CHART OF THE DAY: In a world of infinite choice, we choose very little

How many apps do you have installed on your smart phone? 50, 60, maybe more?

How many TV channels does your cable or satellite TV subscription offer? A couple hundred, give or take?

How many websites are there on the internet? Way, way too many to count I bet. Probably something in the order of tens of millions at least.

So after thinking about those questions, let's ask another set of questions. How many apps, websites, and TV channels do you regularly use/visit/consume? What it the number of these apps, etc. that tend to dominate your time and attention?

Take a look at the chart below, taken from a recent presentation given by business strategist Michael Wolf at a recent Wall St. Journal conference, for some insights into these questions, and then as you have come to demand, some FREE commentary from me after the data.

Interesting data, let's unpack it a little here and see what it might mean for HR/Talent/anyone trying to get attention in a busy world. 

The average person uses 27 apps in a month, but about 80% of that time is spent in only 5 apps. I will offer up my top 5 - Gmail, Twitter, Zite (a news aggregator), Feedly (an RSS feed reader), and The Score (a sports news and scores app). But whatever your Top 5 apps may be, chances are good they dominate your time on your phone to a significant extent.

This same self-selected narrowing of almost endless choices also is seen with the general internet, and with TV content. We have tons of options, almost too many, yet we end up gravitating and focusing on those very few choices we seem to enjoy and identify with the most. And again, those lists are pretty small. 

What should this data make us think about in more general terms as we try to pry precious attention and eyeballs towards our bright shiny new things?

1. We choose very little, but the 'pie' is so big, even a tiny sliver is huge. With the continued growth of market penetration of smart phones, broadband connections, and wifi everywhere - more and more time is being spent online in all of its forms. Your app or website or internet show or podcast doesn't have to break into anyone's Top 5 to still be a huge success. You just have to identify, target, and create value for that small group that will be open and ready for your message. The HR Happy Hour Show that Trish McFarlane and I do is a great example of this. We may not be 'Serial', but we have a fantastic and growing audience of HR and HR tech fans and have built a really cool thing.

2. Habits are really hard to change. You, me, everyone - we check the same 5 apps, the same 8 websites, watch the same 10 TV channels week after week after week. If you can't easily get folks to change their consumption habits then you have to find a way to better integrate with these habits. No one hates email more than me, but I still spend more time in email every day than I care to, and I still get plenty of news and information from this old habit. So it makes sense to focus at least some on getting your message better read in email or in one of the other 'Top' apps today (LinkedIn, Medium, Quora, Snapchat, etc.), instead of creating something brand new that requires users to adopt a new habit. 

3. Don't 'break' things that are working. Once you have an audience, or a set of fans/followers etc., you have to be careful not to mess around or experiment too much all at one time. It is hard enough to initially earn the attention of the audience you seek, it is even harder to have to try and earn them a second time. As your audience grows you want to be sure you are growing along with them, but not leaving them behind if that makes sense. I'd like to run 'Ranked' posts every day, but if I did I am pretty sure I would drive away just about everyone who I have spent 7 or 8 years trying to connect with. But the occasional Tom Cruise or Ranked post is fine I think.

No one has time for all the choices that are now available to us on our phones, the web, and our TVs. That doesn't mean there is not any room or any opportunity for something new to break through, it just means that the ideas that can break through are rarer than ever, and the people that can conjure up these ideas are more valuable than ever.

Ok that's it, I am out. Go back to the sites/apps you really enjoy. 

Have a great week!

This content is not sponsored

No doubt you have heard or read about, and possibly (more like probably), installed for yourself one of the popular Ad blocking programs or browser extensions in order to improve your web browsing experience, protect your privacy, and even perhaps to send a message to the internet publishers of the world that you are sick and tired of a terrible, ad-filled user experience.

