There seems to be four possible ways to generate attention:
1] Buy it
In other words: Advertising
You can buy the access to the people through TV commercials, newspapers ads and magazine, billboards, yellow pages, tradeshow floor space, direct mailing, and like.
These people (Advertising agency guys) are really good when it comes to buying attention. And these people would always be ready to provide you the requisite attention by buying. This source of getting attention is slowly becoming less and less potent with the advent of social media and other ways to generate attention.
2] BEG for it
In other words: Public Relations
When you beg access to the people’s attention via editorial gatekeepers at the radio and TV stations, newspapers, magazines, trade journals and more and more these days, podcasters, bloggers and other social networking sites.
In other words: sales.
When you knock on the doors, call people, send personal emails, or wait for individuals to walk into your showroom.
These sales guys are really good at getting attention one person at a time.
4] EARN it
In other words: we are still debating on what we should call it!
People call it, “inbound marketing”, “social media marketing”, “new marketing”, “content marketing” and “permission marketing”.
The core idea of all of these is generating something interesting and publishing it online for free. Few examples include:
· A YouTube video
· A blog
· Research report
· Series of photos
· Twitter stream
· Ebook
· Facebook fan page and the like.
There are ever increasing cadres of social media gurus assert to be really good at generating attention through social media.
I've come up with a few essential things to comprehend about attention. Possibly you have others to share here:
1. You should be well aware of the four ways to generate attention. And also you need to understand the perspective of the person you are talking with about attention.
2. The majority of the organizations have a business culture around one of these ways to generating attention.
For examples:
P&G - primarily generates attention through advertising
Apple - PR,
Financial investment instruments (ICICI/others) –sales
Adobe, Cisco, Apple, Coca-cola etc: Social media.
Practically all organizations should be doing some amalgamation of all four ways of generating attention. But the cosmic majority of my attention-generating efforts are in creating content such as this post.
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