Entries Tagged 'Hype' ↓

I was about to go to bed last night when I picked up a comment on Twitter that suggested there was something interesting going on at the SXSWi conference* in Austin, Texas, where Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was being interviewed live on stage by a journalist called Sarah Lacy. The story in a nutshell: Many in the audience disliked her interview style, backchannel Twitter traffic got heated, there was heckling etc, it all melted down and there have about a zillion blog rehashes already so I won’t bore you with the details.

What interests me, mainly, is why I was interested. Here was a person I was vaguely aware of and whose product I recently started using, being interviewed an ocean and several timezones away by another person I’d never heard of, in front of an audience of people I’ve never met. Actual relevance to me and my life here at the nether end of a country some of them couldn’t locate on a map? Somewhere very close to zero. Yet there I was, glued to the screen & hyper-alert: palms sweating, heart racing, manically spidering my way through a sprawling web of links to find out what was going to happen next and who was saying what about it.

What is it about wasting time this way is so enormously seductive? Perhaps it has something to do with the illusion of being there, or maybe it’s the equally illusory conviction that witnessing something live is better/different than just hearing about it afterwards (as if forced exposure to Sky News at the gym hadn’t been enough to put me off the stupidity of “live coverage”). Is immediacy addictive? It certainly isn’t fulfilling (sort of like cheap chocolate: no matter how much you have it’s never entirely satisfying. Give me one square of Lindt 70% over three bars of Cadbury’s any day).

Meanwhile this sideshow has distracted me for an entire day. I know in some circles continuous partial attention is supposed to be a good thing, but the resulting continual state of jittery hyper-alertness is exhausting, and entirely inimical to flow.

I need to stay with Twitter etc for a little while longer to discover if there’s anything actually useful in it for my real needs, but it is going to need very careful management.

* Brief explanation for those who know as much about it as I knew yesterday: gathering of the uber-geeks. Everyone who is anyone on the internet, etc. Reading between the lines: lots of egos, lots of jostling, lots of parties.

This BusinessWeek piece by David Armano from last year is a useful starting point summary of the conventional wisdom on whatever this thing is that we’re talking about (what is the difference, exactly, between a “conversation economy” and an “attention economy”?)

It’s the conversation economy, stupid. One of the engines that is driving “2.0″ growth is the fact that communities are forming around popular social platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, Ning, Twitter—the list goes on and on. These platforms facilitate conversation. Conversation leads to relationships and relationships lead to affinity.

Brand affinity, as companies such as Harley-Davidson (HOG) have proven, often drives communities to form around them. This is why anyone who plays a role in branding needs to become a conversation architect. Marketers, businesses, and designers must have an intimate understanding of how these platforms are evolving and influencing human behavior. There has to be an in-depth understanding of why some us of love to incorporate these services in our digital lives.

Long second page on the wonders of Twitter, which I am currently exploring and of which more later.