How to manage your social portfolio using research into web traffic and attention economics. Originally presented at Social Capital 2013.

1. Managing Your Social Portfolio:
Applying Research into Attention
Economics
Adrian J. Ebsary
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2. Attention Economics, Defined
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3. Attention Economics, Defined
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“Now, when we speak of an information-rich world,
we may expect, analogically, that the wealth of
information means a dearth of something else – a
scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes.
What information consumes is rather obvious: it
comes the attention of its recipients.
Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of
attention, and a need to allocate that attention
efficiently among the overabundance of information
sources that might consume it.”
– Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon

4. Attention Economics, Defined
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“This thread of Western philosophical discourse — attention scarcity, future shock,
information overload — has become the conventional wisdom. It seems to be based on
unassailable and unshakable logic. But what is that logic?
The framing of the argument includes the unspoken premise that once upon a time in
some hypothetical past attention wasn’t scarce, we didn’t suffer from too much
information, and we had all the time in the world to reason about the world, our place
in it, and therefore to make wise and grounded decisions.” – Stowe Boyd

5. Attention Economics, Defined
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“… to formulate an allocation problem properly,
ways must be found to measure the quantities of
the scarce resources, […] we can measure how
much scarce resource is consumed by a message by
noting how much time the recipient spends on it.”
- Herbert Simon

6. Attention Economics, Defined
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Attention Economy = any network where
attention is exchanged between more than one
node
Attention Economics = the study of the flow of
attention within a network and the systems
that organize and redistribute this attention
between nodes

7. Attention-Tracking Technology
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8. Attention-Tracking Technology
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9. Attention-Tracking Technology
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10. Why attention economics?
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“Research indicates that perceived social isolation (i.e.,
loneliness) is a risk factor for, and may contribute to, poorer
overall cognitive performance, faster cognitive decline,
poorer executive functioning, more negativity and
depressive cognition, heightened sensitivity to social
threats, a confirmatory bias in social cognition that is self-
protective and paradoxically self-defeating, heightened
anthropomorphism, and contagion that threatens social
cohesion.”
- Cacioppo and Hawkley, 2009
“Results revealed (1) that the experimentally induced increase in status updating
activity reduced loneliness, (2) that the decrease in loneliness was due to
participants feeling more connected to their friends on a daily basis, and (3) that the
effect of posting on loneliness was independent of direct social feedback (i.e.,
responses) by friends.”
- Deters & Mehl, 2010

11. Why attention economics?
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“The results showed that
Facebook users tend to be
more extraverted and
narcissistic, but less
conscientious and socially
lonely, than nonusers.”
- Ryan and Xenos, 2011
Our results show that after Facebook browsing, individuals high in narcissism raised their
public self-awareness while those low in narcissism reduced their public self-awareness.
We also found that individuals low in narcissism perceived their friends’ lives to be better
than their own and consequently experienced negative social well-being and emotion.
However, this effect did not occur for individuals high in narcissism.
- Qiu, Lin and Leung, 2010

12. Why Attention Economics?
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“… we find that emotionally unstable
individuals are more likely to post self-
relevant information online and write
about their emotions when doing so – a
tendency not observed offline. Further,
such emotional writing, paired with
the potential to receive social support
helps them repair well-being after
negative experiences.”
– Berger and Buechel, 2012

13. @AJEbsary
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=
Is hedonic design the best strategy?
Botella, et al. 2012

14. Designing Attention Economies
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Open API = Freedom for developers = Freedom for users
Closed API = Content monopolies = Users are the product
“As I understand, a hugely divisive internal debate occurred among Twitter employees around
this time. One camp wanted to build the entire business around their realtime API. In this
scenario, Twitter would have turned into something like a realtime cloud API company. The
other camp looked at Google's advertising model for inspiration, and decided that building their
own version of AdWords would be the right way to go.
As you likely already know, the advertising group won that battle, and many of the open API
people left the company. While I can understand why the latter camp wanted to build an ad-
based business, the futurist in me thinks this was a tragic mistake. If you are building an
advertising/media business, it would then follow that you need to own all of the screen real-
estate that users see. The next logical step would be to kill all 3rd-party clients, and lock down
the data in the global firehose in order to control the “content”.” – Dalton Caldwell of App.Net

15. Designing Attention Economies
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What is the best way to engineer serendipity when serving content?

16. Designing Attention Economies
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Weng et al., 2012
How do we avoid creating echo chambers?

17. Designing Attention Economies
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Attention Poverty
The 1%
Dean Josef Falkinger
Falkinger, 2003
How do we avoid concentrating attention wealth?

18. Designing Attention Economies
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BBC’s 15 Million Merits –
Black Mirror Series
A cautionary tale in
designing attention
economies

19. Designing Attention Economies
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How much is your attention
investment worth?
How much have you diluted
your attention?

20. Attention Etiquette & Cultural Norms
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What do you think about the use of reciprocal
subscription tactics to build an online following?
(#FollowBack)

21. Attention Etiquette & Cultural Norms
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The effects of unfollowing 8000+ Twitter accounts in several days

22. Attention Etiquette & Cultural Norms
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Kwak, Chun and Moon, 2011
Following more users is likely to result in more people unfollowing your account

23. Attention Etiquette & Cultural Norms
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How important do you think frequent
broadcasting is to maintaining a community?

24. Attention Etiquette & Cultural Norms
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Wu and Huberman, 2010
Give it your best shot,
on your first shot

25. Attention Etiquette & Cultural Norms
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Borgs, et al. 2010
The more you tweet, the more you are unfollowed

26. Attention Etiquette & Cultural Norms
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Kwak, Chun and Moon, 2011
Bursts of tweets in a short
period time are likely to cause
people to unfollow you

27. Attention Etiquette & Cultural Norms
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Hodas and Lerman, 2012
The Goldilocks zone of ‘interesting’

28. The Future of Attention Economics
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“Finally, we need to rethink our business plans. I
doubt this cultural shift will be paid for by better
advertising models. Advertising is based on
capturing attention, typically by interrupting the
broadcast message or by being inserted into the
content itself. Trying to reach information flow is
not about being interrupted.
Advertising does work when it's part of the flow
itself. Ads are great when they provide a desirable
answer to a search query or when they appear at
the moment of purchase. But when the
information being shared is social in nature,
advertising is fundamentally a disruption.”
– Dana Boyd, UX Mag

29. Thank you
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Let’s Connect:
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