Sunday, September 3rd, 2006
County fairs, country music and loving your audience
I grew up in the rural Midwest in the US, about 90 miles west of Chicago, and my father loved - still loves - county fairs. Back in the mid 1980s, I was lucky enough to see Johnny Cash with his wife June Carter at a country fair. I still remember the shiver that went down my spine when he took the stage and said: “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.”
I’m not a huge country music fan, but I love good music. Johnny Cash was a living legend, but he still thanked the audience for coming to the concert, for buying his records. He was humble, but it was a humility and a gratitude for his audience that was common to country singers. When I saw Walk the Line this year, I realised for Johnny Cash it might have been because of all of the letters of support he got, especially when he was struggling with his demons and addictions.
I got that feeling of connection with my audience when I was a cub reporter in western Kansas. It was not just a connection with my sources but also with my audience. That feeling of connection is one of the reasons that I find blogging as a journalist more fulfilling than traditional publishing or broadcasting. I find it odd now to write a story that doesn’t have a space for comments. Yeah, I can see the stats. I know people are clicking on the story, but I find having a conversation with my audience more fulfilling.
I talk to a lot of people in the media who view their audience as an annoyance. In the past, the only time they ever heard from members of their audience was to complain. Here in the UK, they jokingly refer to agitated callers or writers with the blanket phrase, ‘Angry in Milton Keynes’.
When I started this post, I was going to point out some of the many incidents when the media turns on their audience. It’s a pointless exercise really. It gets pretty ugly pretty quickly, like when Richard Cohen of the Washington Post this spring called e-mail correspondents a ‘Digital Lynch Mob‘. (For more background, Kos called it the ‘Substance of a Blogswarm‘. Tailrank has a nice roundup of this particular spat.)
I’m not going to pick on Mr Cohen or any publication. Even I have found myself in a middle of a blogswarm or two, such as when the brothers at Iraq the Model banned the BBC from their blog last year. A poor colleague, Sarah, who actually had little to do with the misunderstanding, got some pretty abusive e-mail. She asked me to help out. I hopped into the comments and explained what we were doing. Two comments later, the tide turned, and a commenter named Thomas was even talking about linking back to us.
As I’ve said before, if we in the traditional media blog, we have to play by the rules of blogging, not our own rules. You don’t issue a press release. You get out ahead of the blog storm. You get into the comments. You give your side of the story.
But you don’t always have to be on the defensive. Real blogging - getting out there and actually engaging in a conversation with your audience - has real benefits, both in terms of the business bottom line and just in terms of personal satisfaction.
What do I get back from it? A lot. As I blogged a few weeks ago, I’m changing jobs. Friday was my last day in the office at the BBC, and my colleagues blogged about it. I had plenty of well wishers. Abdelilah Boukili in Morocco has become a loyal member of our audience. He’s been quick to let us know when something is wrong with the blog, usually technical glitches. But it’s helped us fine tune our blog setup. He has also set up his own blog to chronicle his comments on BBC websites. But his comments on the World Have Your Say blog and here on Strange Attractor show how blogging opens new ways to relate to your audience. He said in a comment to me:
It was your interaction with the contributors to the BBC blog that encouraged me to be one of the frequent contributors. I am not a journalist like you equipped with means to get information. All I can do is give my comments which can be good or bad.
In case, you leave BBC blog I will be “following” you in the Guardian blog.
And there are several bloggers who have become frequent visitors to my blogs, Steve in Utah, Ipanema, Anbika in Nepal and Roberto in Miami, who have wished me well.
It takes time to build a community with a blog. Media companies are rushing to blog, rushing to use social networking tools. But as Suw and I always say, the technical tools are just the start. First off, learn to love your audience. We need to learn from the country music crowd. They remember who pay the bills.
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September 4th, 2006 at 3:30 am
It was very nice of you to pay tribute to those who were regular contributors to BBC WHYS. This means the idea of “out of sight, out of mind†won’t apply here as the internet is a viable means for direct access and your fans will easily detect you just by asking Mr Google to show you up wherever you happen to be.
