Their Attention on You, is Priceless and Predictable

Their Attention on You, is Priceless

I had just spoken for three hours to an elite group in Warsaw. The people could have headed for the exit when I had concluded. But this is the result that occurred. I want this to be the result YOU experience. And remember when you have an abundance of attention, giving a little piece of that attention to as many people as want it, allows you to be both magnet and an excitement generator. Watch the faces of the people and see if this is true.

You walk into a room with 100 people and because of what you are wearing, how amazing you look, your advanced billing, who you are with, or what you are carrying, (1) everyone flashes on you.

(2) You will either capture and hold their gaze or it will move along to another person.

You’ll learn today you don’t want attention at all cost, you want that initial split second to be consistent with what you are there for. If you walk into a board room wearing a bathing suit you’ll get attention, but (3)  if the ongoing attention doesn’t fit with your role there, you lose credibility. The attention that could have been positive becomes a disaster.

Legend Point: Your captivation must be context specific or you lose your desired outcome.

Let me explain…

Instagram. If this were your place of connection with fans, your  reaching 100,000 followers COULD net you about $5,000 for a post with a brand that fully resonates with your Instagram content.

Think about it: You built from scratch an Instagram account that was all about traveling around the world. There was nothing about your philosophy, your kids, your job. Just images of destinations that are captivating. For some reason your account got followed and thousands of others just like seeing it every day.

Sounds easy? You captured attention in a flash one day. They followed you after looking at your posts. And they’re always about the same thing. (This is your Instagrams account, brand!)

There’s a million ways to screw up this account on the road to 100,000 which instantly reveals whether you’re serious about this micro-niche, or not. When it’s clear, your Instagram is the real thing, there will be an established company with money becomes interested. In this case you made it and now you can be rewarded with an exclusive deal with a travel company of some kind.

Imagine if your entire two years of posts are better niched.

Instead of “travel” it’s all about cruises for singles and your account has that same 100,000 followers. NOW that $5,000 per month sponsorship could be worth $10,000 monthly to one cruise line because you are reaching a VERY SPECIFIC audience that is tailor made to their market.

You captured and HELD the attention of 100,000 people over time, and THAT is impressive.

Attention is something that you will capture in one or two “places.” (this is true in both the virtual or in real world) Trying to be seen everywhere is not going to work in real life.  Learn how to capture, hold and make the attention “brand specific” and you can build wealth.

Good news:

You don’t need 100,000 followers anywhere to be successful. The rules of Attention Capture are the same whether you use social media, television, webinars, books, podcasts, newspapers to be seen.

Legend Point: There is a DIFFERENCE between what gets attention and what gets picked (bought), but if you DO NOT get attention, you CAN NOT get “picked up off the rack!”

However, getting attention in a way that is not consistent with you as a person or the product/service you sell then you are like a carnival act. Funny to look at, and go home with nothing.

The attention you capture must be BRAND CONSISTENT, and because YOU are a brand, you probably want to consider some fine tuning that brand image.

Attention that resonates with who you or your company are, is what you strive to achieve.

Now you understand that meaningful attention has three aspects. Let’s focus on the FIRST.

Think of  an attention flash like the momentary trigger that stops certain people from looking at what they were looking at…and instead look at you. Remember you don’t want everyone. You want to capture the attention of specific people for a specific purpose.

For example,

• How would you like to be THE ONE  that the girl (or guy) sees and considers FIRST?
• How would you like your product or service to instantly stand out from all the others?
• What would happen if they thought of you, immediately when they wondered who could solve their problem?

Legend Point: You’ll need to use ONE of the following FIVE Factors that will be certain to bring attention to you.

1. Surprising (unexpected) Place, Placement, Position – If you fly into the stadium on a helicopter, no one is expecting that. It’s surprising. When something happens in one specific location that is surprising because of the location or placement in the location, that’s often enough to have an attention flash.

Coming up the road to the turnoff to the development I live in, the only way to know where to turn right is not by seeing a stop sign or the road itself. Nope. It’s a tree that is 120 feet tall it continues to grow at a 45 degree angle. The boulevard is impossible to miss and that tree captures EVERYONE’s attention.

2. Surprising Sight (didn’t see that coming) or Comment – Driving down the two lane highway last week, a car jumped the meridian from his lane of traffic, into mine and drove head on toward me, out of control and unable to regain control of his car. You don’t expect this behavior from a car. You can’t predict it. It caught and held my attention as I veered off the road. The attention and it’s meaning were so profound that I’m telling you about it a week later.

3. Surprising Moment (ex boyfriend walks in) or Experience – You’re watching the game on TV and the ex walks in. Or maybe you’re with your girlfriend in Vegas and you propose on the casino floor. (Talk about attention.)

4. Salience (Something that is important to YOU) – I walk into my hotel suite only to find it is a regular room, 30 square meters. This is important to me and I have to call down to get moved to a suite. A letter from the IRS is pulled from the mailbox. An email from someone offering you a book contract. You’re at the store and see the ingredients you need to make a birthday cake for someone.

Salience simply means that something is important in this moment to you. (Seeing those same birthday cake ingredients next month won’t matter a lick. But the IRS letter will always be special…)

5. Entropy (Message fading or randomness in moving experience) We naturally attend to things that are fading away. You’re taking off in an airplane and all the other planes at the gates and landing are very quickly little dots on the ground as are the cars and buildings.

A common special effect in video is the fading of a picture to another image or simply a blank screen.

[Scientific research culled from just released work by Lauren Itti, USC and Pierre Baldi, UCI]

Think of the five factors and creating attention getting flashes becomes much easier.

Legend Point: There is a DIFFERENCE between what gets attention and what gets picked (bought), but if you DO NOT get attention, you CAN NOT get bought!

The scientific research showed that SURPRISE is the most important factor in attention, followed by salience (importance to YOU), and entropy (unpredictability, randomness of events or experience).

Legend Point: YOU can utilize all three different elements of surprise. Surprise is NOW PREDICTABLE. The researchers have discovered that surprise is the affect (EMOTION) of information or perception of information by the observer.

Write that down. Tape it to your computer.

“Life is full of surprises, ranging from a great Christmas gift or a new magic trick, to wardrobe malfunctions, reckless drivers, terrorist attacks and tsunamis. Key to our survival is our ability to attend to, identify, and learn from surprising events,” say Itti and Baldi.

Until now surprise was not able to be modeled. That has now changed!

Here is an example of how a top salesman in Poland got me to get me to touch his car…and his hand. The event had finished an hour earlier. I was hot in the 92 degree amphitheater but Krystof managed to get me to smile and be just a little uncomfortable, gathering attention and pictures of his success. Brilliant strategy on his part.

YOU can BE #1. Utilizing these scientific discoveries, you can get attention, stand out from the crowd and be picked up like a menu!

Now: Some facts from the research that you and I can easily understand and apply. Through thousands of measurements in numerous experiments the scientists learned that:

• a continually blinking light on a static background quickly gained attention…and shortly thereafter lost it.
• a shower of low level random pixel showers excites at first but rapidly only becomes a low level interest

It’s like I tell my son…”a joke MIGHT be funny the first time you tell it to someone…it’s not very likely to be funny the second time.”

Surprise can take many forms as the researchers have shown us. Coupled with salience and entropy you have the factors of making YOU #1.

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