Skip to main content

Attention Harvesting

This is news we can all use - how to get a hamster to out-perform the S&P 500. The story is a winner at so many levels. First off, it is a great lesson in marketing - how to write a headline (or email subject line) that will grab the reader's attention immediately. In this case "A hamster has been trading cryptocurrencies in a cage rigged to automatically buy and sell tokens since June - and it's currently outperforming the S&P 500"

The audience will fall in one of few categories - trades crypto and stock, trades crypto, trades stock, everyone else. Since this is in business insider the readership has basic understanding of both crypto and stock even if they are in the group that does nothing with either. That being said, that line has something for everyone. If you are trading crypto you want to know if the hamster outperformed you along with S&P 500. The stock traders among the readership will want to know if displacement by hamsters is looming in their future. For folks that dabble in both they may experience a crisis of confidence reading this line - maybe they are leaving money on the table that the hamsters are mopping up. 

Everyone else is peanut gallery in this context and experiencing a bit of schadenfreude - this is indeed the proof point of blindfolded monkey theory: “A blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a newspaper's financial pages could select a portfolio that would do just as well as one carefully selected by experts.”

So no matter what group you fall into as a reader, you will want to read the rest of the story. And you will learn that the hamster has a Twitter handle and is livestreaming his work for the world to see. The idea is to draw the reader in as a participant and it will likely work. At the time of writing Mr. Goxx had about 3000 followers on Twitter and Twitch. Strictly speaking this story is not attention-harvesting but it is how to do it right, not leave the target feeling depleted. It gets their attention, gives them something to chuckle about and leave them with food for thought. 

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...
Post a Comment
Read more