The Content Attention Pyramid (CAP)

What can we learn from the con­tent atten­tion pyramid?.

There’s no “stand­ing still” in social media pub­lish­ing. If you stand still and neg­lect the need for con­stant evol­u­tion, you’ll slowly start to sink into the con­tent abyss — per­haps nev­er to be seen again.

Either you man­age to stay afloat, or you find an arena where you’re able to com­pete suc­cess­fully. Everything else is futile.

Here we go:

The Content Attention Pyramid (CAP)

Each con­tent niche has a lim­ited amount of avail­able atten­tion; in oth­er words, there is nev­er enough men­tal band­width to cov­er all digit­al content.

Social media algorithms take cues from social inter­ac­tion data and vari­ous forms of ana­lys­is to sat­is­fy the need for inform­a­tion, but also, and more import­antly, do away with con­tent that is no longer needed — or per­haps it nev­er was.

At any giv­en moment in time, brands and con­tent cre­at­ors face two stra­tegic choices:

Failing to adhere to both of these choices, the brand or the con­tent cre­at­or will find them­selves slowly sink­ing into the con­tent abyss — until their newly pub­lished con­tent goes dir­ectly into the void, only to stay there, forever.

Learn more: The Social Media Attention Pyramid

The Anatomy of Attention

Attention is an essen­tial com­pon­ent of pub­lic relations:

An organ­isa­tion, starved of atten­tion, trust, and loy­alty, is com­pelled to wage a per­petu­al struggle for its con­tin­ued existence.

And it’s not just organ­isa­tions. We all seem to crave atten­tion in some form or another:

“People want to be loved; fail­ing that admired; fail­ing that feared; fail­ing that hated and des­pised. They want to evoke some sort of sen­ti­ment. The soul shud­ders before obli­vi­on and seeks con­nec­tion at any price.”
— Hjalmar Söderberg (1869−1941), Swedish author

It’s fear of social isol­a­tion—and atten­tion star­va­tion.

Types of Attention

But what con­sti­tutes ‘atten­tion’?

“Attention is a com­plex, real neur­al archi­tec­ture (‘RNA’) mod­el that integ­rates vari­ous cog­nit­ive mod­els and brain cen­ters to per­form tasks like visu­al search.”
Source: Trends in cog­nit­ive sci­ences ¹Shipp, S. (2004). The brain cir­cuitry of atten­tion. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8, 223 – 230. https://​doi​.org/​1​0​.​1​0​1​6​/​j​.​t​i​c​s​.​2​0​0​4​.​0​3​.​004

Each of the below terms refers to a spe­cif­ic aspect or type of atten­tion (“men­tal band­width”), a com­plex cog­nit­ive pro­cess. ²Schweizer, K., Moosbrugger, H., & Goldhammer, F. (2005). The struc­ture of the rela­tion­ship between atten­tion and intel­li­gence. Intelligence, 33(6), 589 – 611. … Continue read­ing

Let’s explore dif­fer­ent types of attention:

Each type of atten­tion is likely to play a role in how we inter­act with and pro­cess inform­a­tion from our envir­on­ment, and under­stand­ing these dif­fer­ent aspects is key in fields like psy­cho­logy, neur­os­cience, and education.

Learn more: The Anatomy of Attention

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