Who are you talking to?

Introduction In a recent post I was challenged by somebody commenting to make the post briefer, more bulleted, because, for them, that was their preferred style (interestingly, I talked about reading styles in an earlier blog post on The Societal Web). This set me thinking about what I looked for in the web articles and documents that I read, and made me think about my use of other social media outlets such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIN and Ecademy. The devil’s in the detail My own personal style is to seek a relatively detailed understanding of complex issues. So I tend to look for articles that provide a level of detail that is probably more specific than others would wish for. In general, that tends to mean long articles. I looked at my use of Twitter and realised that, for me, it was a source of links to that detail rather than a source of the information in its own right, yet in talking and watching others using the tools and clients of Twitter it was clear that for many the links were spurious. They’d follow the links only if the initial post didn’t provide sufficient information, and often wouldn’t follow them even then. When reading articles and longer posts on other sites, many people will already have stopped reading when they reach this point, they’ve a flavour of what the article’s about and have no desire to read the detail. Fair enough. So who are we writing for? When we write in public we’re not necessarily writing for the public. We’re not trying to develop an article that meets all of the requirements of all of our audience. Rather, we are writing for the audience we wish to attract but publishing it with visibility to everyone. This is, I think, why we have seen an explosion in the ‘noise’ in social media, as more participants publish more material to the widest possible audience in each site. The challenge then is to build a network of followers who are more likely to see our material, and for whom we can write explicitly. The wider public ‘in the noise’ strategy is that even though for many people that content will be lost in the noise, for some, randomly, by chance, it will attract more than a cursory glance. For them, at least for those for whom it is relevant, a new follower can be attracted. So there are benefits to publishing widely in terms of occasional growth of your inner network whilst being conscious of the need to write targeted material precisely for that inner network of followers for whom you are adding distinct and absolute value. Conclusion I’ve realised how important it is to really understand the audiences that you are writing for; to know where they are interacting and what they expect to see generally, and from you in particular. By carefully defining the messages, audience needs, locations and so on, it’s possible to produce the same content published widely but with a significantly improved result. The result of that thinking can be seen in more detail and mapped using the Societal Web ATLAS and we’ll continue to develop the discussions on this topic over time.