Kinsella–Part II: Building Your Blog’s Audience & Power
A key quote: People are very suspicious now of the Mainstream Media agenda, and bloggers are uniquely poised to address that.
Yesterday we ran Part I of Warren Kinsella’s advice from the Exploring the Fusion Power of Public and Participatory Journalism conference on how blogs, if they were candidates, could get elected. Here is a continuation of his talk:
Building an Audience and Building Power
Now we have to be honest with ourselves. Nobody blogs for themselves; they do it so they can get read. So how do you get read, how do you get an audience? You want to be read, so you don’t try to be all things to all people.
You do not need 100 percent of voters. Your target audience is not the world, but people you want to get on your side. I call this the Pyramid of Power. There are the people at the top who think they’ve got power, then the big shot journalists and officials who tell the people at the top that they do in fact have power whether they do or not. And third you have the chattering classes of people who read about those who think that they have power. And then you have the rest of us who vote governments in and out who actually have power now perhaps as a consequence of this technology. And they to me are what blogs are by and for and about.
They are the most important commodities, the ones who can turn the media on its head and are doing that now. They’re a threat to, media dominance. In the Kerry election campaign you saw many corporate blogs, many media blogs. And they were, with greatest respect to those of you who were doing them, pathetic. They were terrible. It was just an extension of what the people were doing in their daily journals. They were boring. Those blogs forgot what blogs are supposed to be about, which is being a little bit snotty and independent.
All of you own PCs, which means that you are by nature suspicious and paranoid like me. (Bottom of the pyramid) power works, you cannot ever ignore it, certainly in a political campaign because they are the ones everybody is afraid of. The soccer mom story we all know about in the 1992 presidential campaign, people who were looking at issues according to their own self-interests and didn’t really have a generalist look at politics anymore.
Same thing in the Canadian Federal Election in 1993. Principally were women, but in Canada were new Canadians and young people. So you grab them and you get yourself elected. You have to watch it when they get mad, because they are much more influential than that top rung and the second rung put together, because they determine who is the hero and who is the zero. They are us, you’ve gotta reach out and hold on to them. The (Mainstream Media) MM finds this suspect, but, I guess, conversely this bottom rung finds the MM very suspect themselves.
Another example from the Canadian Federal Election campaign, the last weekend of the campaign everything that the conventional media had been telling people was going to happen was turned on its head; the conservative party was going to win and they didn’t. So all the mainstream media commentary was wrong. There were no exceptions. So people are very suspicious now of the MM agenda, and bloggers are uniquely poised to address that.
So that’s who are audience is, so let me tell you who I think our audience is not. I have committed the sin of daily journalism…and I have even taught unsuspecting youngsters how to be journalists and I can say not all journalists are bad. But the MM’s design to absorb the blog culture will not work and cannot work because the MM is different from the rest of us.
