We need to learn about information overload

Our readers and Web site visitors are busier than ever. Few would disagree that demands on their personal and professional time are at an all-time high. That means that every single interaction a reader has with a computer--whether catching the latest sports scores on ESPN.com or reading an e-mail from a colleague--is hard-won time we're competing for as B2B publishers on the Web. Digitally speaking, we don't compete against one another. We compete against every single thing someone can do on an Internet-connected computer. Yikes.

Also at an all-time high is the barrage of information published on the Web. With every new e-newsletter or Webcast alert that is sent out, the value of all e-newsletters and Webcasts are cheapened. An oversupply compared to demand, if you will. So what happens is that participation rates--however you want to measure it, whether opt ins, conversions, or open rates--are declining.

That puts publishers squarly in the game of direct response marketers. We send out an ever increasing volume of e-mail to try to get our audiences to participate in some way. And when we all do that, the cacaphony becomes deafening to our readers. Unfortunately, a common response is to send out even more emails, which may boost response in the short term, but it worsens the problem in the long term.

It is obvious, of course, that those publications whose editorial is consistently on target with readers' needs are the very ones that readers will make time for in this information overloaded environment. Still, even top publications are affected by the trends above.

And the number of new publications, new Web sites, new e-mail newsletters, new e-zines, will only rise. The problem is going to get worse, and probably won't get better.

We are living in a different world, as publishers, one that I'm not sure we understand all that well. We need to the fallout of information overload with our audiences. We need a much sharper understanding of how it's affecting our readers. We need a new science of information consumption in the online world.

Usability experts like Jakob Nielsen have touched on this area by calling attention to important digital media concepts like information foraging, scanning vs. reading, micro-content, and information pollution. But we need to learn more. We need to get under the skins of our readers, observe their behavior, live with them day to day to get an intuitive understanding of how they consume information. Consumer packaged goods companies have long done this. If you're selling a product in a grocery store, you're competing with tens of thousands of products, and shoppers give you a fraction of a second of their attention before they make a decision whether to buy your product. Do the dynamics sound familiar?

In a subsequent post, I will sketch out some ideas of how publishers can take a page from consumer packaged goods companies to start developing this new science of information consumption.