Your Audience is Not Like You
This thesis keeps occurring to me and I need to give it a draft or two. It’s a variation on the cliché that you shouldn’t “preach to the choir.” Then to whom do you preach? If rhetoric is persuasive, it’s meant to change minds, not simply gather like-minds together.
Let’s take that metaphor further. A preacher doesn’t communicate to convince anyone on the altar because they have enough faith already. A preacher writes sermons to reach an entire congregation—those who lean towards the pulpit, those who lean away, and those who don’t come to church at all.
In business and marketing, the current cliché is “know your audience,” but that could mean anything. Steve Jobs rightly understood the audience doesn’t know what it wants until a leader shows it to them. That sounds arrogant, but it’s really empathy.
Jobs knew his audience wasn’t part of Silicon Valley, but outside of it. You’ll hear a lot of people in tech belittle people who don’t understand code or who buy Apple for the brand name. They refer to Apple customers as “sheep.”
That’s real arrogance because it’s 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’s biggest tech company today. Apple brought tech to the non-technical.
Jobs understood people don’t care about motherboards like they don’t 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.
The public isn’t 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’m 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.
Good preachers reach across difference. They have an agenda, but they aren’t authoritarian. They don’t expect congregations to turn into choirs. Steve Jobs didn’t expect the public to become programmers either. That’s practical, and tolerant. Good leaders may believe they know what’s better for the audience, but they don’t force change—they help audiences understand they want to change.
They don’t see the public as sheep, but as their flock.
This interest in the other is rare, which is why it succeeds. It’s 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’s your expertise, livelihood, and foundation.
People call other people sheep to say, “I’m the shepherd,” but that’s 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.
There is another term in the tech world for the public besides sheep. Silicon Valley calls customers “users.” I try to use this term as little as possible. I write in The Interactive Voice about how there are three levels of interactivity—spectators, users, and authors. Each level has greater agency in their interactions.
It’s not that user is a negative term, but it’s 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.
Many of the students in my graduate communications courses are “user-interface designers.” I often pun they should aspire to become “author-interface designers” because that’s what the best tech does. Apple, Google, Twitter—their applications turn people into authors, not just users.