You Have Our Divided Attention

SAN FRANCISCO -- People are increasingly media multi-taskers - That means it's getting harder to get people's attention because it may be very divided. People may be surfing the 'Net while watching television and talking on their cell phones, for example.

Safa Rashtchy, senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray, who spoke at the Real Estate Connect SF conference this week, said community, communication and entertainment are colliding. The result: "Communitainment." The distinction between communication and entertainment is no longer clearly defined.

"Communitainment is an emerging trend that will partially replace other forms of content consumption," he said. Text-messaging a pal has an entertainment value, just like watching television, he said, so new forms of communication and media are taking time away from traditional media such as magazines or television, he said.

"Consumers are now in charge. Your success or failure is only a click away," he said. That means a new paradigm for marketing and a heightening need to be adjacent to where people are looking for information.

While there are opportunities presented by these changing times, there are also threats to the old ways. For example, "The music industry, as we know it, is dead," he said.

Rashtchy stated in a "User Revolution" report released in March (see related Inman Blog item here), "Like many major social trends, the changes will not happen overnight and we expect the User Revolution, which has just begun, to last several years before the new regime is fully established and the old statues have all been toppled over."

So it sounds like the challenge is to become the .MP3, Napster, iTunes and iPod of the real estate industry, and to avoid becoming the CD, LP, 45 and 8-track?

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