FOMO & Digital Trends: You Don’t Have To Catch Them All

How do you escape FOMO—Fear Of Missing Out?

The oth­er day, Anne signed up for my mail­ing list. 

After leav­ing her email address, she was taken to a land­ing page where I asked her to share her biggest digit­al mar­ket­ing and com­mu­nic­a­tions chal­lenge. Anne’s biggest chal­lenge was to keep up with digit­al trends in today’s online landscape. 

Anne wrote:

“Must we become fuck­ing experts on ‘Pokémon Marketing’ now?”

I feel you, Anne. She shares her frus­tra­tion with hun­dreds of oth­er read­ers who have answered that same ques­tion over the years. 

How can one keep up in today’s wired world? 

Here we go:

The Digital Space is Too Big: Keeping Up Is Futile

You could pick a chan­nel like Youtube and immerse your­self only to real­ise that you must choose a more pre­cise focus. Now, you might try get­ting a handle on Let’s Play walk­throughs, only to learn that you must ded­ic­ate your­self to a par­tic­u­lar gam­ing genre.

Every time you scratch a new shiny digit­al sur­face, an even big­ger online uni­verse opens up. It’s not humanly pos­sible to keep up with all the new digit­al trends emer­ging all around us. 

As a pub­lic rela­tions pro­fes­sion­al who’s been into digit­al PR for dec­ades, I would sug­gest anoth­er approach. As I see it, it’ll be enough to keep up with those trends that will affect your business.

The trick, of course, is to spot those digit­al trends that truly mat­ter to you and your brand.

How Artificial Scarcity Works

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The Principle of Scarcity

The prin­ciple of scarcity is well-estab­lished in sci­entif­ic lit­er­at­ure. If some­thing seems scarce, we anti­cip­ate our pos­sible regret of fail­ing to acquire the resource in time:

“In 2 exper­i­ments, a total of 200 female under­gradu­ates rated the value and attract­ive­ness of cook­ies that were either in abund­ant sup­ply or scarce sup­ply. […] Results indic­ate that (a) cook­ies in scarce sup­ply were rated as more desir­able than cook­ies in abund­ant sup­ply; (b) cook­ies were rated as more valu­able when their sup­ply changed from abund­ant to scarce than when they were con­stantly scarce; and © cook­ies scarce because of high demand were rated high­er than cook­ies that were scarce because of an acci­dent.“
Source: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology ¹Worchel, S., Lee, J., & Adewole, A. (1975). Effects of sup­ply and demand on rat­ings of object value. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32(5), 906 – 914.

We are pro­grammed for sur­viv­al and will, there­fore, a) over­value items and ser­vices that are scarce and b) under­value those plen­ti­fully. ²The beha­viour is some­times called FOMO (fear of miss­ing out).

Creating arti­fi­cial scarcity (by lim­it­ing avail­ab­il­ity) is a power­ful PR strategy, but to avoid back­fir­ing, the PR pro­fes­sion­al must refrain from fram­ing the offer using untrue statements.

Learn more: The Power of Artificial Scarcity

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The Science Behind FOMO

FOMO is typ­ic­ally described as a per­vas­ive appre­hen­sion that oth­ers might be hav­ing reward­ing exper­i­ences from which one is absent and is char­ac­ter­ized by the desire to stay con­tinu­ally con­nec­ted with what oth­ers are doing.

FOMO is often asso­ci­ated with feel­ings of anxi­ety and dis­sat­is­fac­tion and has been linked to neg­at­ive out­comes such as lower mood and life sat­is­fac­tion, poor sleep qual­ity, and prob­lem­at­ic use of social media.

There is a grow­ing body of sci­entif­ic lit­er­at­ure explor­ing the concept of FOMO, or Fear of Missing Out. 

Here are some key studies:

These stud­ies sug­gest that FOMO is a real psy­cho­lo­gic­al phe­nomen­on that can con­trib­ute to vari­ous issues, par­tic­u­larly in rela­tion to men­tal health and tech­no­logy use. 

As social media plays a sig­ni­fic­ant role in our lives, under­stand­ing and address­ing FOMO becomes increas­ingly important.

The Pointless Pokestop

The oth­er day in Stockholm, I walked past a loc­al store for office sup­plies. There was a Pokestop right out­side their store­front, as cir­cum­stance would have it. ³A Pokestop is a vir­tu­al in-game fea­ture of the pop­u­lar mobile game Pokémon Go, a game that blends with real-world loc­a­tions.

In an attempt to grab this mar­ket­ing oppor­tun­ity, they got into Pokémon Go and added lures to the Pokestop — which they advert­ised on a writ­ten sign in one of their win­dow dis­plays. ⁴Again, for those not up to speed with all things Niantic, a lure is a vir­tu­al item and part of the game. By pla­cing your lure at a Pokestop, you attract vir­tu­al creatures for oth­er play­ers to catch. … Continue read­ing

I got curi­ous and found a café across the street. In an hour, two Pokémon Go play­ers, less than 15 years old, stopped by the Pokestop out­side the store­front, but none cared about enter­ing the office sup­ply store.

