One year ago today I wrote a post called how to deserve an audience.  The point of the post was to talk about what you as a blogger, social media user, or whatever, should do to deserve an audience.  The conclusion was that the best you can do is to provide valuable content.  There were a lot of points discussed in the post, so as an experiment I’m going to see if I still stand behind everything that I wrote about exactly one year ago.

One thing that bugs me about Twitter is that the term followers, the people who elect to see your microblogging updates, sounds like a cross between a group of zombies and a collection of cultish fanatics that you might want to keep at arm’s length. We use other terms like friend, contact, colleague, and buddy to refer to these different kinds of people who pay attention to what you do and say.

Still works for me.

A lot of people (including both you and me?) like the idea of building up these follower numbers for several reasons. It can come across as being selfish, ego driven, or manipulative. Or, with a more positive spin, maybe you’re just looking for a group of great people to share stuff with. Maybe you feel you’ve got important things to say THAT THE WORLD NEEDS TO KNOW.

Many social media users (including bloggers) are looking to build up an audience, composed of these same friends, followers, contacts, etc. You will almost inevitably build up an audience of some size by creating decent content (if not better) AND by networking or socializing. The better you are at one or another of these skills, the bigger your audience will become.

Today, I have a different point of view on audience building.  Many, many people are trying to build their own audiences/followings.  At the same time, they are joining other people’s audiences in growing numbers.  The net result is that without:

• serious filtering of social media inputs
• heavy marketing
• or providing indispensible content,

noise is overwhelming signal at an ever increasing rate.  There’s too much out there for more most people to try to follow.  I see fewer people clicking on links on blogs or in Twitter streams, etc.  I don’t think my overall quality of content is changing much.  In fact, I’m probably passing on few links that I did a year ago.  I honestly think that there’s just too much stuff out there and that most people just can’t be bothered to track it all.  And why should they?

Indeed, why should they?

Audience sizes in social media are too tricky to guage accurately.  There are too many fake accounts around to spam or else market stuff for them to count as real people.  RSS subscription numbers are inflated because the same RSS feed gets published multiple times.  Tweets are automated to the point that we tend to ignore them when we know the source.

You can’t assume that progress is happening just because everyone’s audience seems to be getting bigger.

I’m not out there chasing followers by the pound anymore, although I did at one time.  I’m more interested now in building high quality relationships with interaction, not just filling seats.

What is the real purpose of an audience, though? What makes us worthy of attracting the attention of dozens, hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people?

The short answer is value, but in a way that’s a cop out. Value is something that’s important to someone. If I deliver value by writing a blog post, I’m delivering something to you that is important to you. That value can come in many forms:

• monetary wealth
• productivity
• useful knowledge

For the purposes of this post, let’s put value into three categories, based on the recipient of this value:

Knowledge: I can deliver raw knowledge to you in the form of facts and undocumented links or I can put additional intelligence behind this data to make it more meaningful for you

Entertainment/experience: I can try to make you laugh, cry, angry, horrified, or just plain try to make you think about something that you’ve never thought before. All the blog’s a stage with a shifting cast of performers and portrayers, after all.

Acts: I can go beyond the above by giving you something tangible in the form of a tangible product or a service which I put effort and other resources into to achieve some result.

If a content creator isn’t delivering any of the above, then they really have no right to an audience.

I still believe this is true.

How do you deserve an audience?

You serve the audience. You provide service. You do things for that audience.

You can receive things in return for this service and that’s perfectly fine. You can receive attention, goodwill, gifts in kind, even financial renumeration. You’ve got to provide service (the method for delivering value) to the people who sign up to pay attention to you.

You don’t serve me; I serve you. I try to have fun and to get something from the experience, but my focus has to be on you. I make the best decisions that I can about how to serve you at any given point in time wherever I’m a social media user. I won’t always be right. Occasionally I will indulge in one of my favorite interests, but I will always try to make that valuable to you in some fashion, either through:

• increasing your knowledge about a topic
• creating a rewarding experience from you
• performing some act of service

If I can stay on this track, then I think things will be fine here.

I’m of two minds about this now.  Growth can be rewarding and it always feels good to help people.  However, you can’t appeal to everyone and you can’t please everyone.  I’m more interested in creating content that I can feel good about and that will stand the test of time.  At the same time, I find that my interests vary enough over time that if I try to get too specific on this blog, it will no longer be enjoyable for me.  So sometimes I’ll write about things that are interesting to you and other times I won’t.  Sorry, that’s the way I need it to be.

I’m going to continue to work on growing the audience size here and in other locations. Despite whatever personal satisfaction that I get out of it, I’m really just trying to make my corner of the world a little better.

If you are a content creator and you’re struggling to get an audience, or make it bigger, are you sure that you’re providing value? Think about it.

By the way, I think this is a key to success at almost anything you do.

I’m embarrassed by these last three paragraphs.  I’m not actively growing the audience (not much, anyway) although I try to help as opposed to harming.  The “providing value” comment is so Blogging 101 or Business 101 that anyone with an ounce of common sense should realise it.  I think Homer Simpson would get it.

As for the last point, it’s so, so, so… Seth Godin that I should never have written it.  He should have sued me for copyright infringement, seriously.  He can get away with writing things like that:  it’s closer to his style and he’s got the experience to be able to use that phrase in a more intelligent way.  Bleah.

In conclusion:

I can still support the main point, but some of the details don’t work so well for me a year later.

What can I say, other than that deconstructing a blog post is much less messy than dissecting a foetal pig to see how that organism works.  Don’t need to wash my hands, either.

Onward.