The Science of Communicating & Marketing Your Business

This time out, we're going to talk about what NextStage calls engagement mechanics. Engagement mechanics deals with how people interact with, or engage, information and is based on NextStage's research in modality engineering (yep, I know, I'm losing those simple points. Don't worry, it's easy to follow):

The first 3-5 seconds of interaction are used by individuals to decide if the information is interesting and/or "catches their eye". They are not evaluating the usefulness of the information, only if they want to explore that information further in order to learn whether or not the material affects them. In other words, they're deciding how much of a time investment is warranted.

Slightly overlapping that initial 3-5 seconds is a 4-7 second period of time which people use to determine if they can understand the material well enough to continue the effort of internalizing the information. It's at this point that information has to go from "being pretty" to "being useful". The third time investment occurs at 6-8 seconds and is when people are deciding how to respond to the information being presented. Material containing distinct action items actually can stretch this time period out to 10 or even 15 seconds of engagement before the decision centers of the brain inform consciousness of what action to take (save the material for later, reread immediately to clarify, etc).

Thus material must attract, engage and cause the individual to take action all within a 3-10 second time span. More on these time spans and how to deal with them tomorrow.