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Holtz Communications + Technology

Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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Yes, Virginia, there is an audience

imageWhile working on a proposal for a consulting project, I’ve had an opportunity to give a lot of thought to some of the most dearly held notions of organizational communication in the era of social computing: There are no more audiences and there is no market for your message.

As with any popular belief, there are grains of truth to these, but by and large they don’t hold up to scrutiny.

Audiences have supposedly vanished because everybody now creates content. A lot of people promoting this notion point to Jay Rosen’s phrase, “The People Formerly Known as the Audience” when making their case. However, on this blog Rosen commented:

Look, media people. We are still perfectly content to listen to our radios while driving, sit passively in the darkness of the local multiplex, watch TV while motionless and glassy-eyed in bed, and read silently to ourselves as we always have.

Should we attend the theatre, we are unlikely to storm the stage for purposes of putting on our own production. We feel there is nothing wrong with old style, one-way, top-down media consumption. Big Media pleasures will not be denied us. You provide them, we???ll consume them and you can have yourselves a nice little business.

There are two problems with the assumption that audiences have evaporated because everybody is now engaged:

  • The presumption that all audiences are passive
  • The disconnect between the way communicators use the word and how others define it

The powerful force of passive media has made it easy for audiences to evolve quickly into something else, into groups that share and collaborate. But some people don’t want to make that transition and some audiences never evolve beyond audiences. Like so many things, it’s not an either-or proposition.

The myth of the passive audience

The image that propels the belief that audiences have vanished is one of masses of passive recipients of content. The truth is, there is no such thing. Even as Jay Rosen notes that we won’t storm the theater stage to demand our own production, neither do we sit silently. The enthusiasm of our applause determines the number of curtain calls, for example. Certain types of audiences have even more impact. Try telling a European soccer (er…football) audience that they’re passive. The quality of a Grateful Dead concert was directly proportional to the give-and-take with the audience.

Newspaper and magazines send letters to the editor. People offended or upset by advertising write letters to the offending company. I could go on, but you get the idea. Not everybody in pre-social media audiences engaged in these ways, but neither does everybody today. The percentage of people creating new content is low; the percentage of people either passively consuming content is high, as is the percentage of people who are not consuming social media at all. Look at the technographic statistics compiled by Forrester Research: 48% of the global online population are spectators. Wouldn’t that be synonymous with “people currently known as the audience”?

The communicator’s definition

Whether or not you agree with the idea that audiences still exist is moot, however, when you consider that the argument is a semantic one. “Audience” is just a term to define the target. In the proposal I’m writing, the client’s goal is to get high school and college-aged individuals engaged with its altruistic, non-profit goals. We can talk all we want about the sanctity of the individual, but my proposal still has to reach a target population, a demographic (or technographic) group, a collection of people who share common characteristics. If the proposal is accepted, then I have to show that the new media approaches I have recommended succeeded in producing that heightened level of awareness and engagement. Yes, the effort must engage individuals. But I have to approach those individuals through channels that are most likely to reach them. And let’s face it, even old-style advertising blasted over television ultimately had to translate into one person plunking down cold cash for one bottle of shampoo.

Understanding social media means recognizing the dynamics that can propel willing members of an audience into group mode, where they become more actively engaged and can have far greater impact. But we do still hear radio commercials while driving (nobody has figured out a way to let us fast-forward through those yet), see billboards, view product placements in movies and video games, and view display ads while flipping through paper magazines. If there were no market for messages, 10 million people would not have viewed Dove’s “Evolution” video. Clearly, there was a market for that message.

Look no further than the poster child for business engagement in social media for an example of integration of old and new media. Dell learned the hard way that some members of an audience can become a dynamic group, leading Dell to dive into social media. But they still send me direct mail, advertise in magazines, and produce television commercials. They recognize the rise of the individual while at the same time acknowledging that there are audiences to whom a message can be delivered.

Bottom line: Target audiences continue to be a critical dimension of communication. But we must understand that individual members of those audiences can form into groups in a heartbeat. That’s what social media has changed. But any communicator who starts planning without identifying the audience is headed down a road to failure.

06/09/08 | 0 Comments | Yes, Virginia, there is an audience

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