I met Jen, a beautiful young woman who had just been promoted to a senior creative role at a major consumer goods company, at a quintessentially New York cocktail party. She had a generous smile and animated way of speaking when she talked about her company and her job. Then she asked me about my job, and as I started talking, Jen's face fell flat and her sparkle faded. I panicked a little. Was my discussion of online strategy really that boring? I found myself rambling through a perplexing conversation that produced sparkle when she talked, but nothing when I did. I left the party baffled.

Months later, a mutual friend mentioned she had just returned from Jen's birthday party: her fortieth. "Jen is forty?" I asked, astonished. "Oh yeah," my friend assured me. "She's just a big Botox user."

Suddenly, the cocktail party made sense. Jen wasn't uninterested. She was cosmetically compromised, made passive by anti-aging injections.

In a way, your online audience is like a Botox user. Even if you have an enthusiastic audience for your blog, your Facebook page, or your Twitter feed, the enthusiasm is invisible. The audience is mostly non-responsive and hard to read. In the absence of feedback, it's easy to make the same mistake I made in my conversation: I panicked. I strayed from my message (rambling), looking for something, anything that would spark a reaction.

Since my encounter with Jen, I've developed practices that can help you communicate effectively even when you're talking to a Botox audience, on- or offline:

• Picture your audience. It's easy to feel like you're talking to yourself when you blog or tweet without getting a response. That leads to carelessness -- or even to writing hurtful or counterproductive content. Picture a person that your message is aimed at, whether it's someone you're e-mailing or a single user among your 100,000 Twitter followers. Keep this person in mind, perhaps by literally looking at their picture or avatar as you type. It will make your message more personal, authentic and compelling.
• Hope for feedback, plan for silence. The point of social media is it's social. You're hoping for some kind of response. But you can't count on one, particularly when you're just starting out. Craft your plan with this in mind, and seed your social media presence with content that works whether or not you get a response.
• Ask for feedback in a few forms, but not too many. Online silence may result from inappropriate requests for feedback. If you ask your customers to engage with your new web site by submitting their thoughts and experiences, essentially asking for full-length blog posts, you probably won't get too many takers. Offer a range of lower-effort mechanisms that appeal to different levels of interest and capability--voting in an online poll, submitting links of interest, submitting homemade videos. But don't go overboard. Launching with too many calls to action (say, more than five) will make the audience feel over-solicited.
• Talk to the curve. Your online audience, like any audience, is part of a normal curve: a handful of rabid enthusiasts at one end, a sprinkling of persistent grumblers at the other, and a big pile of modestly happy folks in between. In your hunger for feedback, you'll be tempted to play the ends of the curve, either catering to big fans or fending off critics. Focus on that big middle ground of lukewarm participants (while thanking and encouraging your persistent fans) and you will gradually move them up the curve, and they will naturally contribute more actively to your site.
• Don't shout. THIS IS NOT THE WAY TO MAKE PEOPLE PAY ATTENTION. Nor is your caps lock key the only way to shout: excessive e-mail reminders (3 days left in our contest! 2 days left in our contest! 1 hour left in our contest!), repetitive tweets, and spammy blog comments (come and visit our site!) are all forms of social media shouting. Resist the temptation to talk more and louder in order to get your message heard above the online din, and trust that you will build a better relationship with your audience if you can offer consistent, useful communications.

If this sounds like a balancing act, it is. Engaging with a quiet (or silent) audience takes confidence, creativity and a lot of hard work. Just don't mistake a lack of response for a negative response. Your audience is there, even if it's as inscrutable as a face full of Botox.

Alexandra Samuel is CEO of Social Signal, a social media agency. She helps companies and organizations increase revenue, build brand and strengthen team relationships by creating compelling online communities and social web presences. She holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University. Follow Alex on Twitter at twitter.com/awsamuel.

Government-funded basic and applied research at U.S. universities has given rise to multi-billion-dollar industry after multi-billion-dollar industry. It has been one of the pillars of the U.S. high tech sector. But at least in information technology, the model has been seriously weakened by changes that the administration of George W. Bush instituted at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which in the prior 30 years had bankrolled some of the most important advances in IT.