While Ad blockers have been around for quite some time, their usage has recently seen a dramatic uptick. A study released last month by PageFair and Adobe reported that the usage of Ad blocking tools worldwide has grown by 41% in the last year, and now about 45 million US internet users use these tools, (a 48% growth rate in the 12-month period ending in June 2015).Robert Rauschenberg, Yoicks, 1954

Finally, ad blocking has hit the news more openly due to the recent release of Apple's update to the iOS operating system that powers iPhone and iPad that now supports Ad blocking apps and Safari browser extensions to enable ad blocking. Immediately, Ad blocking apps shot to the top of the App Store popularity charts, (although the number one app, Peace, was quickly withdrawn by its creator for reasons of 'conscience').

And the short-tern and pretty obvious repercussions to online publishers from this rise in user Ad blocking? 

A loss of revenue, for sure, for those sites that rely heavily on banner and display ads for revenue. If these ads are not seen, they can't be clicked on, and therefore can't produce revenue. From the user/reader perspective this is great, you never clicked on any of these ads anyway, and they drover slower page load times, potentially ate of monthly data allotments on mobile, and were just plain creepy and annoying. 

But for the publishers, you or me or anyone blocking these ads presents to their point of view almost a breach of understanding of sorts. The deal, such as it it, is that for non-subscription and non-paywalled sites, the publisher would provide 'free' content, and you, the reader, would 'agree' to put up with seeing and occasionally clicking on ads to fund the content creation operation. It is impossible to tell for sure the number of sites that if Ad blocking continues to grow at the current pace will end up either having to shut down, or adopt an alternate business models, (subscriptions, donations, or more 'sponsored conent'). Sponsored content, for now, looks enough like 'regular' content that the ad blockers can't easily identify it as such.

The deep backstory behind some of what is going on here, and not really worth diving into on an HR blog, is the macro battle being waged for user time and attention, and the corresponding advertising dollars that follow, between Apple, Google, Facebook and if you wanted to be generous, probably Twitter and LinkedIn too. The iOS 9 updated placed a non-deletable 'Apple News' app on your iPhone, Facebook wants every important publisher to publish direct to Facebook, and LinkedIn and its Pulse app want to be the sole source for your news as well.

Some of these companies, (Facebook and Apple for sure), want to control and segregate user's interactions with the internet into their own platforms, devices, and/or apps - formats where they can define the rules of engagement and protect their advertisers ads from being blocked. Others like Google, want to continue to drive traffic to sites (again, especially on mobile), that don't attempt to drive users to download individual publisher apps as opposed to using the mobile web.

It is still really hard to know how these trends are going to play out, how we find and consumer information might change, and how the revenue models will adapt. But ads are like water - they will continue to push and flow into whatever openings they can find to get in front of our eyeballs on on our mobile phone screens. 

But to tie this back, if I can, to the HR/Talent/workplace space, I think the potential for the reduction of independent voices in our space is the real threat and the thing to worry about longer term. If indeed the rise of Ad blocking, combined with the ubiquity, wealth, reach, and influence of the world's largest tech companies drive us to an environment where fewer, siloed, and single-entity controlled sources of information dominate the conversation, then that can't be good for the generation, discussion, and spread of new ideas.

This, to me, is worth paying attention to in the next couple of years. Sure, web pages free of ads do look better, load faster, and are less frustrating.

But if the tradeoff is a world where all of the news (or at least most of it), gets filtered, approved, and distributed via Apple, Google, and Facebook can't promise to be a less frustrating one either.

Have a great week!                         

Off Topic - Stop me if you think that you've heard this one before

If you are a user of the Google Chrome browser, then you are certainly famiiar with the way Chrome displays your Top 8 'most visited' websites when you click to open a new browser tab. For me, these Top 8 most visited sites, (see image on the right), never seem to change all that much if at all. And I am not sure if that is a good thing quite honestly. Whether it is a list of most frequently visited sites, a familiar and kind of static collection of blogs in a RSS reader, or the tendency many of us have in social media to follow and connect with thousands of people but actually converse with about 20, it is really easy to fall into an information rut, seeing the same kinds of content from the same sources, or as the author Eli Pariser has described it, a filter bubble.

