The behavior of today’s clients, supporters and stakeholders has changed in that they poke and search for informational solutions primarily via search and social media and social networks. This means your organisation needs to have useful and relevant content at the right time—when people are looking to solve their problem—and in the right places—where they will find you. But that’s great because the Internet has liberated attention and no longer is its captive.

This change in how we operate over the past 4-5 years has meant organisations need to reconsider how they attract, engage and motivate people to action. What are some of the most important changes your organisation can make to adapt and stay relevant today?

Understand that there are four ways your business can generate attention:

1. You can BUY attention. We know it as advertising and all advertising is voluntary now. You can’t force someone to read your news story, or watch your ad. There’s more media choices and our attention has been segmented.
2. You can BEG for attention. This is called Public Relations. There are two kinds of PR: publicity (which is going to fade away) and there’s public relations which is story telling. Storytelling is going to get more and more important.
3. You can BUG people one at a time to get attention. This is called sales. If you have a sales force, their job is not  take orders because you can outsource that or put that on the internet. Their job is also not to bother people into buying from you either because that is not a scalable strategy but what your sales force must do is communicate emotion. But you can’t communicate trust and emotion to someone if they are not listening. So the forecast should always be warm. Warm introductions are critical because cold doesn’t work as well, and with warm, listening and leads multiply.
4. You can EARN attention online. You earn attention creating and distributing relevant and valuable content that your clearly defined and understood target audience wants such as YouTube videos, white papers, checklist, blogs, Twitter feeds, infographics, photographs, charts, case studies, product pages and ebooks— and it is all free.

Like it or not these changes in technology and human behavior is turning organisations into media hubs as we all seek new ways to connect with audiences and promote our causes.

Question: How are YOU generating attention?

Author – This post is by Patrick McFadden. Patrick is Cause & Effective’s marketing advisor and the author of the Indispensable Marketing Blog. You can also follow him on Twitter. If you would like to guest post on B-Cause, check out our guidelines here.