Specifically, DARPA under Bush drastically reduced the role of universities in IT research projects it funded and shifted both power and money to companies. If the old DARPA model is not restored, the U.S. lead in IT — especially in software — could be lost.

In the IT field, there historically were two basic models for funding academic research: the traditional peer-review model, where everyone writes a lot of proposals and your peers evaluate them and select the ones worth funding, and the DARPA model, where scientists would pitch ideas for high-risk, high-reward projects to the agency's program directors, who are often accomplished scientists and engineers. The latter were swing-for-the-fences projects. Those that were successful led to billion-dollar industries.

The Bush administration put a person in charge of DARPA — Tony Tether — who had unusual view of the job. Apparently, Tether thought we could shortcut the time between invention and commercial products by giving the lead role in projects to companies.

This was a dramatic departure. Academic scientists, who previously had been driving the research agenda for DARPA-funded projects, essentially became consultants to the companies and the proportion of the DARPA funds allocated to universities for IT research was slashed. The government doesn't release the figures, but my guess is that the universities' share dropped from something like 40% to about 10%.

The problem is you can't predict in advance which company is going to want to use the new inventions that a project ends up producing. Moreover, the leading companies in an area often don't want to get involved in government funding. So you often end up working with second-rate companies.

In addition, Tether instituted 12- to 18-month milestones for DARPA-funded programs. If you didn't make them, he would cancel not just one person's contract but the whole program. The idea that you can decide the success of research in 12 to 18 months is absurd. That may be fine for product-development efforts, but research is not a straight-forward path to an easily-hit target. The previous approach — betting on academic scientists with visions of game-changing advances and giving them funding for three to five years — made much more sense.

Tether's measures disengaged some of the best minds in the country from working on the problems that could help the Department of Defense and the information technology industry. He also seemed to have a bias against software projects, which has historically been one of the strongest parts of the American IT industry as well as being one of the strengths of academic research.

The result: Not much progress has been made in solving some of the biggest IT problems confronting us. One worth singling out in particular is developing technology so software can run on multi-core, or parallel, processors. Figuring out how you can make important programs go faster and how to add new features to it when you're using 10 processors instead of one is a very hard problem to solve — the kind that if somebody in another country figures out how to solve it, the software center of the universe could move from the United States to someplace else.

Before Tether came in, a few of us successfully pitched a project to tackle that challenge. But during the Tether years, the vast majority of DARPA's money for the project went to IBM, Sun, and Cray Research. I don't know how many tens or hundreds of millions of dollars DARPA gave to these companies, but whatever research they did has had very little impact on solving one of the biggest problems facing computer science.

The shift to parallel processing levels the playing field in software because nobody has a huge head start. Both China and India both recognize that it represents an opportunity to take the lead in software, and they are investing accordingly. If the leading academic minds in the U.S. had been working hard on this problem for the last eight years and had made great progress, the U.S. lead in software would be much more secure.

Early indications are that DARPA's new director, Regina Dugan, will return to the path that DARPA employed in its heyday, which led to technologies and inventions that DARPA still brags about on its website.

There's a lot riding on which path DARPA follows.

David A. Patterson is the Pardee Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a leader of the RISC project, which allowed computers to run faster; the Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks project, which made possible fast and dependable storage systems; and the Network of Workstations project, which led to cluster computing. Each of these advances led to billion-dollar industries, and all had DARPA funding.

Hey, you! Pay attention! Now! Two Northwest pilots had their licenses stripped away because they reportedly flew off-course, incommunicado, while scheduling future flights on their personal laptops instead of paying attention to their existing flight. Can you believe it? I do.

Mobile devices are the great distractions &#8212 and distractors — of the Information Age. I've heard nurses whisper about doctors who check their Blackberries in the middle of laparoscopic procedures and anesthesiologists who fiddle with their iPods while monitoring vital signs. We want what we want when we want it and we want it now! Even if that means we (inadvertently) overfly Minneapolis by 150 miles.

