Saturday, March 10, 2007

What Digg Taught Me About Attention

Alex Iskold wrote an interesting piece at my favorite blog ReadWriteWeb the other day called "The Attention Economy: An Overview". It's well written, cogent and backed by solid analysis-- as usual. For me the take away quote is this:

It is important to realize that the key ingredient in the attention game is relevancy. As long as a consumer sees relevant content, he/she is going to stick around - and that creates more opportunities to sell.


Quite unexpectedly, I managed to prove Alex's hypothesis this morning. The test case is the blog post right before this one. The one with the pretty picture. Fire Rainbow.

Now this here blog is more of a business blog. You'll notice that if you go to TeamDirection, the corporate blog at the footer of every page is in fact this one. Generally I tailor the content as such. But every now and then I like to put in something fun or unusual-- maybe even funny. I figure blogging is a good tool for people to find TeamDirection and come to know our products.

So I got this really cool picture and I thought:

A) That is amazing
B) Other people would like to see it
C) Amazing pictures often do very well on Digg.

Up to Digg it went. And it got Dugg.

If you enjoy watching the hit counter spin, then this experience is for you. Project Management is typically a workweek topic, so the weekends tend to be quiet at ye olde blogge. But as I type this, Fire Rainbow has managed 1667 diggs. This translates to, at this moment:


7 1/2 Hours of Digging
74,807 Page Views
65,382 Unique Visitors


Given that the purpose of this blog is to talk about TeamDirection, Project Management and our new IntelliGantt line of products one would have to think some number would click to the company site. Even if by accident (falling on the mouse, dog pawing at the owner for a walk, momentary loss of motor control, etc..), some number would click through.

Well, some number did. And that number is ........ 9.

Yes, 9.

Out of 65,382 visitors.

As Alex said:

As long as a consumer sees relevant content, he/she is going to stick around - and that creates more opportunities to sell.


Consider this experience the proof. QED

1 comment:

BlueNight said...

That's the problem with anything viral. The question of relevance is "relevant to whom?" For example, if I hadn't seen the link to this post from the rainbow post, I wouldn't have clicked through. Heck, I didn't even realize this blog was about business etc etc until you mentioned it.

I tend to click through "more of the same" and "oh, that's interesting."

When I clicked through your links (out of courtesy for the blog post), I saw a very pretty, very smooth and shiny website. No offense, but if after four minutes of looking at your front page, I can't tell what your product does, then I'm not sticking around.

The website is a brochure for the intended market segment, in which I am not included.