Crescendo works alongside SocialFlow’s existing optimized publisher tool now called Cadence, which helps marketers send out tweets and updates at the time that their fans are most receptive to them. With Crescendo, marketers have a cost-effective way to target consumers who are not following the brand.

The secret sauce behind Crescendo and Cadence is the way New York City-based SocialFlow understands what people are talking about and where their attention is likely to turn to over time. That allows the company to stay ahead of followers and keep sending messages that are likely to be complementary to their discussion. Now, with Crescendo, SocialFlow can use its knowledge to buy up the right keywords for Facebook ads that reflect what their most engaged fans are talking about and sharing at the moment. So instead of buying against larger buckets of expensive keywords, SocialFlow can pick off terms that are being discussed in real time and then buy them for less money.

Using SocialFlow’s dashboard, customers can target customers by geography and demographics and set how much they want to spend. And then they let Crescendo buy the right keywords automatically. This is important because as some popular conversation topics emerge, which can drive up the cost of certain words, Crescendo can move on to the next set of keywords as it anticipates the flow of attention. The dashboard shows users how much their spending is worth in terms of cost per clicks, cost per likes and other metrics.

Frank Speiser, SocialFlow’s co-founder and CEO, told me marketers can’t be expected to track every conversation and respond in real time. But with Crescendo, SocialFlow helps companies insert themselves into conversations in a helpful way by being timely and listening to what people are saying.

“If you want to be relevant and not intrusive, you have to listen to where the conversation is and you have to fit in with the conversation and where it’s flowing,” Speiser said. “It has to be adding to the experience. No one likes a commercial, but if it’s contextually relevant, it feels like I’m helping at the right time and place.”

Crescendo is designed to work with Cadence and highlights how paid and earned media can work together. By building up a large following of fans, a brand can tap into the conversations of active users to learn how to target similar consumers on the open market. And ultimately, if a paid ad works, it can turn a consumer into a fan, allowing a marketer to get more out of their earned media.

LIPMAN advertising, which has been testing Crescendo with one of its brand customers, said it was able to double conversion rates and produce more qualified “likes” using Crescendo.

“Partnering with SocialFlow has enabled us to significantly amplify brand messages dynamically to the right audiences, at the right time in their journey,” says Jennifer Pasiakos, VP of digital at LIPMAN. ”Together we are inspiring more users to join the conversation, share their own experiences and ultimately create a more engaged, deeply loyal community.”

SocialFlow’s approach to social media advertising makes a lot of sense especially in today’s attention economy. These days, everything is competition for a user’s attention, whether it’s media, advertising, games or just life. More and more, it comes down to listening to what a user is talking about and reacting quickly.

Image courtesy of Flickr user xthylacine

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated
• Players and Strategies for Real-Time In-Stream Advertising
• What Groupon Can Teach Us About Shopping and the Web

As members of the tech industry, we need to ask serious questions about the behaviors that we are promoting. Are we really helping people live better lives? Or, are we promoting suboptimal habits and aptitudes? At best, many of the products we’re building are time wasters. At worst, they’re the addictive equivalents of cigarettes — irresistible cheap thrills that feel good in the moment, but are destructive in the long run. “Addictive” products are rampant in our lives — Facebook, Farmville (or any Zynga game), Twitter, Pinterest. The list goes on and on.

With Web products, the general assumption is that user attention can eventually be turned into money, so revenue models are often postponed. In this paradigm, success is measured in terms of user acquisition and retention. The more users you have, and the more time they spend on the site, the better. Designers of these products have learned to manufacture desire — and they’ve gotten really good at it. Services such as Facebook and Farmville constantly interrupt the lives of their users by sending out push notifications like there’s no tomorrow. But this shift towards compulsive and chronic usage might have some unintended consequences.

I worry that by promoting constant task switching and multitasking, the Internet is changing our attention. Just as muscles grow stronger with use, and persistent practice makes any skill better, some of our most subtle mental abilities grow or wither with our choices. It’s rare for a whole hour to go by without some interruption from our phones (or email, etc.), and computer and mobile interfaces have made multitasking easier than ever. While the jury is still out, it’s a real possibility that heavy multitasking is increasing compulsiveness and distractibility.

