30 Jun Audience is King

If you’re reading this, you’re officially my audience. As the author, my relationship with you has changed dramatically in recent times, so it needs to be considered in a different way. For many years, we’ve focussed on the ‘voice’ of the author and what they want to say rather than thinking about what the audience would like to hear. Social media and our access as individuals to a public voice, has changed this relationship. Now, neither is passive. We both have a role to play which creates more of a conversation and less of a ‘telling’.

When considering authoring messages for businesses, communities or ourselves, we need to focus less on what we want to say and more on what our audience wants to know. We’ve moved away from ‘key messages’ towards ‘key listenable’ Yeah, I just made that word up, but let me explain.

Facebook, for example started as a way to find out; “Who do I want to know?’ Very quickly, we were only sharing things with our ‘friends’ that we wanted them to know, such as our latest purchase, the last thing we ate, or that party we had fun at. We began to curate our messages based on what we wanted people to think of us. The author, just like every advertiser in history, began to manipulate how the audience viewed them. And then comments happened. The audience started co-authoring our content. Social media morphed and changed and exploded, and now everyone with a keyboard or a phone has an expert opinion on everything.

Professional communicators like me, have been displaced. No longer do our messages have more authority than anyone else. So where does that leave businesses, advertisers, community groups, charities, or health promotion agencies when it comes to messaging? It means we collaborate. We converse, we listen, and we think about our audience before we think about ourselves.

For example, when I was working for Saving Animals from Euthanasia (SAFE) one of our key messages was that, ‘foster care is better for companion animals than caged care.’ Our audience however, primarily wanted to know, ‘how can I adopt a pet?’ We needed to find a way (and we did when we rewrote the SAFE website) to serve our audience. We focussed on their needs and gradually as part of the conversation between animal lovers and animal rescuers, the benefits of foster care became obvious. 

You don’t need to compromise your principals just to tell the audience what it wants to hear. You just have to make sure that they are your first consideration, rather an afterthought.