Violent Agreement: Blogging For Different Audiences

One of the recurring points we’ve been trying to help promote is that blogging is often about having more than one audience, and frequently about having one blog per audience.

The need for a better understanding that there’s hundreds of different blogospheres, and that each should be approached appropriately, is best illustrated by some of the conversations that have been happening between high-profile bloggers lately. The problem, of course, isn’t that the A-listers don’t get enough attention; Rather, the attention focused on them sometimes distracts from the fact that they are often talking to different constituencies.

Enough theory, let’s look at a real example.

Meet the Boys

Last week, Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, authors of Naked Conversations and well-known bloggers, attended an event at Amazon to talk about their book and their experiences with blogging. Robert and Shel are both good guys, and we’ve been happy to watch the progress on their Red Couch blog on TypePad as they developed the content and ideas for their book. They’re also both pretty deeply in the “true believer” camp of blogging, living much of their professional lives through the lens of social media, and of course having an investment in making sure their blog-focused book succeeds. In short, they’re terrific at talking about the ideals and aspirations of blogging, and spend a lot of time talking to future-thinking people who are looking for confirmation that their interest in blogs is valuable and useful.

One of the members of the audience at Amazon was Werner Vogels, a stand-up fellow, he’s the CTO of Amazon and someone used to the hard-nosed skepticism that it takes to keep a huge infrastructure like Amazon.com running. Just one recent example of the kind of business Werner helps run is Amazon’s S3 web service, a storage service that’s not only highly available and built with smart APIs, but one that actually charges for service, which sometimes seems like a rarity in these Web 2.0 days. Practical, pragmatic, and built for mainstream business and consumer audiences.

You see where this is going, right? Both sides spend a lot of time talking to audiences that are fairly distinct. And different cultures always have a different goals, different measures of what constitutes success.

That being said, there’s some amazing commonalities. Both the Naked Voice blog and the Amazon Web Services blog run on TypePad, and both companies have employees or staff who run personal or professional blogs on Movable Type or other tools. You don’t need to convince Microsoft or Amazon that blogs are a valuable way to help your business communicate; They’re both already putting their money where their mouth is. Everybody here is in violent agreement with each other!

So what’s the problem?

Despite everyone having similar ideas, we got a classic blogging back-and-forth going last week. Post and counter-post and counter-counter-post flew back and forth. This, despite the fact that everyone agrees:

• Blogs have a role in helping businesses communicate
• Blogs should be measured in business with practical metrics, just like any other tool or technology
• There’s just as much value in having a Grand Theory of Blogs as there is in just cutting the bullshit and getting something done.

So, what can we do about this kind of pointless miscommunication, instead of wasting time feeding the meme-trackers that thrive on flame wars and butting heads? Seems like there’s some smart first steps to ensure your public business blogging is productive.

• Identify the audience you’re speaking to. It’s okay if some people say “this isn’t for me”.
• Point out some of the goals you’re striving for. Most of the time, everyone wants the same thing.
• Acknowledge that some audiences have different priorities. Even a one-line disclaimer of “your mileage may vary” can keep people from losing their cool.

In conclusion: This kind of high-profile bickering scares the crap out of people who are new to blogging, especially companies who are new to blogging. Back when they first got email, they might have worried a bit about spam or something, but they sure didn’t fear that “leaders in the email community” would be flaming each other or be having “touchy-feely” vs. “by-the-book” arguments.

All of us who care about helping people communicate better using new technology, or assisting people in using the web to make their work more effective, would do well to make sure that we’re addressing our audiences appropriately. That way we can spend less time being fodder for Slashdot and more time actually helping people take advantage of cool stuff like blogs.