By Lee Wilson, President & CEO, PCI Education
“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention…‚” Herbert Simon – Nobel Laureate in Economics
Are you drowning in information? You are not alone. Our customers are experiencing an information overload. Marketers are screaming ever louder – the average urban dweller is exposed to 4,000 ads a day – and the broadcast model is breaking down and giving way to a conversation model (what some call Web 2.0). But the information is not to blame – we are.
Our Broken Paradigm
For those of us who came of age before the Internet, our paradigm of information consumption is built on two assumptions that are no longer true.
1. Information is scarce. This manifested itself in SCANNING – a need to constantly scan the media landscape to find the stuff you needed to know.
2. Information is hard to find. This flows from the first assumption and led to HOARDING. If you wanted to have easy access to information, you better catch it as it passes by. Finding it later was just too much trouble.
Scanning and hoarding information made sense right up until the mid to late 90s. We scanned and hoarded so that information would be on hand when we needed it.
However, with the vast resources of the Web both assumptions no longer make sense. Scanning and hoarding in an age of infinite input will make your head and your hard drive explode.
In 30 seconds with a good search strategy you can find what you need right when you need it. This is a complete paradigm shift.
A Solution
The foundation survival skill in the age of infinite input is HOMING. This is the ability to search efficiently and have a nose for what is meaningful in what you find during that search.
What we need to do is couple homing with what Tim Ferris in his book The 4-Hour Workweek calls “a low information diet.”
“Ignorance may be bliss, but it is also practical. It is imperative that you learn to ignore or redirect all information and interruptions that are irrelevant, unimportant, or unactionable. Most are all three‚” [emphasis added].
Break Through Marketing
Marketing and selling in the era of infinite input feels like howling into a gale. The fundamental problem is that the signal to noise ratio has gotten completely out of whack. So what is a legitimate marketer to do? Here are five suggestions for how to rethink your marketing and sales mix.
1. Stop shouting. You can’t have a conversation when you are screaming. Beyond the obvious (opt-in lists) you need to look at every communication and ask whether it is relevant, important, and actionable for the target audience. Make sure you hit all three.
2. Respect people’s time. Less is more.
3. Relax, Grasshopper. This new information economy is not kind to control freaks. The goal is to help your passionate users find ways of communicating with their peers – what they have to say is going carry a lot more water than anything you say. Some bad stuff is going to crop up. This is really an opportunity to engage in conversation. Would you rather they complained behind your back where you can’t respond?
4. Make it personal. In a sea of corporate dreck, people respond to the genuine and personal. People expect you to have a perspective, but they also respect the expertise you bring to their information gathering.
5. Don’t hide information with the hope that you are going to “force” the start of a sales conversation. You will just frustrate customers who are used to instantly finding what they need.
Conclusion
Personally, we need to take control of our information diet. We need to discard our old paradigms and seek information only when we need it.
Professionally, we need to translate our understanding of information overload into new marketing approaches. We need our customer’s permission to have a long-term conversation with them.
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Lee is currently President & CEO of PCI Education, a leading publisher of supplemental education products for students with special needs and learning differences. Lee has been a Senior Marketing, Sales, and Business Development Executive at Harcourt, Pearson, Apple, and Chancery Software. He consults on strategic direction, marketing programs, and sales management for publishing and ed-tech companies. His recent focus has been the blending of technology and print solutions with emphasis on virtual worlds, video games, and Web 2.0 technologies. He currently serves on the board of the Association of Educational Publishers (AEP), is a former board member and chair of the Education Division at the Software Information Industry Association (SIIA), and was one of the founding board members of the Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF). He blogs regularly at www.education-business-blog.com. Lee earned an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a BA from Princeton University.
Perhaps we need a 12-step process to get us from information hoarding to homing? Moving from the “more is better” information model to “less is more” is harder than it seems even for a committed person.
Just as in marketing and sales, you have to divide your attention between the information sources that continue to provide good value and prospecting for those that are launching and evolving into better sources. But fundamentally you have to accept that there is no longer a possibility of staying abreast of everything related to your segment or niche.