Just when you think there couldn’t possibly be any more information coming at you on the social web (and I am using the term “information” very loosely), another source pops up. First it was just Facebook messages, then it was following people on Twitter, now there’s Google+ and LinkedIn and Instagram and half a dozen other newcomers — all producing streams of activity that compete for our increasingly scarce attention. David Shing, the “digital prophet” for AOL, said this week that he expects unfriending and unfollowing to become a major phenomenon, and I know just what that feels like: a friend unfollowed me recently, and it got me thinking about this attention economy we are living in.

As anyone who follows me through Twitter or any other social network probably knows by now, I am pretty active on a number of different services for a variety of reasons. I don’t use LinkedIn very much — mostly because it feels like a site where you go to post your resume, rather than a place you go to have a discussion with people about something — but I post links there when I have a new blog post, and sometimes check out LinkedIn Today for industry news. I mostly use Facebook for social reasons, to keep in touch with family, but I post links there too. And I am a fan of Instagram for photos, for reasons that Om has described, and have been trying to post more to Google+ as well.

Am I part of the solution, or part of the problem?
The result of all this is two-fold: I wind up posting many of the same links — to my blog posts, as well as to photos and other things — to multiple networks, because I don’t know which of them my friends and followers (and potential readers) are using the most. Like me, I suspect many of them use multiple networks for different purposes. And I often re-post links in Twitter, because as Bitly has shown with its link analytics, the “half-life” of a tweet is remarkably short, and so many people may not see it. The other effect of this is that in some networks, such as Google+, I don’t participate as much as I should, and I sometimes get criticized for just posting links and then not sticking around.

I try not to clog up my stream with unnecessary things, and I try to make my activity on any network a mix of professional and personal, with humor and conversation and photos mixed up amid the blog posts and other industry-related things. I think it helps when people, including journalists, are human in that way (although not too human, hopefully). But I can see how my stream could be noisy for some — and it certainly has turned out to be for one friend, who said recently that they were forced to unfollow me. I’m not going to name them because it’s not really important who they are, I’m more interested in their reasons; they said they unfollowed me because:

I’m frankly tired of people who talk about themselves or promote their work. Repetition just makes it worse. Bombarding me with the same content multiple times in multiple channels makes you uninteresting to me.

I was somewhat taken aback by this, I admit. I assumed people would just ignore the tweets or messages they weren’t interested in, as I do when I come across things in other people’s streams that I don’t find relevant. But when I asked this friend to explain, they described something that I thought was probably pretty common for some people — and something that might possibly become more widespread, as Shing described in his recent interview with The Guardian. In effect, this person said their attention was a precious resource, and that I (and presumably others) were wasting it:

Twitter is no different from any medium in this respect – I only follow what deserves my attention. Diluting my attention stream is a great way to tell me that you do not share my concern about allocating it.

Information overload and Shirky’s “filter failure”

I think this is a feeling we probably all have now and then, thanks to what some call information overload and Clay Shirky has called “filter failure.” Maybe we feel it when our inbox is filled with messages that have been sent by someone clicking “reply all,” or maybe when we get inundated with Facebook messages and photo tags, or — on the far end of the spectrum — when we try to follow someone like Robert Scoble on a new social network like Google+. The uber-blogger and social-media maven described recently how his own wife deleted her Google+ account because of the signal-to-noise problem caused in part by Scoble himself.

Facebook has only added to this phenomenon with its new “ticker,” which scrolls by as you watch the page, with every “like” and message and Spotify song appearing and then disappearing. Facebook seemed very proud of its new “frictionless sharing” social apps, but many expressed concern about the volume of noise that would be created — and I think rightfully so. In a way, these concerns are the same as the ones my friend has: where do I spend my attention? There is a finite amount of it, and so at some point we have to choose where to allocate it. I spend less time on Facebook in part because I have too many “friends” there and the signal-to-noise ratio is quite low.

How do we solve these kinds of problems? I don’t really know. Filters such as Circles and Facebook lists — or even a new network like Bill Gross’s Chime, which lets you follow only part of a person rather than everything they post — might be part of the solution, but they also just increase the flow. Do we have to get ruthless with our friend and follower lists, and prune them even if we risk offending someone? Perhaps. All I know is that the problem isn’t getting any better — if anything, it is getting worse.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users John Lambert Pearson and Kevin Dooley

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This blog post is part of the HBR Online Forum The CEO's Role in Fixing the System.

I recently heard that the only group held in lower regard than corporate executives in the United States is Congress. Wow! Think about that. What a terrible blow to business. And yet, I'd argue that it's our own fault. By serving narrow self-interests, we — the business people of this country — basically facilitated this mistrust. We have been purveyors of our own doom. There's a reason the Occupy Wall Street movement was hatched and a reason why its message is growing more pervasive.

The shine on corporate executives has been more than just tarnished by the economic events and hardships of the past three years. It's all but gone. Too many corporations view their role as extracting profit ("hit the numbers!," "deliver the bottom line!") from society as opposed to viewing profit as a byproduct of delivering a valued service over the medium and long term. A stock pop on the heels of the release of monthly sales results contributes little to customers, employees, or communities, and yet that is exactly what all too many corporate executives are focused on and live and die by.

