Bulletpoints: The Lost Art
Monday, February 2, 2009 at 11:01PM 
There is a time and a place for research paper style of long blog posts and of course there is some leeway for rants and raves. Hey, we all as authors can get lost in the moment.
In a normal day, I manage my time pretty well. I multi-task endlessly. My day is a mashup of everything online; emails, google reader, newsletters, social media, reputation management, writing, personal branding, blogging, webinars and engaging the community. I'm sure I forgot something else. All together I read about 2 hours of blogs and comments in the morning in and same at dinner. Oh and the twitter addiction runs strong in this one! I have a seperate mac devoted to tweetdeck god. Oh, and the good ol' tweetdeck. Have you ever wondered why twitter is only 140 characters? It is to get you to the point quickly and in the best way.
Wanna know why a consensus of tools are required to stay on top of you brand? (That will be in another post.. stay tuned.) Daniel Clark nails down what not to do on twitter HERE. You can figure out what the correct approach is. It should be this way, so you can adapt the tools of the internet to meet your individual needs.
Now trust me, I want to read about everything you write but there just isn't enough hours in the day. My attention span is about three paragraphs consisting of the first, second, and last paragraph and usually a healthy skimming of the comments, trackbacks and the post's URL is off to a ripe delicious bookmark. I will happily bookmark your link and go back to it in case I every need to know more or if you contact me. (BTW: Delicious is also a great search tool!)
"Estimates for the length of human attention span are highly variable and range from 30 seconds to 1 minute per year of age in young children about the age of 12, to a maximum of around 20 minutes in adults. Wikipedia
Do you want to keep the most attention possible on your post then please consider these guidelines: (Yes, I am attracted to shining objects and so are most people.)
- Add some value to your content.
- How about some depth into a topic?
- Dynamic edgy body of work.
- Get to the point and summarize it to a paragraph in length.
- A little humor never hurts!
- Respect your communitie's time.
- We all want to give you our undivided attention but it is just not reality.
Guess what? "Bullet points" are never considered bad grammar. Please be creative - bullet point away!
Finally, if your into video and you have a point to make 3 mins or less or I'm on to something else. Longer length videos are for niche communities, selling products, web-casts etc. What is your ideal format for a blog post? Video? How long can you give undivided attention to a topic?
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Reader Comments (3)
i like to read blogs, but dont often write much heheh. I am not very good to manage my time. you're good to do with yours
loveisintheair
You are right on wrt to video length. @chrisgeier and I are working on a series of videos for the Business Process Management (BPM) space --- our biggest challenge has been to keep it short and interesting. Yes, this is a niche area. However, we think that we can bring a little BPM LUV to the masses. We might be wrong and flame out. We shall see.
good post. when i was in consulting we had a font and bullet rule. essentially, it limited the content on the page so it could be as impactful as possible.
today, i find that using a few, concise points and a visual element help me maximize the value and effectiveness of my communications.