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A couple of weeks ago, I discussed the need to better understand the interactive audience. In this post I will elaborate on the understanding of “audience types” and the need to move away from the traditional categories in which we tend to bucket our audiences.

Prologue

I’ve always noticed that anytime something new is introduced to the world it will inevitably go through a certain life cycle before its effectiveness matures.

Stage 1: The New Idea

What I’ve found is that we’ll always start with the big idea, new medium, or new invention. It’s that idea that will change everything. The way we work, the way we live, the way we think. Big things will come from this as soon as we introduce it to the world. (See the MP3 player)

Stage 2: Just Add Insanity

For some time after, in a need to bring it down to a kitchen-table understanding, we’ll apply older designs, approaches, and thoughts to the new idea expecting this to work as well as it did in the past.
(See the Nomad MP3 player that looked like a portable CD player)

Stage 3: The Revelation

Suddenly there is a stage of relearning and training ourselves to look at the problem we are trying to solve differently. The light will turn on, and it’s at that point when we really see great things happen. (See the Apple iPod)

Stop Applying Insanity to Your Interactive Strategy

I look at the terms B2B, B2C, B2G, B2E, and every other term like this as an old world approach being pinned to a brand new medium.

Any marketing firm, design firm or advertising agency that looks at the interactive space through these filters has already began from a failing position.

Relearn the Medium

The problem with the above terms is that it groups people into irrelevant buckets. What you’ve done right out of the gates is set yourself up to look at your audience in industry segments, and not as individuals. This is acceptable in the traditional spaces of radio, print, and television commercials. You simply didn’t have much choice beyond a one-way, one-to-many message.

By taking this approach with interactive you ignore one of the core benefits of moving into the this space – creating a two-way, one-to-one dialog. No matter what industry you consider yourself to be in – interactive design always boils down to one person interacting with you at a time. Even at a global scale, it comes down to millions of one-to-one experiences. You have an opportunity to here to connect in unique ways and engage each person at a level they could never have experienced with traditional methods. So from this point forward I suggest throwing the old terms out when dealing with interactive.

Regroup Your Audience

All this talk of breaking down the groups, and now I’m talking about regrouping? Yes, but this is a different type of grouping. Not by market segment or business sector, but by type of individual audience member. Now that you have millions of one-to-one experiences between millions of different individuals, the next point is to understand with whom are you starting a dialog. With interactive you are really only talking about two different types: Visitors and Messengers.

Audience Type: Visitors

Visitors are the ones that will participate in your interactive experience. They will learn from it, respond directly to you with it, be entertained and informed by it. If done remarkably, they will return over and over, and be willing to lose track of time with it. The primary type of dialog they will have will be directly with you and the story you’ve shared.

Audience Type: Messengers

Messengers are your storytellers. They are like visitors, but they don’t stop there. They are the bloggers, the contributors, the responders, the visitors that decide to share your post or “email the page.” These are the people that share your story in a way that is relevant to them and their audience.

Now Create Something New

These are your two main audience types. If anything you’ve learned before doesn’t relate directly back to your audience at the individual level, forget it.

Going forward what you need to do is:

1. break down the traditional silos (or groups, tribes, whatever),
2. understand them as individuals,
3. identify with them, and then
4. enable them to engage as visitors or messengers in your story.

Making sure that you start from this point, and answering questions that enable your audience in either group will help you create experiences that you couldn’t have traditionally achieved or thought of.

If you retrain yourself to look at your audience in this way, you’re solutions will begin to change drastically. You will turn on the light, and begin to make great things happen.