What catches our attention easily? Something familiar.

What also catches our attention? Something different.

Recently I’ve seen – randomly – cases where two familiar “things” were together, but they were different things.  This caught my attention in a halting sort of way, positively changing my train of thought and action.  It wasn’t only online that this happened, but it can apply very well to people trying to create buzz on the web.

A definition of juxtaposition from reference.com refers to placing things close together or side by side, epecially for contrast or comparision.

What I’ve run into lately is juxtapositional contrast… things that are different that contrast each other. Some of these things are social things.

Social Juxtaposition – placing contrasting stuff (i.e. media) together in a social situation.

In promoting – a cause, a product, a service, an idea – it is challenging to stand out from all of the other promotion, especially in a crowded market.  For example, trying to showcase one’s awesome website design skill is shouting into a concert of voices saying similar things about their own design skills.  How to differentiate?  Add some juxtapositional zest.

We’re talking fairly uncontroversial stuff here… but what is new now for marketing online via social web promotion will be how to allow for contrast that gathers attention in positive and perhaps conversational new ways.  This technique would also fall into the social viral engineering category.

For one example of differentiation, that perhaps is more in the techie appeal area… as blogging became popular and then crowded, some bloggers turned into or started as video bloggers to get attention, and some now are doing live video shows.  Beyond simply live with a web cam, the cutting edge now for some is live video from mobile phones in interesting locations… allowing several contrasting juxtpositional intersections:

• Some of the audience will be in different time zones and countries, allowing for a “it’s morning here” vs. “it’s midnight here” feeling of contrast
• Some live feeds (Ustream, Mogulus, others) allow for real-time chat in the same web browser window, sometimes in contrast with the video stream.  Sideways chat traffic can also enhance the video, but a lot of time it goes off in other directions, which via social interaction actually seems to keep interest when the video has normal lulls in activity.
• Using tweets to alert the people following you on Twitter.com that you’ve just started an interesting live video stream… this is in contrast to the alternative of stuff like work, or cleaning the dishes, or whatever one was doing before being interrupted.
• Finding locations that match – or contrast with – the subject of the video stream.  Try interviewing someone on a seesaw (aka teeter-totter) about some otherwise dry subject like project management and deriving earned value.  Or, now that in the northern hemisphere the pools are starting to open up, interview someone who’s in the water.

So interrupting this post now is a short clip taken earlier today of some recreational water activity.

As you are probably reading this sentence while watching the some of the clip, you’re going to try and link the context of the video with this writeup. And, your mind will automagically create some thought to link the video with what you are reading… maybe the water… the idea of video blogging…. or perhaps wondering if this writeup is leading to a marketing pitch. Or, maybe the link your mind creates is that this subject is confusing you a little too much.

Regardless, without creating a time-consuming animation, or slickly producing a video, a clip (taken by chance when stopping to avoid some road traffic) can be used to enhance via juxtaposition someone’s memory of this page. Just use a more exciting or compelling clip.

Furthering this issue one last bit… explaining that I’ve done canoeing and kayaking in that same water will lock in more interest – in a long-tail way – by those people who enjoy those activities. It was this type of contrasting linkages over the last few days that caused me to think how online social web activities are a mesh of random juxtaposed media, to which services (such as friendfeed, mefeed, socialthing, and other lifestreaming services) try to help organize our social clutter.

Yet as always I’ll be looking for and reacting to the interesting social juxtaposition buzz instead of the harmonized feed!

Too much information running through my brain
Too much information driving me insane

… and this was penned before there was cable TV with 500 channels, mobile phones (with or without text messaging & voicemail), and before there was any of the billions of spam emails (worldwide) per hour! My hunch is that today we have 10 times more information to deal with on a daily basis now, and there is more information arriving with (couldn’t resist) every breath you take.

As the information glut continues, organizations – and people – who succeed and excel will be the ones who recognize the importance of managing information efficiently.

And for those many people who have a portion of their social life online, with many friends, updates, events, and activities, the too-much-information aspect extends into a new term: social clutter.

Socially, many of us now suffer from information overload. For some people, quality time has been replaced by quantity, as we now keep up with more people and have more interruptions in our time with friends and family. Anyone with a mobile phone been asked to silence their ring or set it on vibrate for an event?

It’s kind of like asking people to filter out each of their own social clutter to keep the event from being overwhelmed.

Too much information? Since when?

Our information now is typically electronic data, at one time or another. This is new. Only 20 years ago it was still a very analog world. But now, magazines and newspapers are composed using computers. Digital cameras & photos now exceed film cameras. CD’s that were overtaking vinyl are now being replaced by digital files. And email and online text are essential information sources for most of the people reading these words in this post.

And every year, many of us produce a lot of digital material (emails, videos, photos, slide decks, documents) that we don’t need, yet we have to save it, file it, organize it. We don’t know what we won’t need, so we may try and save it all.

As the volume of online social interactions grow, and with these interactions all saved in the online cloud of data, the social clutter will continue to grow.  What to do?  Use tools, such as filters and folders (online or offline), to be more efficient.  And don’t be afraid to unfriend or unfollow people who are cluttering your life.  More on the social clutter handling in future posts.