So what do we do? To me, the answer is simple. We should ask “why.” If we’re going to bring positive creations into the world, we need to seriously think about how our products are going to fit into, and enrich, people’s lives. What’s the reason we’re building these products in the first place? “To get acquired” or “to make a lot of money,” shouldn’t necessarily be our answers. Focusing on maximizing certain metrics, and creating numerically “successful” products, distracts us from bigger questions about the purpose of technology, and what role we as technologists should play in the larger community.

I believe that the purpose of technology is to take over the grating, tedious tasks that we have had to put up with for so long, so that we can live fuller, more interesting lives. In short, technology allows us to be even more human by becoming less mechanistic.

If none of us ever had to work, I think that our activities would cluster into three areas: art, interpersonal interaction and discovery (science, academic research, curiosity). While this is a much longer discussion, I worry that our community is aiming to make technology and content consumption our primary activity, instead of helping us engage in these creative and personal endeavors.

I’m not trying to be the crotchety, out-of-touch naysayer. Personally, I love LOLcats, Reddit, and many other services that could be classified as time wasters. The trick is moderation. The problem is that we, as a product design community, are purposely trying to create compulsions.

I don’t have the answers. I’m not saying that we should stop building. I’m just saying that we should take a hard look at ourselves and determine whether or not we’re bringing value to the world. We have the chance to do something spectacular with technology. We have the chance to make billions of lives easier and more enjoyable. We have the chance to free people from tedium. Let’s take this opportunity to build timesaving — and lifesaving — services, not quick hits.

This is a call to make more Amazons, eBays, and AirBnBs. A call to build fewer Zyngas. As I said before, I don’t have the answer. But with all the brainpower in Silicon Valley, I think we can figure this out. I’d like to use this post as a starting point for the discussion. Let’s hash it out, together, in the comments below.

Jason is the founder of Dopamine (ironic, we know), a behavior/UX design firm based in San Francisco. He named the company after his favorite neurotransmitter, which is involved in learning as well as addiction. It’s a reminder of design’s ability to be either helpful or, if misused, harmful. He is also a UX mentor for 500 Startups and a researcher in the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab. He blogs at persuasive.ly

Image courtesy of Flickr user xjara69.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Social third-quarter 2012: analysis and outlook
• Readers weigh in: future prospects for Twitter
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1

Ever since Facebook went public in one of the largest technology stock issues of the last decade, an offering that valued the company at more than $60 billion, one of the biggest questions hanging over the company’s head is whether it can generate enough revenue to justify this massive market value. There have been questions raised about both the lack of a strong (or at least convincing) mobile strategy and the relatively lackluster performance of Facebook’s advertising model. And some wonder whether the giant network will ever be able to make advertising work at all, because of the nature of the network and the purposes for which most people use it — and whether alternative networks like Twitter aren’t better equipped to do so.

One of the more recent discussions of that idea comes from startup advisor and entrepreneur Alistair Croll, who argues in a recent blog post that despite its enormous size and reach — something that should theoretically make it perfectly suited for advertising — the nature of Facebook’s network actually makes it less effective at doing this than Twitter. In a nutshell, Croll says, we are more likely to be open to commercial messages appearing in our Twitter stream because the network is asymmetric (meaning you don’t have to approve every follower, and users can send you messages by simply using your Twitter name).

Is Facebook’s structure even conducive to ads?

Facebook, by contrast, is based on a more symmetric model — one that is designed to allow users to control their social network at a very granular level, by approving each and every “friend,” and therefore implicitly accepting that messages from them will appear in their timeline. The network has added subscriptions and other features to try and duplicate the asymmetric model that Twitter uses, but those don’t seem to have really taken off for most users, many of whom complain about subscriber spam. And that kind of structure, Croll argues, makes it a particularly ineffective medium for advertising:

At its core, Facebook is also built around the idea of a network of friends, which means some people (and their messages) are foreign to that network. Our “immune system” reacts when someone promotes something to us. Our first reaction is that their computer has a virus and it’s spamming their social graph —- not that they might be genuinely recommending something.

