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Part IV ✦ Designing a CMS
I believe that the key to staying on the right side of the line between service and exploitation
is to place a value proposition at the base of your audience analysis. For each audience that
you expect to serve, you must decide what its members want from you and what you want
from them. Then make sure that the equation is balanced. If you’re willing to give as much
value as you expect from your audiences in return, the relationship involves no exploitation.
Your value propositions can serve as the guiding principles behind every other part of how
you work with this audience.
What Is an Audience?
Audiences are simply groups of people that you choose to serve in some way. The first natural
question to answer is, “How do I know someone who’s in my audience from someone who’s
not?” The answer is to find the set of traits that distinguishes this audience from others and
then figure out whether the person in question demonstrates these traits.
A trait is a specific characteristic of a person that you can discover, store, and combine with
other characteristics to know this person. For you, a person, to know another person is one
thing. For a computer to know a person is quite another. For you or me, a person isn’t some
set of data points; she’s a complex being whom we intuitively “get.” You say that you know
someone if you can recognize her and can accurately predict what she may do, say, and want.
No computer that I know of can “get” a person in this sense, so you better settle for something
less. You can settle for coming up with a few isolated traits and using them to try to predict
wants. And, amazingly, that approach basically works. In most of the circumstances that you
face in a CMS, you can limit the number of potential wants that you serve. You can also draw
wide enough distinctions between your users that determining who’s who and what they
probably want isn’t too hard. As you learn to discern more traits more accurately, you can
continue to get better at predicting more wants for more people.
Although many disciplines talk around or about audiences, I’ve never seen the concept nailed
down enough to become specifically useful in the context of a CMS. So in the following list, I
try to draw the elements of audiences out of the three different disciplines in which I’ve seen
the concept operate. My goal is to piece together a use of the term audience that you can
apply very specifically to a CMS:
✦ From the discipline of writing and oral communication: I draw the idea of audience
analysis, which tries to define what you need to know to “speak” to a particular group
of people.
✦ From marketing: I draw the notions of segmentation and profiling, which tries to tie
groups of people together by using data about them.
✦ From computer science: I draw the notion of the user as a kind of person that an
application must serve psychologically and ergonomically.
From these three bases, I construct the set of data that you can gather to understand, serve,
and be served by your audiences.
Audiences and communicators
Writers, public speakers, and other communication professionals have used the concept of
an audience analysis for a long time. A lot is written on this subject, appearing in textbooks
and the popular press. Most of the work that I’ve seen boils down to the following seemingly
simple points:
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