Welcome to My Blog

Hello all, my name is Alex Concilus and this is my blog on audience analysis and why it is important to know your audience when planning social media strategy. Let me start off with a little bit of background information on myself. I am a recent graduate from the SMAD (School of Media Arts and Design) program at James Madison University with a concentration in Corporate Communications. I enjoy reading, writing and digital photography and am currently studying for the LSAT to hopefully further my education in law school.

The purpose of this blog is to post information on why audience analysis is important to you as a company, a writer, a marketer or anything else that can’t exist without an audience. I will also go into ways you can reach your audience and ways that you can keep your audience once you have found it. Let me start things off with my definition of audience analysis, which to me, is figuring out who is listening to you so you can craft your message to fit their needs.

The order of the blog is reverse chronological so to start from the beginning you must go back a few pages. To read more, please see the resources page for articles I used to gather information. Thank you for stopping by and please contact me for any questions.

Conclusions

If this is your first time reading my blog then this post is a good starting point for you. I’m going to give an overview of everything I have talked about so far regarding audience analysis and if there are any ideas that you would like more details on, then you are free to check out my other posts. Just keep in mind that this is the last post of this section on audience analysis and it begins with this post on the importance of determining your audience. With that settled, lets talk about why you should care about audience analysis.

Knowing who your audience is, is very important because if you don’t know who you are crafting your message for, then you don’t know who is going to care about what you have to say. If you give the wrong message, then it’s likely that no one will care about what you have to say. To find your audience, the best way is to ask because then you have the opportunity to interact with your potential audience and show them that you care. There are also more great ideas presented in the link above. If you are having trouble finding your audience, it could be because you are looking in the wrong place. I don’t mean that you should be looking in a different city, state or country. I mean you should be trying different mediums. Another solution to not being able to find your audience is having your audience find you. This may seem a bit risky but it could pay off as blogger Jaffer Ali explains here.

Finally, once you have found your audience, you need to keep in mind that they are dynamic and likely to change. They also have many more choices available to them today. You should already be using social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to connect with your audience and actively engage them in conversation. Receiving feedback from your audience is the best way to learn and make changes that can only benefit you as a business. After all, the customer knows best. Speaking of customer, just because you have made the sale doesn’t mean you should lose contact with that customer. You should e-mail that customer and make sure they are satisfied with your product and ask if there is anything else you can do to make their experience more enjoyable thus forming a relationship.

I know that was a lot to take in all in one post but it sums up just about everything that was said regarding audience analysis in earlier posts. I invite you to go through and read my other posts regarding audience analysis if you are looking for more information or please contact me if there’s something else you think I should mention.

This is the end of my series of posts on audience analysis. Next I would like to tackle the subject of collaboration and whether new social media make it easier or more difficult to work together. I’ll get started on these posts within the next couple of weeks and go through a similar process as I have done with audience analysis.

Relationship Marketing

You are a business that has been around for a while but is introducing a new product to the market. The problem is, your normal clientel probably isn’t that interested in your new product. There are a couple of dilemmas here with the most important one being keeping your old audience even though you may not have anything new and exciting for them. Loyal customers are only loyal because you did something right to get there attention the first time and never stopped paying attention to them. The key to this is, relationships. To start things off here is a great video on relationships and determining what you want out of the relationship before forming one.

Once you know why you want to form a relationship with your consumer, it would be good to know how to build it. In this article from Gail Goodman on Entrepreneur.com, she describes five ways on how to build and keep relationships. Her first point is that building your network is as important as building your sales because as your network grows and as long as you continue to talk to the contacts you make in your network, then those contacts will more then likely become customers. However, getting the sale is not the end of this journey. After the sale you need to continue to engage your customer so they feel appreciated and continue to do business with you. Here is a great video on social media and how it has changed the way we interact and buy. Now more then ever there are so many brands out there and the customer has many choices. You need to make sure you keep your customers loyal so they don’t switch to another brand.

Hopefully this post has been helpful in giving you ways to build a relationship with your audience. My next post is going to be a wrap up of the past nine posts and will hopefully end with you knowing why audience analysis is so important.

Audience Analysis and Photography

This post is kind of a sidetrack from the rest in that it is specific only to photographers and how they use audience analysis. With the current state of the economy, finding a job is going to be hard for just about everybody. With the current trend of technology, finding a job as a professional photographer is going to be even more challenging

These days, anybody who can afford a nice camera can shoot a really nice picture. It just doesn’t take very much to do. Especially with the focus of these new cameras being on userability and ease of use. Somebody with absolutely no background in photography can take shots that look almost as good as if done by a professional. There are however ways to distinguish yourself from the rest.

According to the e-book Understanding new media, social media
and the business of photography, you have to “create a story” for yourself. What the author means by this, is letting people know not only what your style and ability is but how much experience you have. It also depends on what kind of photography you are doing. For instance, being a photojournalist is completely different from being a wedding photographer. Although being skilled in both fields is helpful. The differences are better explained in this blog called the new media photographer.

The best way to get your name out there is of course to advertise yourself. Instead of posting your photos to a photo sharing website, you should create your own website like these people have: Casey Templeton, Katie Stoops and Dr. Frank Doherty. These sites are much more professional than just posting on Flickr but there is nothing wrong with using sites like Flickr.

Doing all of these things will help to establish yourself and hopefully you will gain a following. In my next post I’m going show you how to find a new audience while keeping the existing one interested.

Using Social Media to Connect with Your Audience

Now that you have seen an example of why you need to keep your audience engaged, I am going to show you a few tools you should be utilizing to stay connected.

