Like he said: the audience is everybody

From a recent post on JNJ BTW:

When I started JNJBTW, I thought my audience would be pretty much those who write about the business of healthcare — reporters, editors, healthcare bloggers — those folks. What I’ve found, after doing this for a year, is that the people reading this are, well, er, people. Doctors, nurses, consumers — employees and retirees — people who hate the company and people who support what we do — friends, neighbors, my father-in-law… well, you get the idea.

Now those who have been blogging for a while may think, “well, duh!?” but for me it was an important point — particularly since I’m often asked “who is your audience?” My answer, which many people scoff at, is that it is everybody — that I don’t define my audience, but that the audience defines itself.

From my recent post about style and audience design in corporate blogs:

Blogs are a part of the Internet and the Internet provides virtually anyone with near-universal access to information. This may seem like a truism, but it has significant implications. Whereas before groups of stakeholder would be targeted individually and the flow of information was highly controlled, this is no longer the case in a networked world. A careful examination of the Google-Sicko story reveals a case of audience underfitting, i.e. a company employee addressing a specific audience but effectively reaching a much broader readership (and, in this case, not with a positive result).

The problem encountered is the extreme reach and transparency of online publishing. Because we are used to addressing either individuals or select communities of people, suddenly reaching a diffuse, invisible and potentially vast audience is not always easy to handle. This is especially problematic when you talk about people who are also your readers (see the Google example).

As the author of a corporate blog, one thing to never forget is that your audience defines itself (well said, Marc!) and that you need to write accordingly. Forget all the cozy rhetoric about blogs being “personal” and “open” and so forth for a moment. The key thing to keep in mind is that the word you identifies the person(s) whom you are addressing and that words like they, users, consumers, the public etc denotes those people whom you are not addressing. You are talking to the first group and about the second group. The unique aspect of blogs is that all those people that you conceptualize as being in the second group are also in the first, since anyone can potentially be a reader of your blog. The Google-Sicko example illustrates what happens in such a case: talking about someone who is part of the discourse is generally regarded as highly antisocial. In terms of language, we split the world into three parties: ourselves and those “with us” (I/we), our discourse partners (you) and everyone else (he/she/<name>). Making your reader feel treated as a third party is a mistake you don’t want to make.