Why You Should Build Your Audience

'Live Earth 2007, Wembley Stadium' by GlowPlug An interesting component of your online brand is most certainly audience. Without it, there is little point in doing much of anything online other than email, research, and storing information. Audience is what makes the web 2.0 world turn, as we’re all dependent upon the interactivity that audience brings.

Without people to follow, read, and comment on what each of us creates, we would have no measuring stick to compare ourselves to. We would not have a way to gauge improvement in knowledge or abilities. We’d be unable to find out what help others need, or how to learn something new from readers. Audience is a crucial piece to the social web.

As individuals, we shouldn’t be hesitant to grow audience in building our brand, or writing a blog. It’s not an egotistical to want to reach more people, its right in line with human nature to connect with people and socialize. Maintaining your audience is the other half of the equation – the one that give direct feedback of whether or not you’re adding value for them. It’s important to understand the expectations you set for your audience so you can continue to meet those expectations.

For organizations it’s easier in a way since they have long had marketing strategies that target certain demographics (specific audiences) for their product or service. They have been growing and maintaining their target markets for decades in some cases. There is one difference with online audience for organizations though: interactivity. This is not something that is found offline – you don’t see comments on magazine ads for your favorite soda or show company. You will online though, and that is the big challenge for the enterprise as they move into the social media space.

Bringing people to your social web is an important part of the social aspect. It allows for feedback, interaction and growth for all involved. Are you actively growing your audience?

What tips & techniques do you use or suggest for others to help grow their audience? How do you approach readers, followers, and friends on your social web?

Look for my article ‘Audience’ in the upcoming August 2008 issue of Personal Branding Magazine in which I talk about why growing and maintaining audience is important to personal brand.

Photo credit: GlowPlug

Old media bias โ€“ or is it fear of obsolescence?

Saturday night I was listening to social media guru & fellow Social Media Breakfast conversationalist @Albert Maruggi of Provident Partners being interviewed on WCCO radio here in Minneapolis. What really struck me was the way in which the host of the show totally spun every point that was brought up. Instead of a real discussion of what is happening in the social media space, she choose to simply believe her pre-conceived notions of the Internet as a “dangerous” place.

Now I agree that everyone is welcome to believe what they want, but to not let an honest discussion develop seems deceiving to me. Whether you believe in the hype or not isn’t the point, rather the inability to have an honest discussion about something on an old-media platform in a public space. Personally I think that fellow Twitter @MNHeadHunter hit the nail on the head in this tweet.

@rickmahn Biased or not knowledgable. Or feeling threatened ๐Ÿ™‚

Personally, this is one of the examples that worries me about so many people relying on old media for all their political news. If we can’t have an honest discussion of the facts on the platform about something like social media, how can I trust them about my political choices from any party? Disappointing to say the least.

Oh yeah, Albert was great on talking about facts, concepts, and directions – well done Albert!

Did anyone else catch the broadcast last Saturday? What did you think of the interview?

Enterprise workers don’t have the bandwidth for social media

'Ben Considered Working from his new Balloon Cube' by ShadowStorm In past posts on the topic, I’ve often wondered when the average worker would “get” blogging. I have to admit that I finally “got it” recently, but from a different perspective. While working with larger firms, I’ve again had the chance to observe the average office worker. In doing so, “it” occurred to me while explaining how social media adds value to an organization that many folks just don’t have the bandwidth to participate.

It’s not that they wouldn’t want to, rather, it’s that the modern organization is so optimized on searching for productivity gains that there is little room to add back the socialization tools to the mix. To do so without finding the reasons for using more employees’ time doesn’t add value to the organization. Many existing efforts to engage the employee meet with mediocre results because people don’t have interest in helping their employer know more about them.

Another aspect of social media in the enterprise is buy-in. There simply is a certain demographic that will be averse to participating. The reasons for this can be nearly anything, but usually comes back to the fact that many people can’t grasp the value of participating. They may exhibit this perspective in many other aspects of their life as well by not joining community groups or friends in other activities.

So, for those organizations that are trying to leverage the knowledge of their employees, the challenge is to find the channel that they will respond to. It’s more than that however, because just like working to connect with consumers, the business needs to connect with their staff. They need to eliminate the gap between business and employee by being themselves. Executives & veeps need to show their personalities, not their “game face” that they use for business. The employees know about that all too well, they need to see that the business is made up of real people.

Social Media in general has this issue – that people aren’t willing to invest the time, or don’t see any value in participating. It’s not unique to this new way of engaging people. Similar challenges faced radio and television at one time as well, newfangled things that they were. These new community building tools & techniques are still in their infancy and will be a large part of the infrastructure of the new economy that is developing as we speak – the trends in the market prove that out every day.

Photo credit: ShadowStorm

Fathers Day 2008

For all the hours you worked

For all the knowledge and advice you share

For setting the example and showing me how to be a man

For teaching me how to respect people

For being there when any of us kids stumbled

For always listening

Most of all, thank you for being my dad.

Migrated to Firefox 3โ€ฆ finally

Firefox I’ve finally made the switch to Firefox 3 (RC3). While previous betas and release candidates didn’t feel quite finished, this one sure does. From the talk around the ‘net about it, it sounds like this may be the last RC before going gold. Yeah, I still have a number of plug-ins that are not supported yet, but in the week since I switched to RC3 there have been three plug-ins updated for compatibility!

My main plug-ins that I can’t live without are there and the stability, memory management, and feature set have made it worth the change. Kudos to the Mozilla team on the work so far – you’re real close, and I know you’ve got a longer list of things to finish up than I’m aware of.

So yep, to those who give a darn I’ve moved to FF3 and am happy with the upgrade. Good stuff.

Pin It on Pinterest