Netiquette is nice and multimedia manners are marvelous but the central issue here is performance and productivity. The same laptops those pilots were allegedly using to debate scheduling seniority can also be used to real-time recalculate fuel level reroutes. When you toss in a laptop or mobile device, anyone — in theory — can become more efficient and effective. That's as true for neurosurgery teams at Massachusetts General Hospital as for SEAL teams in Kabul. Wouldn't you want your surgeon to be able to have all the info they need, when they need it, to boost their real-time operational effectiveness?

Unfortunately, these technologies are — to paraphrase military folks — inherently "dual use." That is to say, we can use them either to better focus on the task at hand or to multitask something else. Every university professor lecturing in America wonders which students are assiduously taking notes on their laptops and which are assiduously playing Scrabulous. Do professors really want to play "Big Brother" or block the digital deployment of their students', um, personal educational technologies? Of course not. And anyway, they can't — any more than King Canute could hold back the tide.

But what about when your firm is making an "agency-of-record" pitch to a much-desired client and the client's alpha-dog Chief Marketing Officer keeps pecking away on his BlackBerry while your team presents? (This actually happened.) What should you do?

No, the team lead didn't keep quiet until the CMO looked up. No, the team lead didn't politely ask if BlackBerries could be put away until the presentation's end. The team pressed on. Like the Charge of the Light Brigade.

And no, the firm didn't win the business. And, yes, everyone was bitter about the CMO's publicly divided attentions. This company now vows never to let client gizmos distract from the business at hand ever again. They'll ask for undivided attention or they'll walk. Better to die on your feet than live on your knees.

Would you tell a C-level prospect or a key client to put his iPhone away? Really? Have you ever done it? And what would your emotional — and professional — reaction be to an expensive consultant or mission-critical vendor politely insisting that you shut down your laptop or turn off your phone?

I've seen Starbucks and McDonald's employees (politely) decline to serve customers chatting away on their phones as they try to order their skinny lattes. Manners aren't the issue; it's done to keep the line flowing smoothly.

Remember, digital device checking can be deceiving. Google CEO Eric Schmidt (no less) has publicly run searches to real-time "fact check" comments by his fellow executives during meetings. He's not unique. When someone makes claims during a presentation that don't quite sound right, I've Googled or Binged and found — big surprise — that the speaker is often guilty of exaggeration well beyond the boundaries of acceptable puffery. I may look like I'm ignoring the presenter but, in fact, I'm taking him or her more seriously than they might like.

Some companies — Microsoft is one — have declared that certain meetings should be device-free. Attendees have to check their Zunes and mobile what-nots at the door. Frankly, I don't think that this is remotely practical unless the highest-ranked executive in the room honors that constraint. Surreptitious texting has become as American as apple pie, as Indian as curry, and as Nordic as lutefisk.

Demographic and technological trends would suggest that by 2015, the typical meeting will have more devices being monitored than people in the room.

Is there a solution to this growing problem? Why, yes...and I've seen it work with my own undistracted eyes.

Make meetings more interactive. Push for participation. Call on — and call out — that CMO. Create expectations that inhibit leaning back and promote the lean forward. If people think they can get away with diverting their attention, they will. Do you think commercial airline pilots all over the world will think twice before they spend more than 15 minutes on their laptops doing non-flight-related calculations? I do. Do you think students will think twice about IM-ing their sweetheart if there's a better than even chance they'll be called on in class? I do. Do you think a CMO will think twice before checking her messages if two of the best-regarded advertising agencies simply shut up — or decline to present — until she makes it clear to everyone in the room that she's fully engaged? I do.

You manage attention not by regulating devices but by managing expectations. If those pilots had even once successfully interacted with an air traffic controller or one of the other pilots trying to hail them, they'd have likely kept their licenses. They didn't. The best way to command undivided attention — and respect — is to lead by example.

What example are you setting? Pay attention.

A researcher at MIT Sloan School's Center for Digital Business and a visiting fellow at the Imperial College Business School, Michael Schrage is the author of Serious Play and the forthcoming Getting Beyond Ideas. His research focuses on the behavioral economics of innovation through models, prototypes, simulations and experiments.