from some other exceptional talents who are likewise seminal figures in our industry. One of those people is John Sumser.
 
In recent weeks and in his posts that talk about content, identity, authenticity, transparency, marketing-spin, markets-as-conversations and what-have-you John paints a seascape where he has long stood as a beacon of sorts.
 
For those who read his daily column John’s opinionated posts fill in the details of a thing bit-by-bit like a painting-by-numbers. For those who have read John for years his body of work in retrospect resembles broad brush strokes that cover the whole canvas, not the painstaking post-by-post dabs of color — red for technology, yellow for recruiting, blue for business — but a full spectrum that covers everything from branding to job boards and acquisitions to busts. Hue, tint, color. Energized, it’s the stuff that light is made from. Focused it is projected like a lighthouse beam.

Whether for hapless seafarers in recruiting or the seasoned scrimshaw scratchers of HR, John’s posts can help one find shelter from the swells and storms of an industry itself constantly weathering enormous and rapid change. For those who do not understand how lighthouses work — when the real tempests blow — captains and crew get smashed on the rocks and curse John Sumser’s name. I know. I’ve been in a wreck or two and cursed him rather loudly myself.

Userbility Over Useless Junk, Coming to an Inbox Near You

Over recent weeks John Sumser has had a series of posts that resonate with me on a number of levels. As they relate to my interest in blogging and its applications both social and commercial they are all good reads. To point to any one in particular would be to unravel a thread but last Friday’s post Attention Is The Currency was especially special. It pointed to a book The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business.

[The book] Argues that businesses in modern times are headed for disaster - unless they overcome the dangerously high attention deficits that threaten to cripple the modern workplace. This book helps you to learn to manage this critical, yet finite resource.

Wow! I’d better buy a copy. I hope I have enough time to read it without too many distractions. So many emails to write! Ahem. I digress, trying to keep your attention…

Even more interesting to me than his reference to the book — and Herbert Simon as an early proponent of the attention economy — John concluded his observations over recent weeks with this interesting wink:

A good friend recently pointed out that spam makes money…It will take sustained expression of annoyance to persuade these fans of cheap money that brand erosion is a worse fate.

I may have passed that by had it not been for this in John’s post Marketing Is A Conversation from the day before, echoing our first posts launching RCI’s blog:

When you look at the vast majority of the crap that spews from the marketing departments of our industry, you have to wonder if this idea ever penetrated our world. Loud shouting and ridiculous claims drown out any possibility of nuanced conversation. The air is littered with so many “bests” and “biggests” that there’s little room for discussions of effectiveness and quality.

Well, there are some that would argue with John on that! They are heavy hitters bound by vested interests, holding on for dear life as the waves crash over the bow. But as happens when his beam comes swooping round, those too far out at sea are left in the dark and can easily miss the point of John’s provocation.

For sure, there are some old mariners in our business who have been at sea for so long — with no landmarks by which to get their bearings — that they have become the “biggest” and the “best” in their own minds by virtue of their simply staying afloat, a few faint stars in the constellation of competitors and potential customers to guide them home. Unfortunately and invariably they remain lost at sea, unable to get into port. Drunk from too much rum and the constant lashing of a howling competitive wind they are unable to discern the beacon’s blip from some unidentified star on the horizon, the blinking light ignored as an navigational false-positive.

So, what’s the deal and what’s the fix? We are awash with information, flooded with mail and drowning in data.

To the fix, is it about relevancy and context as defined by individual preferences versus market segmentation? Is it about information/editorial filtering in the expectation that being in the right place at the right time happens by design and not as the chance outcome of an indiscriminate email blast?

I wonder, is there life after “opens” and click-throughs and page-views? Does all of this require a new language and new terms of reference? And, to the monetization of email and blogging and the attenuation of noise I then wonder how long email marketers like me can continue to smoke our own dope.

So many questions — like jagged rocks and icebergs — the undoing of so many, some long forgotten like ghost ships.

To the nuts and bolts of the matter, there simply must be a way to correct attention deficit, inbox pollution and pop-up overwhelm. I have to believe that we can hold and respect our audience’s attention and translate that embrace in ways that eventually lead to mutual engagement. Surely, it cannot be as simple as changing the voice to make the message clearer and less ambiguous. Is it just a question of giving the audience what they really want, an anonymous and no-strings-attached take-away and enough time to suss you out?

Well, those are all $64,000 questions ain’t they? Questions a marketer worth his salt couldn’t let sail by like ships in the night.

Oh, and John: Land a-hoy!