Here's the thing...if you are truly interested in understanding your audience, whether it be for fun or profit, your primary focus will be on their responses to the messages you convey. As I am sure you already know, it's not what you say, it's what they hear and in marketing/PR it's also how they behave after hearing your message. This whole Internets thing has created a great vehicle for the practice of two-way communication with your audiences. There are a ton of ways in which you can use this to your advantage and over the course of time I will probably blab on about all of them in this blog, but for now, let's focus on the online newspaper.

Being a true - not red, white, and blue - Canadian, I read the Globe and Mail online every day. Aside from the whole Eastern-centric thing, it's a pretty good read. "In these tough economic times" (that phrase will never get old) many of the articles focus on layoffs, foreclosures, and bankruptcies (oh my!). Today there was a gem of a headline that screamed:

"Ottawa Refuses to Rescue AbitibiBowater"

Well, in the manner of all good headlines, that's pretty provocative. The article featured quotes from an assortment of parliamentary types as well as from disenfranchised AbitibiBowater employees, and generally echoed most of the anxieties and difficulties that we as a society and as a nation are facing. Nothing really new there. What was the kicker in this case was that headline with its inference that our government was turning its back on one of its venerable corporate institutions. Oh yeah, didn't you know? AbitibiBowater is one of Canada's oldest companies and is the largest producer worldwide of - wait for it - newsprint.

So here we have the message and the medium in a spectacular mash-up. We have aprimarily print news publication conveying the message that a newsprint manufacturer is going under. The message could have been delivered in the dispassionate and unbiased tone for which serious journalism is known (tongue, meet cheek) but where would be the fun in that? Nope, the sentiment was set with the headline and ran a merry course from there and the readers had something to say about it. Many online newspapers have a comments section directly beside or below each article which provides a forum for readers to sound off on the topic or story at hand. If a story is controversial enough to evoke feeling, the reader is motivated to respond and there is gold in them thar responses. Finally a place where you get to learn what others "hear" and what buttons it pushes for them. You get a myriad of perceptions that, if you're smart, you will absorb so that they can enrich your knowledge of your audience and inform your messaging to them.

It doesn't matter whether your communications are intended for personal or professional purposes. You always have an audience and what they hear is infinitely more important than what you say.

AC