Boldly, I assumed that Pokémon Go play­ers gen­er­ally aren’t in the mar­ket to stock up on print­er ink. 

It got me thinking.

I checked the office supplier’s web­site, which wasn’t optim­ised for mobile. The web­site couldn’t tell me wheth­er or not they had cer­tain products in stock or not. Wouldn’t their mar­ket­ing efforts have been bet­ter spent jack­ing up their site? 

Let’s ima­gine that the web­site has 500 unique hits every day. What if the office sup­pli­er had aimed their “cre­at­ive ambi­tions” at those 500 daily web vis­it­ors — instead of try­ing to con­vert two young Pokémon Go players?

The FOMO Filter 

A part of me cel­eb­rates the office sup­pli­er for tak­ing a chance to try some­thing new. “Fortune favours the bold,” and so on.

Still, some­thing must be said about tak­ing unne­ces­sary gambles when there’s plenty of oth­er low-hanging fruit. Marketing and com­mu­nic­a­tions are fiercely com­pet­it­ive simply because we com­pete for one of the world’s rare and most valu­able nat­ur­al resources; people’s attention. 

The ques­tion we should be ask­ing ourselves:

The FOMO fil­ter: Before exper­i­ment­ing with excit­ing online trends, ask your­self: have you exhausted all exist­ing PR- and mar­ket­ing opportunities?

Stay Focused, Stay Sharp

Businesses can’t afford to jump on every online band­wag­on (Clubhouse, any­one? Or per­haps — the Metaverse?) that seems to be in vogue. 

It turns us into FOMO-suf­fer­ing neo­phili­acs. We fall prey to our strategies of man­u­fac­tur­ing arti­fi­cial scarcity.

The office sup­ply store’s mar­ket­ing team should be excited about inbound mar­ket­ing, Google AdWords, cus­tom­er loy­alty, mar­ket research, online con­ver­sion, search engine optim­isa­tion, and e‑commerce — instead of Pokémon Go.

So, Anne and every­one else strug­gling to keep up, you don’t have to catch them all! 

Just. Stay. Business. Relevant.

Update: Since someone asked:

PR Resource: The Anatomy of Attention

“There’s only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
— Oscar Wilde

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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.

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 ⁵Shipp, 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. ⁶Schweizer, 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:

• Alertness. This is the state of being watch­ful and ready to respond. It’s the most basic form of atten­tion, rep­res­ent­ing our read­i­ness to per­ceive and pro­cess inform­a­tion from the environment.
• Sustained atten­tion. This involves focus­ing on a spe­cif­ic task or stim­u­lus over a pro­longed peri­od. It’s cru­cial for tasks that require ongo­ing con­cen­tra­tion, like read­ing or driving.
• Focused atten­tion. This refers to the abil­ity to con­cen­trate on one par­tic­u­lar stim­u­lus or task while ignor­ing oth­ers. It’s the abil­ity to focus nar­rowly on a single thing.
• Attentional switch­ing. Also known as task switch­ing or cog­nit­ive flex­ib­il­ity, this involves shift­ing focus from one task to anoth­er. It’s crit­ic­al for mul­ti­task­ing and adapt­ing to chan­ging demands or priorities.
• Divided atten­tion. This is the abil­ity to pro­cess two or more responses or react to mul­tiple tasks sim­ul­tan­eously. It’s often tested by ask­ing people to per­form two tasks sim­ul­tan­eously, like listen­ing to a con­ver­sa­tion while writ­ing.
• Attention accord­ing to the super­vis­ory atten­tion­al sys­tem. This concept, derived from cog­nit­ive psy­cho­logy, refers to a high­er-level con­trol sys­tem that reg­u­lates the alloc­a­tion of atten­tion, par­tic­u­larly in situ­ations requir­ing plan­ning or decision-making.
• Attention as inhib­i­tion. This aspect of atten­tion involves sup­press­ing irrel­ev­ant or dis­tract­ing stim­uli. It’s a cru­cial com­pon­ent of focused atten­tion and self-regulation.
• Spatial atten­tion. This type of atten­tion focuses on a spe­cif­ic area with­in the visu­al field. It’s like a spot­light that enhances inform­a­tion pro­cessing in a par­tic­u­lar location.
• Attention as plan­ning. This per­spect­ive views atten­tion as a resource that needs to be alloc­ated effi­ciently, espe­cially in com­plex tasks requir­ing stra­tegic plan­ning and organization.
• Interference. In the con­text of atten­tion, inter­fer­ence refers to the pro­cess by which irrel­ev­ant inform­a­tion or dis­trac­tions impede the effi­ciency of cog­nit­ive processing.
• Attention as arous­al. This con­siders atten­tion in the con­text of the gen­er­al level of alert­ness or arous­al. It’s about the read­i­ness of the brain to engage with stim­uli or tasks.
• Attention accord­ing to the assess­ment tra­di­tion. This refers to meas­ur­ing and eval­u­at­ing atten­tion­al pro­cesses, often in clin­ic­al or edu­ca­tion­al set­tings, to identi­fy atten­tion defi­cits or disorders.

Each type of atten­tion plays a cru­cial 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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