This is a point that we have made in the past as well. And it isn’t just a threat to traditional advertising, the kind General Motors was doing when it decided to yank its $10-million budget just before Facebook’s IPO (the company is apparently reconsidering this move). It’s also a potential risk for the kind of social advertising Facebook is trying to sell to big customers, including features like “sponsored stories,” which embed messages from Facebook users inside ads. As I tried to point out in a recent GigaOM Pro report, the network’s future depends on it being able to solve that problem (subscription required).

If Facebook can’t make ads work, then it is AOL

Sir Martin Sorrell, the chairman of giant advertising and marketing conglomerate WPP Group, put this challenge well when he said recently that he wasn’t sure whether advertising would be effective on Facebook or not, because it is a social place where users expect to interact with their friends, not with commercial messages. As he put it: “The point is that Facebook is a social medium, not an advertising one… you interrupt social conversations with commercial messages at your peril.” As Croll notes in his blog post, this could be one of the reasons why Twitter might actually be better suited to advertising content:

Facebook is stuck in an awkward place compared to LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Google. It’s not a “vertical” social network like LinkedIn. It’s not an “open” social network like Twitter [and] it’s not a default part of using the Web like Google is.

Obviously, Facebook is far from doomed when it comes to either advertising or generating revenue. One of the few advantages the network has — apart from just its massive size — is the “open graph” platform it has created, which connects it to millions of websites through “like” buttons and comments and other features (something Google has been trying to replicate to some extent with its Google+ network and the +1 button). There is at least the potential that Facebook could use these connections to develop an advertising network that places ads on partner sites and targets them using the behavior of its users, avoiding the anti-social problem.

The big danger is that Facebook never makes this or any of its various mobile efforts fly properly, and winds up being just an AOL-style platform that “tries to keep people inside it, making money off the in-system credit taxes,” as Croll puts it in his post. It may have a few billion dollars that it can spend on figuring the problem out, and a billion or so users on whom to test various solutions, but there’s no guarantee that it will succeed — or that success is even possible without radically changing the nature of the network.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why Facebook must prove the worth of social advertising
• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1

Are all the modern devices and digital conveniences we have at our disposal — from the web and social media to smartphones and tablets — making us more distracted and less able to concentrate? And is this harming our ability to think and be creative, and therefore by extension harming society as a whole? It’s a question that rears its head from time to time. One of the latest expressions of this fear comes from Joe Kraus, a serial entrepreneur who is now a partner with Google Ventures and gave a presentation recently about his concerns, offering an alternative concept he calls “Slow Tech.” But is this really something that we need to be afraid of?

In his presentation, Kraus argues that the incessant demands of cellphones and social media, not to mention email and other forms of distraction, are making it difficult for us to connect with other people — including our families — and also endangering our ability to think about anything other than the next jolt of stimulation from the devices we have all around us, which he compares to the constant stimulus of a slot machine at a casino. As he describes it:

We are creating and encouraging a culture of distraction where we are increasingly disconnected from the people and events around us, and increasingly unable to engage in long-form thinking. People now feel anxious when their brains are unstimulated.

We are losing some very important things by doing this. We threaten the key ingredients behind creativity and insight by filling up all our ‘gap’ time with stimulation. And we inhibit real human connection when we prioritize our phones over the people right in front of us.

Is multi-tasking just a myth?

Kraus says he has an “unhealthy relationship” with his phone and is constantly pulling it out to check things, and that if he lets it, that behaviour “fills up those gaps in my day — some gaps of boredom, some of solitude.” The effect of all of this, he argues, is that we are increasingly distracted, and less able to pay attention to anything for a reasonable length of time, and this distraction is a “worsening condition.” We may think that we are getting things accomplished or multi-tasking, he says, but brain studies show that multi-tasking is a myth, and in reality we are just trying to do too many things at once and overloading our brain’s ability to concentrate.

The Google Ventures partner and former co-founder of Excite.com also quotes sociologist Dr. Sherry Turkle, to the effect that: “We are lonely but fearful of intimacy. Digital connections offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. We expect more from technology and less from each other.”
This explains the constant desire for virtual contact, Kraus says — and that contact gets in the way of real relationships.

