Cambridge Business Association
Your Attention, Please.
Book

Your Attention, Please.

How to Appeal to Today's Distracted, Disinterested, Disengaged, Disenchanted, And Busy Consumer

Paul B. Brown and Alison Davis
Adams Media, 2006
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Editorial Rating

8

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Recommendation

Getting your message across is becoming more difficult. People suffer an excess of information and clutter. Audiences are demanding and selective, and they vary widely in their needs and interests. That’s why business writer Paul B. Brown and employee-communications consultant Alison Davis deserve a lot of credit for creating this handy, practical manual on basic communication skills for the Internet age. Their ideas may not be profound, but their fundamental lessons are highly applicable, as their examples and their blocky, jazzy layout attest. Their book offers the expected list of pitfalls, but it also provides great guidelines that can improve the practices of any communicator. getAbstract recommends it to anyone who needs to break through the tumult and get a message across to the public. Follow its advice and everyone, including the members of your audience, will benefit.

Summary

Discarded Messages

Communicators are in trouble. Messages and information from newspapers, magazines, e-mails, videos, audios and other sources besiege today’s audiences. In reaction, people delete, skip and pitch material as fast as they get it. If you’ve tried to give a presentation to a restless, distracted audience, you know that people are finding it hard to pay attention, no matter how much time you spend crafting your message. You face a problem, but you are not alone. The challenge of breaking through the communication clutter is common, and it’s getting worse. The first step is to analyze what factors influence the people who receive (or reject) your message. Members of modern audiences discard the majority of messages they receive for several reasons, including:

  • The messages may be interesting, but that’s all – And that isn’t enough. A message has to be relevant and compelling to get people to read it, much less act upon it.
  • The messages don’t address people’s needs – People pay attention to messages that offer them clearly stated benefits, like becoming safer, thinner or wealthier.
  • Messages...

About the Authors

Paul B. Brown writes the What’s Offline column for The New York Times Sunday Business section. A former writer and editor for BusinessWeek, Financial World, Forbes and Inc., he co-authored numerous bestsellers, including Customers for Life. Alison Davis is co-founder and CEO of Davis & Company, an employee-communications consulting firm.

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