Getting Attention: The Science of Being Captivating Online

Do you want to bring more attention to your business or product?

Want to find out what inspires people to take notice?

To discover how to get people's attention online, I interview Ben Parr.
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The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode I interview Ben Parr, the former co-editor for Mashable. He's also the co-founder of DominateFund—invest in great companies. His new book is called Captivology: The Science of Capturing People's Attention.

Ben will explore the science of getting attention.

You'll discover the different types of attention, as well as some of the triggers.

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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Getting Attention
Ben's backstory

Ben talks about how his personal blog led to writing for Mashable in 2008. Some of the stories on Ben's blog hit Digg, which was big at the time. Mashable noticed and asked Ben to write for them. He then came on board as a junior editor, and was promoted to co-editor in 2009, which was when he moved to San Francisco. Ben was with Mashable for 3 1/2 years.

As co-editor, Ben was in charge of the West Coast. Since he was the only one in Silicon Valley for a long time, if anything came up in Silicon Valley (like they needed someone to talk to Mark Zuckerberg), they called on Ben. He wrote about 2,400 articles and also helped manage and mentor a lot of reporters and junior editors.

Ben's book, Captivology, came about a couple of years ago. When Ben was just starting out investing in companies, he realized they were all asking for help with press and marketing, customer and user acquisition, and virality. He explains that all of these areas are about getting attention for products and getting users.

Ben says he did a lot of research, and realized there was a lot of interesting information about attention over the last 50 years, but no one had put it together into something mainstream.

Listen to the show to discover why Captivology was the book he had to write.

The science behind the book

For Captivology, Ben went through more than 1,000 different research studies and interviewed dozens of PhDs, as well as business leaders and thought leaders, like Sheryl Sandberg, Steven Soderbergh and David Copperfield. They helped him frame the book in a way that there's a lot of science and research, but also practical information. There's knowledge people can use in daily life.

Going into the book, Ben had theories about things like reward systems, and confirmed some of his beliefs on how they work.

For example, there's a type of reward-giving, called post-action rewards. This is when someone gets a reward as a surprise after completing an action. When you surprise people with a reward, it reinforces behavior.

Listen to the show to discover why incentives are the worst ways to get attention.

The three types of attention

In Ben's research, he discovered three stages of attention: immediate, short and long attention.

Immediate attention. This is the immediate and automatic reaction people have to certain sights, sounds and stimuli. When people hear a gunshot they duck, which is an automatic reaction to protect themselves. There's a lot of fascinating science on how that works and why it matters, Ben says.

Short attention. Short attention is the second stage. That's when people start consciously focusing on something. When someone starts watching a show or reading a story about something, that's short attention.

Long attention. A lot of people don't think about the third stage, which is long attention (long-term interest in a subject).