Are there too many conversations?
By: Lisa Allocca
It’s 2:00 in the afternoon and I have received 35 newsletters today. That doesn’t include my feeds from various blogs and sites. All of this information came from companies, industry pundits, journalists, venture capitalists, and people that I have found to be interesting over the course of my career.
Depending how prolific people were this past week, I could have hundreds of items to read. And it has been a relatively slow week as people wind down for summer and holiday vacation. I suppose at one time or another I unwittingly checked a box that meant that I “opted in” or subscribed to all of these newsletters and blog feeds but frankly I don’t remember purposely signing up for all of this information.
As an information “power user” I am able to filter through these conversations fairly quickly. I call them conversations because they provide the opportunity to comment and engage the author. It took me several hours to comb through all the information but it would have taken a non-power user much longer. Most of these newsletters and blog entries have commented or aggregated content from other sites. After scanning several hundred items, hidden among the noise, there were only about a dozen that contained original, thought-provoking commentary. There were only about a dozen, about 3% of all the conversations out there on topics where I have “opted-in” that I would consider “expert” on a particular subject. The rest is just noise.
What I found even more interesting is that only one item out of the dozen originated from someone that was not an established journalist or industry/financial analyst. The one item was written by a different kind of market-watcher – a VC.
So consider this.
Even though everyone has the opportunity to publish, the people who have traditionally been the newsmakers and provide in-depth commentary continue to be the newsmakers but they are just expanding the tools they use to communicate. As you filter thorough all of the noise, focus in on what moves the needle for you business.
