The Attention Asset

There’s a post on Seth Godin’s blog today called Do we value attention properly?

In it, he argues that we need to be careful not to discount the attention we get from our audience, i.e. anyone who pauses to listen to us, because attention is valuable.

He makes a good point: attention if leveraged properly can lead to more business and customers (for a for-profit) or more volunteers and donors (for a non-profit).

Spamming our audience burns trust, and sometimes we inadvertently do it. In order to “ensure the executives respond”, I’m sometimes compelled to send “reminder e-mails”. But what I find is that send too many of them and eventually those reminders go the route of spam: ignored.

Better to be silent and shout only when absolutely necessary, so when you do shout people know you’ve something important to say.