Knowing Yourself Is To Know Your Audience

I enjoy reading certain books, studying various topics, choosing a newspaper over the New York Times via the iPad here and there, and overall fascinated by anything interesting and/or unique.  

  "Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life" - Confucius

 With that opening statement and quote I find it to be the best vector in defining/knowing who my audience is and determining their whereabouts.  

I find that knowing your interests is the first step into knowing who it is that you want to put yourself in front of, your audience.  Consider the the various avenues that you venture into on a daily basis in order to fulfill a desire or interest; I know for myself that there are numerous blogs as well as podcast that I listen to on an almost daily basis.  What I just described to you, the reader, are the venues of where I frequent, but now I have to be particular as to what this or that venue is about. To be specific I would have to say that I find my eyes and ears frequenting the topics of modern male lifestyle and technology.  

As such my engagement with the internet include, but not limited to JoshSpear.com, Gizmodo.com, Uncrate.com, Crackberry.com, TechFoolery.net, and Medium.  The reason why I chose to mention the previous sites is because they offer not only a different topic of interest, but they offer a unique way of interacting with the audience.  Some are more subtle than others, but I'm not an always looking to dive head first into everything that catches my attention.  I look to not only entertain myself, but I look to how I can maybe take away something from my expereince from each one of my venues that I partake in. The following are just descriptive of the previous mentioned influences and to help gather an understanding as to who my audience is:

• JoshSpear.com offers its audience a simple, yet still interactive way to engage, have it be in the form of a social network button, i.e. twitter, Like, or @Pinterest.  The site offers a unique look at art, politics, food and various below the radar trends to cover the lifestyle approach.
• Uncrate is quite similar to JoshSpear, but the idea behind it is really just a collection of stuff that appears to target men.  Not just any group of men, but a sophisticated man; its not put out there that their ideal audience consist of young male, educated, career situation, and have money to burn on their collection of man-cave recommendation items ranging from the latest Maserati to a coffee table book titled The Whiskey Bible.
•  TechFoolery is awesome due to the fact that they are strictly a podcast site.  Their media is portable and capable of being turned on and off with the push of a button.  Its more engaging than any of the others due to the fact that their audience interacts, not in the "live" sense, but via voice-mail and emails that are put on for display with every episode; questions are answered and general comments on the technology front are made by the audience.  You're capable of listening and that draws in a crowd thats looking for "intimacy", if you will.  TechFoolery does a great job and delivery honest and sincere podcast episode that are real, felt, and contain an extreme human element that can leverage your stance in the market.

 My love for marketing and the world of branding, delivering a message in a creative fashion truly interests me and I find myself shaping more of my social media landscape to reflect that not only to contribute to my self branding, but ultimately to garner an honest, like-minded audience.  So far I've found my my "words", if you will, being followed by individuals who happen to share the same interest as myself via Twitter which in turn allows me to continue.  

 

I know what my audience is interested in, what they speak about, and how they generally react because I am part of someone's audience.  Who is more in-tune with such a collective than those who actually reside within it? I give feedback in the form of a comment, I may "like" something, re-tweet a URL link to an article, and +1 a post that someone may have recently published.  I want to engage and interact as an audience member and in the same turn I would like to  to delivery that same call to action to my own.