Kraus is far from the only one to raise the warning flag about any of this: Turkle has written about how the internet doesn’t help form real relationships, but fosters a kind of fake intimacy. Nicholas Carr argues in his book The Shallows that the internet and social media are making us less intelligent — and less interesting — and are actually changing our brains in negative ways. Others have also written about how they are trying to minimize the distractions their phones provide in the way of notifications, and there are a host of apps to help you concentrate when you are using your computer.

I would be the first to agree that time without a phone or tablet is a valuable thing, and that it’s good to take long walks (or baths, the place where Archimedes famously discovered the law of hydrostatics) and think big thoughts. And I also wrestle — as Kraus does — with the desire to look at the phone during meals and other times when I am with my family. But is this really a social disaster waiting to happen? And is it changing us and our brains for the worse? I have my doubts about that, just as I have my doubts about Nick Carr’s argument that the internet is making us dumber and less interesting, or that Facebook or any other social network is making us lonely.

Distraction of all kinds can be good as well as bad

Is technology changing, and society along with it? Of course it is — but that doesn’t mean we are becoming worse in some way, or necessarily losing anything crucial. In fact, we are just as likely to be gaining as losing. When Carr made his argument about the distractions of the internet, I had just finished reading a piece that Paul Kedrosky wrote for The Edge collection, in which he argued that one of the things he liked best about the internet and social media was the way in which it bombarded him with random data and content — the way that molecules are bombarded with other particles during quantum research — and that this produced all sorts of wonderful combinations of ideas:

The democratization of connections, collisions and therefore thinking is historically unprecedented. We are the first generation to have the information equivalent of the Large Hadron Collider for ideas. And if that doesn’t change the way you think, nothing will.

Not everyone can consume (or make sense of) quite as many diverse information sources as Kedrosky can, but his point is a good one: the random information flow that we are bathed in when we are online or using social media and devices like smartphones can just as easily be a source of inspiration and creativity as a killer of those things. Why is looking out the window or going for a walk more conducive to reflection than browsing through a friend’s Tumblr stream? I am not against walks or daydreaming — but there are plenty of ways to daydream and think big thoughts, and the shower or the hiking trail is not the only place that happens.

Is there a need for moderation when it comes to phones or the internet or social media? Of course there is, and social norms are developing around those things, just as they developed around the horseless carriage and the telephone and plenty of other modern inventions. One of the devices that has historically drawn the most criticism from scholars and theologians for its corrupting effect on humanity seems to have worked out pretty well — it’s called the book. If we can figure that out, I’m sure we can figure out how to handle cellphones and status updates.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Call it Real-Time, Squared, or NewNet, The Web Is Changing
• What the Google-Motorola deal means for Android, Microsoft and the mobile industry
• The rise of tablets in the enterprise

Just when you think there couldn’t possibly be any more information coming at you on the social web (and I am using the term “information” very loosely), another source pops up. First it was just Facebook messages, then it was following people on Twitter, now there’s Google+ and LinkedIn and Instagram and half a dozen other newcomers — all producing streams of activity that compete for our increasingly scarce attention. David Shing, the “digital prophet” for AOL, said this week that he expects unfriending and unfollowing to become a major phenomenon, and I know just what that feels like: a friend unfollowed me recently, and it got me thinking about this attention economy we are living in.

As anyone who follows me through Twitter or any other social network probably knows by now, I am pretty active on a number of different services for a variety of reasons. I don’t use LinkedIn very much — mostly because it feels like a site where you go to post your resume, rather than a place you go to have a discussion with people about something — but I post links there when I have a new blog post, and sometimes check out LinkedIn Today for industry news. I mostly use Facebook for social reasons, to keep in touch with family, but I post links there too. And I am a fan of Instagram for photos, for reasons that Om has described, and have been trying to post more to Google+ as well.

Am I part of the solution, or part of the problem?

The result of all this is two-fold: I wind up posting many of the same links — to my blog posts, as well as to photos and other things — to multiple networks, because I don’t know which of them my friends and followers (and potential readers) are using the most. Like me, I suspect many of them use multiple networks for different purposes. And I often re-post links in Twitter, because as Bitly has shown with its link analytics, the “half-life” of a tweet is remarkably short, and so many people may not see it. The other effect of this is that in some networks, such as Google+, I don’t participate as much as I should, and I sometimes get criticized for just posting links and then not sticking around.

