There's a school of thought among some business marketers and communicators that only two things are required to get your message across.

Tell people what to think about your company's offering.

Tell them with frequency. Over and over and over again.

Got news for you, Bucky
In this age of shifting communications paradigms, this kind of thinking is the intellectual equivalent of Cheez-Whiz.

The Cheez-Whiz dynamic will fool you into ignoring the truth about communicating in a new world where customers and prospects now exercise complete control over information.

And unfortunately, the truth is that your customers and prospects won't stand for being told what they should believe. They'll decide for themselves. Because they now control all the access to all the information they need to make their own decisions.

Your incessant interruptions and repetition only makes things worse. If they're not ready for your informational revelations or already interested in what you have to say, your constant yammering won't make much difference.

So stop your yammering
Because they decide when they want information. And how much they want. And when, where and how they want it delivered to them.

Yet companies keep yammering on. To the extent that there is so much marketing noise out there that brand messages aren't just getting lost, they're being disintegrated.

Entering this new age, the issue for business communicators is no longer providing useful information. It's helping audiences overcome the sheer volume of information so they can find meaning in yours.

Overcoming your information
It is no longer about serving up all the info you can. It's now about helping customers and prospects separate the wheat from all the corporate chaff. The important from the mundane. The overriding issues from the detailed support.

Things have gotten so bad that an Institute for the Future study says that when the average white-collar worker faces the average two hundred-message day, 71 percent of them feel stressed by the amount of information they receive. Sixty percent of them feel overwhelmed.

A different approach
Under those conditions, it's not going to do you much good to dump all your information on these stressed out, overwhelmed business buyers. That is, if you want them to retain any of it.

What's needed in this new paradigm, in our opinion, is information architecture. Setting things up so that your customers and prospects can find the information they need and want, focus their attention on it and come to their own conclusion.

Of course, if you architect it right, they'll come to your conclusion.

Introducing conclusion architecture
For that reason, we consider information architecture to have two interrelated parts. One part includes organizing information so people can find and act on the most relevant and compelling to them. The other is presenting that information in ways that people can and will pay attention to the key parts of it.

As Herbert Simon, a Nobel prize-winning economist puts it, "What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention."

Structure and attention
Attention is different than awareness. Attention is harder to get. It's like trying to shoehorn Pavarotti into a wetsuit. It takes a lot of effort. But the result is quite memorable.

To us, attention means focused mental engagement on a specific piece of information.

So while a whole bunch of stuff may come into our awareness, we only attend to a particular one and let the rest pass through. Then we decide whether to act on that piece or not. That's attention.

So awareness comes before attention. But it only becomes attention when information reaches a threshold of meaning in our brains and spurs the potential for action.

'Cause it's a messy world
Sure, you can throw oodles of information into your customers' and prospects' awareness. But that's precisely the problem. It's all stacking up higher than the dirty dishes at Louie Anderson's house.

Nonetheless, everyone is still throwing all the information they can at audiences' minds and expecting it to stick. Like huge information cow pies splatting against a barn door.

In fact, there's so much throwing and so little sticking going on out there that messages, brand promises and brands themselves are being fragmented to the point of extinction.

In this new-paradigm world, awareness is too vague and general. It doesn't catalyze any action anymore.

On the other hand, attention is targeted and specific. It gets people moving.

So information architecture to us is the melding of both these disciplines. It's both the organization and presentation of messages to focus your audience on specific information that initiates attention and then makes it easy to drill down for more and deeper understanding.

Think of it as ergonomics for your aching communications
Through information architecture you can focus attention by identifying ways information naturally clusters and organizes itself. You can align those natural patterns with the user's unique needs, expectations, use patterns and self-interest.

Information architecture is designing for maximum functionality. From a single perspective—the user's.

Whether you're producing a Web site, a brochure system or a multimedia integrated communications program, when you design for attention, usability and clarity, you increase its communications value. And ultimately the return on your marketing investment.