In 1993 I put peanut butter and chocolate together for the first time in melding public relations and grass roots online marketing services. Rather than brokering information, we shared it freely on line by speaking directly with some of the people most responsible for word-of-mouth. I made numerous mistakes for clients at Microsoft, CompuServe, Prodigy, Sprynet, AOL and a host of early Internet companies—many of whom got lost in the flood—through the early and mid ‘90s. And while non-technology companies were receptive to the intelligence of the approach, most didn’t know how to value it, or marginalized the audience.
Then, the hype of the Internet Economy hit. I helped launch the Industry Standard, sat in meetings with David Wetherall and Jeff Skilling, and used the tail of digital communications to wag large clients such as IBM, Procter & Gamble, Viacom, Sony Electronics and Universal Music Group. We engaged in social media, but consumer behavior lagged inevitably and we waited a little longer for the world to awaken to what happened.
Thirteen years after my first venture, technorati such as Seth Goldstein and Robert Levitan opened my eyes to the attention movement in technology, which is based on the user rights to data. Together, we created a grass-roots social media campaign—simply engaging like-minded individuals online through blogging, social networking, emailing—and seized the number two placement on Google when you search attention. We created a movement. From this experiment I birthed a new approach to PR, a detailed system for generating attention. It is being called attention-based PR.
Attention-based PR is predicated on the belief that information is everywhere. We are besieged by it. What is truly scarce and valuable today is consumer attention, what we literally pay attention to. Attention, of which there is an unlimited demand and finite supply, is what matters to communicators in a world in which the average American is exposed to more than 1,300 marketing messages. Today, attention is a currency that flows from community influencers through not only promotion, but production and publishing.
So, attention-based PR goes beyond media relations to use original content to influence the people most responsible for word-of-mouth, those of you who validate what you should pay attention to within your community. We use social, participatory media to create two-way conversations. We engage them through the Internet. In this way we capture attention.