A filter bubble can occur when we either proactively choose to limit the number and diversity of our information sources, or, as is a key feature of the social network Facebook, a system and algorithm determines what content and information it thinks we should see, based on our past preferences and behaviors. But by explicit choice, or more passive acceptance of smart filters, the end result can be, paradoxically, in a networked, connected world of almost unlimited information, that our consumption and exposure to content becomes pretty narrow. We read things we already know, from sources we access every day, and that are shared with us by the same small group of people we know well, (and who, mostly, think like we do).

So here are the questions for today - what do you do to try and ensure you are seeing a wide enough range of viewpoints and sources of information? Do you try and seek out new and different, (perhaps divergent), writers and thinkers to supplement the same five blogs you read every day? How do you seek out people that might disagree with you?

And finally, who is out there doing amazing work that you think the rest of your community might not know about?

Have a Great Weekend!

Before you know you want it

As the World Wide Web has developed and evolved the methods and strategies utilized for information discovery have also undergone tremendous growth and evolution.  In the late 1990s portal and categorization technology from Yahoo dominated. If you wanted to find something, chances are a walk down Yahoo's categorization hierarchy was your starting point.

Over time as the web exploded in content and complexity and since human-curated categorization simply could not keep up with the growth, search took over as the primary tool for finding content. This market was led by Yahoo for a time, and eventually came to be dominated by Google.  More recently, social discovery has come to rival search as a primary and important mechanism for surfacing important and meaningful web content.  I know something is important, and quite likely worth my time and attention if a trusted friend or colleague has shared it on Twitter, or recommended it on Facebook.

But despite the obvious improvements in the underlying technology and usability exhibited by the evolution of discovery tools and methods, there still seems an element of inefficiency and imperfection in the strategies and actions that many of us leverage to find interesting information.  Keeping informed of news and developments in our areas of interest, and perhaps most importantly, surfacing content and expertise in adjacent or complimentary spaces, the kinds of resources that are most likely to expose us to new thinking, ideas, and challenge our conception of the status quo, is increasingly seen as an endless, and hopeless struggle.

It is only logical that there is something next, something better and more effective than the combination of search and social curation and discovery that most of us have come to rely upon in an attempt to learn, adapt, and stay informed.  What if the next development is a kind of new technology that not only presents you with a collection of relevant resources and links based on your active preferences and the content shared by your trusted networks, but is intelligent enough to predict what you will be interested in next, and offers information and insights based on a more informed prediction about not just what you may have liked in the past, but what is most relevant to you today, and quite likely tomorrow.

That is the basic premise behind an interesting startup from Finland called Futureful.  Futureful is in the process of developing what they call a 'Predictive Discovery Engine'.  What exactly is 'predictive discovery?' From the Futureful 'about' page:

Futureful’s predictive discovery engine analyzes relevant information flows to open up the potential future around you. We use a combination of personal, social and contextual filters to understand interests, influences and intentions, and provide you with inspiring seeds to play with. Then its up to you to pick and choose, discover and share. 

I have to admit that while a little unsure about the specific ability of Futureful to build and successfully deploy the self-described predictive discovery engine, I do think that in time, and perhaps sooner than later a better, and more precise method and technology for information discovery and presentation will have to emerge.  The current, seemingly unsustainable cycle of adding feeds to Google Reader, adding friends on the various social networks, and the development of new and improved mobile devices that provide constant access to all the noise, with only a passing ability to discover the signal will eventually have to change.

If you are like me, you might feel like you are reading every possible blog, news source, and mass media site you can find.  You may have developed a large, diverse, and valuable set of networks across numerous social platforms.  You are constantly reading, updating, reviewing, and sharing.  But despite all this activity, you never shake the feeling that you are missing something. So you add 'more'. Another feed, another friend, an so on.

Perhaps we don't need more, we need more precise.

Perhaps we need a way to see the future before it arrives.

How about you - what do you do to try and manage the balance between information overload and the sense you are missing something?