One such tool, is Twitter. Based on my own experience, there seem to be a lot of skeptics out there as to the usefulness of Twitter. However, Twitter is in fact very useful, as discussed in this article from flyte new media. In this article, the author talks about how you can use Twitter to promote your business by first explaining how Twitter works and then how you can make it work for you. The author also includes three guidelines of etiquette, that can be used for all social media, towards the end of his article that are something you should stick to.

Another great tool that has really grown over the past couple of years is Facebook. I’m sure many people think that Facebook is just something a lot of college students use to waste time. It is much more then that though. Facebook can now be used to connect with literally millions of people. If you are a business then you should have a Facebook profile. You can find people who may be interested in your business and easily interact with them. You can post information about your business and let others comment on what you are doing as a business. This is a great opportunity for feedback and for letting your customers know you are listening to them. In this article from Relativity: Business Technology Solutions, the author briefly describes how you can setup your own Facebook account and then utilize it to get more exposure.

Finally, if you are using Twitter or maybe a blog of your own, then you should consider having your own RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed. The way RSS works is, you have the link on your blog or Twitter for others to click and by doing so they will receive updates via some sort of online reader such as Google Reader. If the idea of RSS still doesn’t make sense to you then check out this video from CommonCraft for some clarification.

Hopefully now you are already using or considering using some of these tools. In my next post I’m going to be career specific in how you can use audience analysis in the photography profession.

Keeping Your Audience Interested

This may sound like a simple enough concept but believe it or not many companies fail at this. A great example is the fiasco Dell went through a few years back when they provided poor customer service to a customer who turned out to be quite popular. That customer was blogger, among other things, Jeff Jarvis. I’m sure many of you know the story of Dell Hell, but if you don’t then I will give you a quick overview. If you want to know more details then visit the Dell Hell link to all see all of the blog posts Mr. Jarvis has posted on Dell.

The story starts when Mr. Jarvis bought a Dell notebook along with a four year in-home warranty. The notebook malfunctions and Mr. Jarvis contacts Dell to get someone to come fix his laptop but Dell decides not to honor his in-home warranty and has Mr. Jarvis send his notebook to them instead. He sends it in and they fix it and send it back but the notebook still overheats. Dell once again refuses to send someone to Mr. Jarvis’s house so Mr. Jarvis reacts, much unlike Dell, which you will see later on. Mr. Jarvis takes to the internet on his blog and posts about his bad experience with Dell only to find that many other people are having the same problems. Thanks to Mr. Jarvis, things like “Dell Sucks. Dell Lies.” became a viral message. Dell doesn’t react and instead forms the “look but don’t interact” blog policy, which essentially just means they were ignoring the customer completely. Dell customers start to wonder if Dell really cares about them and Dell’s reputation becomes threatened.

Still Dell ignores complaints from consumers and assume that the whole problem will just blow over. Then in July 2005 Dell closed it’s customer support forum to avoid more negative comments, thus cutting off communication with the customer. After a letter from Mr. Jarvis to Dell, and many months later, Dell realizes that their non-response strategy isn’t working. In July 2006 they came up with Direct2Dell site where they offer support and many other things for their customers, including IdeaStorm, where customers can post ideas for things they’d like to see on their dell. They even have a link on their blog roll to BuzzMachine, Jeff Jarvis’s blog.

As I’m sure you have learned, listening to your audience is one of the best ways to keep them around. In my next post I’m going to tell you about some tools, that you may not be using, that are very helpful in engaging your audience.

Don’t Look For Your Audience

Let them look for you. As you may remember, in my last post I mentioned that you shouldn’t be looking for your audience. I know your first thought had to be, “this guy is absolutely crazy.” Or something along those lines. I ran into this concept of letting your audience target you in an article by Jaffer Ali. In his article, Mr. Ali talks about how the audience doesn’t care how they find the content they are looking for. They care about the content itself and what it means to them. With that in mind, you cannot try and reach every audience out there by having multiple types of content. You still need to focus it down to a certain group so you are not spread too thin.

This however would be another great opportunity to try out Vidsense, the ad company I mentioned in my last post that places clips of your choice on one of the many sites in their ad network that lead directly to your website. By doing this all you have to worry about is having the proper content on your website. The audience will do the rest when they find your site through Vidsense.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do any research of your audience at all though. It would be helpful to have a general idea of who you are targeting. There is a great podcast I found that is focused on finding your audience when writing a speech but a lot of the concepts can still be applied to many other areas.

Hopefully by now you have an idea of who your audience is or at least how you find out who they are. In my next post I plan to talk about why, once you find your audience, it is important to engage them and keep them interested.

Location, Location, Location

So you’re still having trouble finding the right audience? The problem may be that you haven’t pinned your audience’s location down and are not reaching them the correct way. Before you start researching geographic locations where you think your audience is from, let me mention that I mean a different kind of location. The location I’m speaking of is, the internet. According to a posting by Jennifer Pearson, in 2007 more than 44 percent of adults age 18-24 reported spending more than three hours online a day. Also, 40 percent of online users over the age of 12 reports watching network televisions online as well, some on a weekly basis. With these numbers network commercials might not be cutting it anymore.

Why bother watching the newest episode of Lost on tv when you can catch it online the next day without the extra 15 minutes of commercial breaks? This is especially important today to those people who feel like they don’t have time for all the things they want to do in a day. People are not only watching network television shows online, they are watching user generated content and other clips of movies that can be found online.

Vidsense provides companies looking to get more traffic to their website with a solution to advertising on multiple sites. What Vidsense does is, it posts clips on the many sites that are in the Vidsense ad network and when users click on the clip they want to see, they are directed to your site where the clip is embedded. This concept is explained more in this demo video from Vidsense.

Now that you hopefully have a better of idea of where your audience may be, you should be able to reach them more effectively. In my next post I’m going to bring up an interesting concept I found on why you shouldn’t be targeting your audience.