From the briefing you gave about your childhood, being raised in the countryside, it’s no wonder if you are a very natural person. Perhaps being close to nature doesn’t spoil the spirit with ideologies that simply strip one of his basic essence and to be engulfed by the ideas of the others.
The internet has the advantage of making people closer. In the case of blogging people are judged on what they say, not where they are from. Blogging has succeeded in creating an international community of a special kind, in that they directly access each other’s ideas.
Thanks to your openness, your interaction with the world will continue to flourish.
Once again, thank you for your nice comments on my contributions, which I assure you I won’t stop. I also would like to extend my thanks to Richard Bowen, who in his reply to my comment about your leaving BBC WHYS said this as an appreciation of my, shall I say, dedicated contribution:
Abdelilah, I’m shocked that you think I don’t publish certain valid comments. I’ve published everything you’ve ever written. In fact I’m your biggest fan, even putting your picture on our “Wall of Inspiration” (a place where all the team add images or words that mean something to World Have Your Say). A photo of the “Wall” is being taken as we speak and will shortly be on Flickr for all to see. Richard
To both of you and to the rest of BBC WHYS team, I say you will be always on my mind, doing my best to send contributions, which I hope will be in line with to the international renown of your blogs.
September 4th, 2006 at 3:51 am
It was very nice of you to pay tribute to some of those who were regular contributors to BBC WHYS. This means the idea of “out of sight, out of mind” won’t apply here as the internet is a viable means for direct access and your fans will easily detect you just by asking Mr Google to show you up wherever you happen to be.
From the briefing you gave about your childhood, being raised in the countryside, it’s no wonder if you are a very natural person. Perhaps being close to nature doesn’t spoil the spirit with ideologies that simply strip one of his basic essence and to be engulfed by the ideas of the others.
The internet has the advantage of making people closer. In the case of blogging people are judged on what they say, not where they are from. Blogging has succeeded in creating an international community of a special kind, in that they directly access each other’s ideas.
Thanks to your openness, your interaction with the world will continue to flourish.
Once again, thank you for your nice comments on my contributions, which I assure you I won’t stop. I also would like to extend my thanks to Richard Bowen, who in his reply to my comment about your leaving BBC WHYS said this as an appreciation of my, shall I say, dedicated contribution:
Abdelilah, I’m shocked that you think I don’t publish certain valid comments. I’ve published everything you’ve ever written. In fact I’m your biggest fan, even putting your picture on our “Wall of Inspiration” (a place where all the team add images or words that mean something to World Have Your Say). A photo of the “Wall” is being taken as we speak and will shortly be on Flickr for all to see. Richard
To both of you and to the rest of BBC WHYS team, I say you will be always on my mind, doing my best to send contributions, which I hope will be in line with to the international renown of your blogs.
September 5th, 2006 at 12:31 am
Kevin,
Thanks for the mention in this post and the encouragement to keep blogging. It is nice to know that someone out there cares about what I think.
Concerning your comments about how the media views its audiences — thus, their reluctance to truly blog — make an interesting point. What kind of business model views its customers as an annoyance? Aren’t companies supposed to coddle their most loyal and involve customers at least a little bit? Doesn’t actively commenting and contacting company employees an indicator of loyalty and involvement?
September 6th, 2006 at 8:12 am
Yeah Steve,
That is really the point. It’s tricky right now in that journalists do feel threatened. A couple thousand lost their jobs in the last year due to budget cuts. But, at the end of the day, you can either get defensive (the standard response) or get in there. Most journalists just aren’t ready for their audience to talk back to them. They are still stuck in a one-way publishing mode.
My experience has been 180 degrees different. By engaging with my audience rather than getting upset because they have something to say about my articles, I have found that you start to head off some of the ‘digital lynch mob’ behaviour. It’s out there, but just responding is really important. People tend to put their daggers away when they realise that there is another human being on the other side of the screen.
k
September 6th, 2006 at 4:30 pm
“People tend to put their daggers away when they realise that there is another human being on the other side of the screen.”
That can apply to both parties — the professional journalist and reader/watcher/listener. Professional journalists could feel less threatened, and the media consumer should exercise more patience with goof ups and not rapidly look for bias.