The Steve Rubel Stream

Insights on emerging technologies and trends.
Steve Rubel
Steve Rubel (bio) is SVP, Director of Insights for Edelman Digital, a division of Edelman - the world's largest independent PR firm.

He is charged with helping clients identify emerging technologies and trends that can be applied in marketing communications programs. Rubel also explores these topics on his site, a monthly Forbes.com column and in a bi-weekly AdAge column. He can be found on Twitter and Facebook as well.

Steve can be reached via email at steverubel@gmail.com.

Note: Everything posted on this site is Steve's personal opinion. It does not represent the views of Edelman or its clients.

               

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Presentation: Communicating in the Age of Streams

Last week during the launch of Seesmic Look in New York, I gave a presentation on communicating in the age of streams. You can watch the video here or below (if for some reason the embedded video doesn't go direct to my part of the talk, simply scroll to the 1:24:04 minute mark). My slides can be found here. I have embedded them below as well with the YouTube video too.

A quick summary ...

All of us - whether you're a stay at home mom or an executive - are going to have to cope with the firehose. There's more information coming at us than we can handle. Information will scale. Human attention is finite. This presents a major challenges to those of us who are in the attention business. It's like 25 lanes of traffic trying to squeeze into the Lincoln Tunnel all it once. Your marketing campaign is just one bus.

To mitigate this ongoing trend of streams, communicators will need to: 1) be as ubiquitous as possible, 2) adopt multiple messages, stories and formats and 3) make sure you allow your employees to get out there - in other words, use the force, don't fight it.

More in the embedded media below.

Filed under  attention   attention crash   events   Lifestreaming   marketing   PR   presentations   streams   video  
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Posted 1 month ago

Video: Engaging Employees in the Age of Streams

Pete Cashmore from Mashable calls 2010 the year of digital distraction - and he's spot on. The deluge of information is only going to increase, which is going to make reaching people harder than ever. Mark Evans recommends focusing on quality not quantity - which is something I have started to do.

While so much attention focuses on just what the Attention Crash means for consumers and marketers, there's another story looming. Companies will also need to fight the internal and external noise just to engage their own workforce.

Earlier this month I spoke at the Edelman Change and Employee Engagement Summit on this topic. I offered three potential solutions, which are summarized here, In addition, you can see more in this nine minute excerpt from my talk. 

Has your company changed the way it communicates with you?

Filed under  attention   attention crash   Edelman   employee engagement   PR   streams   video  
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Posted 2 months ago

Three Ways to Thrive in the Age of Streams

The images above should strike fear in any one who seeks attention - be it a brand, a politician or an individual. They come from Nielsen. The first (87) is the number of domains the average American visits in a month. The second (2600) is the number of web pages the average American visits in a month. 

This funnel is small when you think about the infinite choices we have today - an era of information abundance. And given that human attention doesn't scale, I anticipate these stats will remain stable. So how do you break through? Here are three steps I am considering in my work as a communicator ...

1) Limiting all writing to 400 words or less - that's what Leo Baubata is doing and I think he's on to something. (You can do the same with email.)

2) Doing more with visuals - most of my PowerPoint decks don't have bullet points and I am doing more with mindmapping. (According to the book Brain Rules, if information is presented just verbally orally, people only remember about 10 percent. This jumps to 65 percent if you add a picture.)

3) Embracing a hub and spoke approach - it's difficult to expect anyone to come to you. This is why I like Posterous. I can start something here and engage with it everywhere via their auto-posting feature

Is your message being heard? And if so, how are you coping
Filed under  attention   attention crash   marketing   simplicity   trends  
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Posted 4 months ago

Bloggers Raise their Game with Imagery

Why do I love Kara Swisher from the Wall Journal? Simple, she is raising the game for blogging. Watch how she uses clever headlines and imagery in her posts - often tied to movies. Now, compare that to how Techcrunch is now doing the same, which I believe is a new development. This all is good for us, the readers. Also, it offers a good lesson on how to break through the Attention Crash.

LATER:: MG says this is nothing new. Maybe I just noticed it.

   
Click here to download:
Kara_Swisher_is_Causing_Other_.zip (337 KB)

Filed under  attention   attention crash   journalism   writing  
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Posted 7 months ago

Gallery: Screens That Save Me Time

Sometimes little things go a long way. Take a look at the three screen grabs below, all of which I encountered this morning. What I love about each one is that they show how the media is increasingly respecting our time. CNN and iMedia Connection both summarize long stories at the top with bullet points, which gives me enough data if I want to invest more time in a story. Meanwhile, I have become a huge fan of the New York Times article skimmer, which is so much easier to read than the web site. We need more simple interface tweaks like these.

     
Click here to download:
Gallery_Screens_That_Save_Me_T.zip (157 KB)

Filed under  attention   attention crash   design   media   user interfaces  
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Posted 7 months ago

Initial Impressions: Lazyfeed Discovery Engine

This morning I received an invitation to Lazyfeed, which debuted at the TechCrunch event last week. Louis Gray has been playing with it and likes what he sees. Here are my initial impressions. Screen grabs follow.

Pros:

  • It's a great way to discover new content to either read or eventually share with others. Just type in a tag and, boom, you're off
  • If you connect your various streams it will automatically surface relevant content for you, based on what you already share - such as this interview with our eBay client, RBH
  • I can see making this part of my lifestream workflow, right alongside Zemanta
Cons:
  • It lacks, however, the ability to email content directly from the app into something else like Evernote or Posterous or sharing tools that let me push stuff into Twitter, Facebook, etc
  • It does not have a mobile interface or iPhone app
  • It needs a way to integrate with other applications like Postrank or Backtype so that it surfaces new content by engagement, not just keywords. Also, I would love to see it slurp in my Google Reader OPML the way Feedly can
Overall, it's pretty strong. I found some great content such as how to get your Gmail Task list outside of Gmail and more. If you're an information junkie that's looking for more signal, less noise, sign up and give Lazyfeed a go. It's not replacing

Related articles by Zemanta

     
Click here to download:
Initial_Impressions_Lazyfeed_C.zip (605 KB)

Filed under  Attention   Attention Crash   Initial Impressions   RSS  
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Posted 8 months ago

Just a Small Deluge of Data

Saw this today in a presentation given by Google. It comes from "The Social Data Revolution." Can anyone confirm if this is true? Regardless, it's food for thought. Your attention (even seconds of it) is the most valuable currency anyone could ever wish for given this massive deluge.

Filed under  attention   attention crash   data  
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Posted 8 months ago
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