I try not to clog up my stream with unnecessary things, and I try to make my activity on any network a mix of professional and personal, with humor and conversation and photos mixed up amid the blog posts and other industry-related things. I think it helps when people, including journalists, are human in that way (although not too human, hopefully). But I can see how my stream could be noisy for some — and it certainly has turned out to be for one friend, who said recently that they were forced to unfollow me. I’m not going to name them because it’s not really important who they are, I’m more interested in their reasons; they said they unfollowed me because:

I’m frankly tired of people who talk about themselves or promote their work. Repetition just makes it worse. Bombarding me with the same content multiple times in multiple channels makes you uninteresting to me.

I was somewhat taken aback by this, I admit. I assumed people would just ignore the tweets or messages they weren’t interested in, as I do when I come across things in other people’s streams that I don’t find relevant. But when I asked this friend to explain, they described something that I thought was probably pretty common for some people — and something that might possibly become more widespread, as Shing described in his recent interview with The Guardian. In effect, this person said their attention was a precious resource, and that I (and presumably others) were wasting it:

Twitter is no different from any medium in this respect – I only follow what deserves my attention. Diluting my attention stream is a great way to tell me that you do not share my concern about allocating it.

Information overload and Shirky’s “filter failure”

I think this is a feeling we probably all have now and then, thanks to what some call information overload and Clay Shirky has called “filter failure.” Maybe we feel it when our inbox is filled with messages that have been sent by someone clicking “reply all,” or maybe when we get inundated with Facebook messages and photo tags, or — on the far end of the spectrum — when we try to follow someone like Robert Scoble on a new social network like Google+. The uber-blogger and social-media maven described recently how his own wife deleted her Google+ account because of the signal-to-noise problem caused in part by Scoble himself.

Facebook has only added to this phenomenon with its new “ticker,” which scrolls by as you watch the page, with every “like” and message and Spotify song appearing and then disappearing. Facebook seemed very proud of its new “frictionless sharing” social apps, but many expressed concern about the volume of noise that would be created — and I think rightfully so. In a way, these concerns are the same as the ones my friend has: where do I spend my attention? There is a finite amount of it, and so at some point we have to choose where to allocate it. I spend less time on Facebook in part because I have too many “friends” there and the signal-to-noise ratio is quite low.

How do we solve these kinds of problems? I don’t really know. Filters such as Circles and Facebook lists — or even a new network like Bill Gross’s Chime, which lets you follow only part of a person rather than everything they post — might be part of the solution, but they also just increase the flow. Do we have to get ruthless with our friend and follower lists, and prune them even if we risk offending someone? Perhaps. All I know is that the problem isn’t getting any better — if anything, it is getting worse.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users John Lambert Pearson and Kevin Dooley

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated
• NewNet Q3: Facebook remakes headlines in social media
• Examining the rise of crowd labor platforms in 2012

The intrusive things that can affect your ability to get work done include instant message alerts, according to the study, which was conducted by Helen Hodgetts at the University of Cardiff in the UK. Even, apparently, if you only give these things a moment of your attention before returning to your primary task, you still lose a fairly significant amount of potentially productive time over the course of a day.

Speaking to LiveScience.com, Hodgetts had this to say about the study’s findings:

“Email notifications and instant messages all cause a break in focus of the task in hand, even if they are attended to only very briefly. We might find ourselves needing a few moments to regather our thoughts, and remember what it was that we were about to do before we switched our attention to the interrupting on-screen notification.”

Instead of using visual cues, Hodgetts suggests opting for auditory indicators of new mail, messages and content. If a chime sounds indicating a new message on Adium, my preferred messaging client, I can acknowledge it and continue working without breaking pace. Not only does that save me time, but it also helps make sure I maintain my train of thought, and less valuable information is lost as a result.

I’ve dropped Growl (visual notifications for pretty much any good program on the Mac), and after reading this, I’m going to disable dock bounce and menu bar item visual cues, too. Attention span is my No. 1 challenge as a web worker, and I’ll do anything that might help improve mine.

Do you find visual alerts distracting?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Personal tools lead to practical business
• Defining work in the digital age: an analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce