{"id":3994,"date":"2018-08-05T09:00:29","date_gmt":"2018-08-05T09:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dotkalm.com\/bumpspark\/?p=3994"},"modified":"2018-12-01T21:25:17","modified_gmt":"2018-12-01T21:25:17","slug":"your-audience-is-not-like-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dotkalm.com\/bumpspark\/your-audience-is-not-like-you\/","title":{"rendered":"Your Audience is Not Like You"},"content":{"rendered":"

This thesis keeps occurring to me and I need to give it a draft or two. It\u2019s a variation on the clich\u00e9 that you shouldn’t “preach to the choir.<\/a>\u201d Then to whom do you preach? If rhetoric<\/a> is persuasive, it\u2019s meant to change minds, not simply gather like-minds together.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s take that metaphor further. A preacher doesn\u2019t communicate to convince anyone on the altar because they have enough faith already. A preacher writes sermons to reach an entire congregation\u2014those who lean towards the pulpit, those who lean away, and those who don\u2019t come to church at all.<\/p>\n

In business and marketing, the current clich\u00e9 is \u201cknow your audience<\/a>,\u201d but that could mean anything. Steve Jobs rightly understood the audience doesn\u2019t know what it wants until a leader shows it to them<\/a>. That sounds arrogant, but it\u2019s really empathy.<\/p>\n

Jobs knew his audience wasn\u2019t part of Silicon Valley, but outside of it. You\u2019ll hear a lot of people in tech belittle people who don\u2019t understand code or who buy Apple for the brand name. They refer to Apple customers as “sheep.”<\/a><\/p>\n

That\u2019s real arrogance because it\u2019s dismissive, an indication the speaker has no interest in communicating or understanding the other. Jobs was a terrific communicator, which is why Apple is the world\u2019s biggest tech company today. Apple brought tech to the non-technical.<\/p>\n

Jobs understood people don\u2019t care about motherboards like they don\u2019t care about car transmissions. People want to travel from point A to point B or from website A to website B without understanding the mechanics, not because they are sheep, but because they are doctors and lawyers and parents with other issues on their minds.<\/p>\n

The public isn\u2019t some alien other. Tech experts go to the public for their health care, legal contracts, day care, and all kinds of expertise. The sheep are their community. But I\u2019m sure many of their doctors and lawyers see the tech community as sheep for not understanding medicine or the law better. We stick with our own.<\/p>\n

Good preachers reach across difference. They have an agenda, but they aren\u2019t authoritarian. They don\u2019t expect congregations to turn into choirs. Steve Jobs didn\u2019t expect the public to become programmers either. That\u2019s practical, and tolerant. Good leaders may believe they know what\u2019s better for the audience, but they don\u2019t force change\u2014they help audiences understand they want to change.<\/p>\n

They don\u2019t see the public as sheep, but as their flock.<\/p>\n

This interest in the other is rare, which is why it succeeds. It\u2019s not surprising that most people stick with their domain. Your domain contains the people who talk like you and think like you and often decide your fate. Your domain also makes you feel accomplished. It\u2019s your expertise, livelihood, and foundation.<\/p>\n

People call other people sheep to say, \u201cI\u2019m the shepherd,\u201d but that\u2019s not what a good shepherd wants, or a good leader says. A good leader learns for the flock, serves and protects the audience. They are generous teachers and share knowledge. To insiders, leaders can often look like traitors because they give so much away.<\/p>\n

There is another term in the tech world for the public besides sheep. Silicon Valley calls customers \u201cusers.<\/a>\u201d I try to use this term as little as possible. I write in The Interactive Voice<\/em><\/a> about how there are three levels of interactivity\u2014spectators, users, and authors. Each level has greater agency in their interactions.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not that user is a negative term, but it\u2019s not the best way to think of your audience. You only have good conversations with other authors, who are different than you and smarter than you in their differences.<\/p>\n

Many of the students in my graduate communications courses are \u201cuser-interface designers.<\/a>\u201d I often pun they should aspire to become \u201cauthor-interface designers\u201d because that\u2019s what the best tech does. Apple, Google, Twitter\u2014their applications turn people into authors, not just users.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This thesis keeps occurring to me and I need to give it a draft or two. It\u2019s a variation on the clich\u00e9 that you shouldn’t…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4235,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"image","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[69,56,57],"tags":[226,111,153,127,93,224,225,52],"class_list":["post-3994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-image","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-course","category-ivoice","category-linkweek","tag-agency","tag-audience","tag-author","tag-connection","tag-hyperlink","tag-jobs","tag-user","tag-writing","post_format-post-format-image"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dotkalm.com\/bumpspark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dotkalm.com\/bumpspark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dotkalm.com\/bumpspark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dotkalm.com\/bumpspark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dotkalm.com\/bumpspark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3994"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/dotkalm.com\/bumpspark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3994\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4246,"href":"https:\/\/dotkalm.com\/bumpspark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3994\/revisions\/4246"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dotkalm.com\/bumpspark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dotkalm.com\/bumpspark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dotkalm.com\/bumpspark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dotkalm.com\/bumpspark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}