Given that we — the business people of this country — are responsible for our bum rap, I think we're also responsible for restoring its luster.

Enter new approaches to capitalism &#8212 some are calling it conscious capitalism or enlightened business. I'd call it simply "enlightened self-interest." This notion of a conscious and long-term approach to value creation — when put into proper application — serves long-term shareholders extraordinarily well and has the capacity to favorably reshape the public's perception of corporate America. It is built on the fundamental premise that every business has a deeper purpose than merely short-term profit maximization and, more importantly, a responsibility to all of its stakeholders (customers, employees, vendors, investors, community). With such a model, profit is merely the byproduct of delivering something that serves society and a broad range of stakeholders.

When I go to the ATM, I'm usually required to make a deposit before I make a withdrawal. I'd argue it's the same in business. We have to spend less time figuring out how to extract economic value from our stakeholders and more time creating what is valuable to them. Doing so is what ultimately creates long-term value.

There are countless and creative ways in which companies are beginning to do exactly that. I find an experiment that the Panera Bread Foundation conducted to be an interesting example.

About two years ago, we began noodling around this idea of leveraging Panera's core skills to affect positive — heck, lasting — change in the communities in which it served. Panera operates some 1,500 bakery cafes nationwide. We've been opening two cafes every week. Our belief was that the national scale of our operation provided Panera the opportunity to turn that core competency against a societal ill and uniquely make a difference in addressing the food insecurity in this country. We continued to kick the tires on this idea and decided: we were going to tackle an issue by skill and sweat equity rather than, say, hand-outs or day-end product donations, which Panera had been doing, and continues to do, through its Dough Nation program.

This revelation manifested itself in true bricks-and-mortar form as a Panera Cares Cafe in a St. Louis suburb — a non-profit, community-based, pay-what-you-can iteration of our established, commercial Panera, LLC cafes. Today, we are three cafes strong. The ultimate hope is to open one in many of the markets Panera serves. We call them community cafes of shared responsibility.

These cafes are virtually indistinguishable from a Panera — same menu, same comfortable environment, same friendly people. Instead of prices, however, we simply suggest people leave their fair share. In lieu of cash registers, there are donation boxes. Every guest is on their honor and every guest is welcome, whether or not they can leave a monetary contribution.

Though Panera Cares is still somewhat of an experiment, our three community cafes have proven to be sustainable thus far. As well, we expect to serve as many as 1 million people in these three cafes and to add additional programs to benefit the community.

My point is this: Corporate America will both serve its shareholders and strengthen its reputation when it finds ways to use its expertise and core competencies, as well as its scale, to be truly conscious citizens. Imagine if more large corporations were more active in trying to address social needs locally.

For every vital service now being provided by a not-for-profit or government entity in this country, there is almost certainly a large corporation with the skills, experience, and scale to vastly improve and increase the capacities of those organizations.

Food banks serve a vital function, but they are often disorganized and inefficient. Yet there are huge national retailers with vast experience in procuring, moving, and delivering goods, including perishables. The nation's largest home builders, construction companies, and industrial designers could vastly increase the humanity, efficiency, and capacity of our community homeless shelters. \

Consider key competitive advantages companies hold. For instance, what might a Google do with the world's best search algorithms? Could it play an integral role in homeland defense? How about Apple's prowess in design? UPS's and Federal Express's for transport? There is no dearth of expertise to be passed on.

You need only look to Zucotti Park to see that big business is taking it on the chin from citizens who are at best weary and at worst completely mistrusting. Rethinking why our respective organizations exist and then contributing what we do best as businesses, directly to the communities, could rehabilitate perceptions of big business and capitalism as being wrong, evil. Businesses should not be stigmatized for or bashful about making money if they are conscious about their place and purpose in society.

All leaders have a lens through which they view success and accountability. You often hear CEOs say that their first obligation is to their shareholders. I agree, but shareholders are served best when CEOs focus on serving the range of stakeholders involved in a company first. We have to remember that public companies are chartered to serve our society, not simply the shareholder. In the end, long-term shareholder value is delivered when companies relish their broader role. Today we call it conscious capitalism; tomorrow a new term will emerge. Whatever the name, we need more of it.

A bigger worry is that jobseekers no longer have the skills demanded by employers. Half of the 8m jobs lost went in construction and manufacturing, and those departing these industries may struggle to adapt to jobs in more vibrant areas such as education and health services. The cost of this skills mismatch is compounded by America’s housing bust. Many owe more on mortgages than their homes are worth. Households often opt to stay put rather than default, leaving them trapped in places with high unemployment and unable to move to where jobs are plentiful. The rise of the two-income household has also made workers less mobile than they were: it is harder to move in search of jobs if there are two careers to consider.

These factors, in my opinion, are the biggest in holding back economic growth in the United States. Of course, companies holding on to their cash reserves and not investing in expansion or hiring is another. But the three mentioned above seem to explain much of the tepidness in the economy. All the more reason to invest in vocational and/or higher education and not cut back as is done currently in Texas.

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Are yard sales indicative of community in decline? If so, this part of the country is in serious trouble. And if everyone is selling, who is buying?

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By contrast, homeowners with less lavish housing are much more likely to keep writing checks to their lender. About one in 12 mortgages below the million-dollar mark is delinquent."

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