The 360 view: how we navigate the attention economy

It’s humbling to see yourself as others do, the 360 view. You’re just another blob on someone’s radar. But attention is the new currency, and face time is crucial for your bottom line.

The morning commute never fails to remind me how many of us there are, how alike we are, but at the same time, so totally self-focussed. I weave my way through all the others, all going to very similar places of work, and I imagine how they have all gone through their morning ritual, ready to face other humans, just like me. Precious minutes spent at the mirror. How do I look?

Some might be off to a job interview. Maybe sent a hundred letters in, and this is the first time they were invited in. Nervous, probably.

But in the morning traffic, I don’t see them as they see themselves in the mirror. I see other humans, full 360, in cars, on bicycles, on foot. When they look at me, same thing, I’m just another blob on their radar.

As with our company. We are one of the millions of faceless businesses that drive the economy. If we are seen at all, it’s a click on our website. And gone again.

The 360-view, if you are wondering, is the road to true self-awareness while seeing yourself as others see you. A concept often used in personal development and professional contexts to describe a state of having a comprehensive understanding of oneself from multiple perspectives.

It’s about integrating various sources of information to form a complete picture of who you are, how you are perceived by others, and how you can develop and grow. As a person, as a company.

Goes just as well for the person we saw this morning, on their way to a job interview, sending in a hundred fails before writing the one that landed them the invitation. As for a company rep landing their biggest contract after they spent six months tweaking their story.

Human attention is a scarce good, the competition for it fierce. Advertisers and tech platforms vie for it. On social media, ever-more attention-seeking subjects are deployed to capture a minute of face time from an ever-scrolling audience.

You want to sell your goods, first thing you need is attention. Face time with your lead.

Attention is currency. Recently, a well-known venture capital firm invested millions in a company that had not developed any product, just hyped its possible future existence very successfully.

Until not long ago, new clients came to us because our company name reflects what we do. That we are experts in the web framework Django. We did zero marketing.

No longer. We haven’t had an organic lead in 2 years. It hurts. We are busy with our existing clients, but still, it hurts that we are not getting as many requests as before.

We should do some marketing.

We are lucky: one, that our first big gig was for an email marketing machine. We built their platform that they sold their products on by collecting email addresses and delivering newsletters. Our takeaway? Marketing is a numbers game, 5 million emails sent daily makes for a company of 750 employees.

Two: we have an email marketing expert on our team. Knows all the ins and outs of the technical side of email marketing, including deliverability: the art of delivering emails to inboxes as opposed to the spam box.

So, having grown up in the attention trade, we are ideally positioned to fire off some marketing campaigns.

But here it comes: we know who are we, what we sell, for whom. But how does the world see us? We need a 360 view.

Getting a strangers’ trust is hard. That’s the first thing you realise when you do your first marketing campaign. Your lead has a gazillion choices and you are just another attention-seeker looking for face time.

But we are lucky in a third way: we do marketing for our clients.

In particular, for one client, who is struggling with a diminishing user base, we are doing a marketing campaign that is right down our alley. A combination of email and personal networking. And it delivers, but not only for the client. Also for us.

Delivers because the client gets users, and we get face time.

More importantly, we get to see ourselves as others see us. We learn from that. We get to see how we are perceived by others, how what we are trying to sell is perceived, how to gain attention from our leads in order for us to bring across the value the product can bring to them. Marketing for our client is the perfect hands-on 360-view course.

How we navigate the attention economy is learning how to do marketing for ourselves by doing marketing for others. That won’t be for everyone, and in fact it might be our unique niche that makes it possible. But for us, it helps that we are on the road often, leading and learning, and it helps our clients that we offer the services they need to thrive.