Give Me a Little Attention, Please!

Just curious... who's reading anything these days?

I am signed up for all kinds of email notifications on computing and the Internet. That makes sense, it's what I do most days, at least partly.

One of them led me to a conference going on right now in LA, the OMMA Display in LA. You can watch live events, take part in panel discussions remotely via chat rooms, and join all the chatter via Twitter (and all the other social media).

But it all got me wondering: lots of people are talking. Who's listening? Plenty of people are writing. Who's reading?

The people doing the presenting at this particular conference are online marketers. My best guess as to who these folks are talking to: themselves.

I did a little non-scientific research recently, and asked people what their reaction to online ads was, and how they "handled" them. Did they read them? Listen to them? Follow links? "Like" them on Facebook or "follow" them on Twitter?

The short answer was what I preached a long time ago: if I was interested in the subject anyway, I might (stress, "might") pay attention to an ad. Hence, some of the Google ads work because they're parsing my email and serving me ads based on what I'm already talking about, or I searched on a particular subject and they handed me an ad related to that subject. And that's about it.

We (Internet users) have become remarkably adept at ignoring. We can look through, around, past, find the "x" faster than they can move the ad, and even multi-task while watching a YouTube video or online episode of our favorite show to that when the ad pops up, we pop off. We're just not paying attention.

And certainly with all the information competing for our attention, we have become extremely selective in what we allow past the gates to our full, awake, aware, listening, heeding brain.

Did you pay attention to what I just wrote? Thought so.

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