I want you to listen to me. I want you to read this. I want you to take some time out of your life to pass these words across your eyes and devote more time still to burn them permanently into your brain. I want this because I think I deserve it. After all, I did wake up early on a Friday to type this nonsense into WordPress, didn’t I?

We want people to pay attention to us but we rarely ever ask why they should. We assume that since they are paying attention to other people who are obviously less clever than ourselves that we are somehow entitled to a slice of their attention. We ignore the fact that every time we ask someone to listen, to read, to watch or to follow us around on the social network de jour we are taking something from them — a tiny slice of their attention, their time, their focus and that for this reason we owe them something in return.

Information, communication, community building and all that social stuff the Internet likes to harp about is at its core a transaction and in our rush to sell our widgets and what-have-yous to whoever we can coerce into sitting down and listening to us we forget that all transactions have two parts — a give and a take.

The take we’re pretty good at. We post a message, plan a campaign, put together a project or otherwise produce a good and spin it out into the ether. Because we worked hard to create it we assume that the people who are listening to us will work just as hard to consume it. We beleive that somehow our effort, in and of itself is valuable and that good work in and of itself should be rewarded with the time and attention of our peers.

It shouldn’t.

That’s not how people work.

Think about it. Advertisers spend billions of dollars a year to get you to buy a few thousand products. The campaigns that they create are often the result of hundreds of man hours and decades of experience being put to the sole purpose of convincing you to plunk down another few shekels for a Coke. Yet, advertising budgets go up every, single year because every year, it gets harder on a dollar basis to convince people to do this. Why? Because as we get more inundated with information there are more messages for us to filter through, more debits on our concentration and more reason to screen out everything but the absolute best (and most pervasive) messages.

Online we face the same basic economics. Marketers continue to increase the size and scope of their messages and consumers continue to get better at screening them out. The result? You need to be more creative, more pervasive and devote more and more energy to the task of earning consumers time. We have become a culture that takes but never gives, and the debt we have run up can be felt by anyone who has seen how much harder it is to get people to pay attention to anything at all in the last few years.

So what can we do about it?

We need to start looking at both sides of the transaction. When we ask someone for their time and attention, what are we giving them in return? It could be something as simple as a thank you, a hearty virtual pat on the shoulders to something as tangible as the opportunity to win a prize or participate in a unique experience. If all we do is clear cut our communities, trying to extract as much value from them as we can, we will eventually realize how unsustainable our projects are and be stunned by how quickly our communities leave us for the next shiny, new attention sync.

This isn’t just about being nice to the people we market to, it’s about actively providing our communities with real incentives to keep them coming back. It’s about realizing that the days when people will do our grunt work for nothing are coming to their end and that now to drive action we need to give people a reason, something to believe in.

We need to stop seeing the people we engage with as faceless automatons who should be happy to spend their time drinking down our content, filling out our forms and adding friends to our networks and instead see them as people — people giving us a gift, a gift that is becoming increasingly precious — their time.

Special thanks to Tamar for the inspiration.

(Images)

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