Know your audience
by jeff on July 3rd, 2008Scott Lake’s post about being more than an email address (how to categorize people who sign up for the MG beta) got me thinking.
The Scotts’ discussion touched on an important aspect of communications. Target audience. The person you are speaking with. It affects the vocabulary, the delivery and the complexity of your message. It determines how you present ideas. We all do this to some degree during face-to-face conversations, but its it’s less of a focus in written conversations. Tragically.
Target audiences are usually defined at the planning stage; ahead of writing, design, layout… Truthfully speaking, this usually involves pretty general categories and a lot of educated assumptions.
If someone has taken the time to give you their email address, you should take the time to engage them in a little conversation. It will be evident soon enough what people’s interest in your application is and why they signed up. Then group them accordingly and interact with them in the way that is most productive for both of you. These days, if the only engagement you are having with your beta signups is to send them an email when your application is ready, you are missing a major opportunity.
This opportunity can inform our process in several ways.
Beyond interaction for productivity, its interaction for practice. For perfection. For persuasion.
At the start of the project our focus was on messages and concepts that the entire group felt fit on the same page. An equal amount of energy now has to be spent on getting to know who we’re talking to. In the end, its about message received, not message sent.
These early discussions give us the chance to take an iterative approach to our communications – ultimately developing a conversation instead of a broadcast. And the potential to create conversation specific to different partners and players is rare.
So cool.
July 3rd, 2008 at 10:08 am
Love the topic and I am interested in seeing the responses to the article.
I wanted to share a simple way another blogger has to gather information. Dave Gray of Communication Nation asks: http://communicationnation.blogspot.com/2008/06/who-are-you.html#links
Additionally, and not to state the obvious — while we may all be of different e.g. backgrounds, ideas, education levels, etc. — behaviouraly we share a common characteristic: we are very interested in Mercury Grove.
Finally, you may wish to consider this question from two different angles: 1- yours and 2- ours. Your angle is to better understand your audience to be able to better tailor your messages to them. Our angle is to get the information we want in the ways that we want. While the objectives are mutually compatible, it is perhaps best summed up by Abe Lincon (perhaps the first to debunk 1-to-1 marketing):
“You can please all of the people some of the time; some of the people all of the time; but never all of the people all of the time.”