TheWayoftheWeb

Content and Digital Marketing Specialists

audience

I’m not a number – or a user – or a visitor

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For a while I’ve read various people debating whether ‘traditional’ terms for people online are still effective. Do we really just want ‘visitors’ – as if they turn up, pay their museum entry fee, look at the exhibits and then leave? Or is it fair to assume they’re users – as if we’re peddling heroin? Especially as a ‘user’ is linked to user accounts and usernames. And only those who actually make a transaction can really be termed ‘consumers’. (They’re not ‘Unique Users’ in analytics/metrics, they’re Unique IPs…but I think that’s not something that can be changed now!)

I think it’s a shame that ad agencies and computing have sewn up ‘client’. It’s more informal than consumer, and yet infers a bit more choice and power on the part of the individual than the other terms. And like an agency, any website publisher has to constantly evolve and adapt to meet the needs of their clients…

I did try to work out a reason for renaming the audience Flibbertigibbets, but even my tenuous grip on reality struggled with that one.

So, like an age old riddle, what’s someone who can come and read a website and leave, come and interact, or come and take part in spending money?

So far, my best effort is ‘Participant‘. If we accept that participation starts at going to a url and observing the content, and goes up to spending every second of the day interacting, posting, uploading and purchasing. And if you look at the Wikipedia entries for participation, it starts to make sense:

‘Participation, in addition to its dictionary definition, has specific meanings in certain areas.

So it can incorporate decision making, benefit, multiplicity, sharing, and being involved in a virtual reality? If you really want, you can split it into Reading Participants, Posting Participants, Uploading Participants, Buying Participants. You can even have a past participle if it makes you happy!

I’d be interested to know if other people think it’s a change worth making, and whether it’s worth participating or not?

There’s still room for blogs to grow….

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I’ve just spotted some research by Emarketer on US blog readership which shows that, despite the justified excitement and uptake of Twitter et al, blog readership is set to grow from 94.1 million readers in 2007 to 145.3 million in 2012. That figure is people reading a blog at least once a month.

Whether or not that’s totally correct, what’s interesting for me is that the 94.1million in 2007 is 50% of U.S. internet users. So 50% of internet users in 2007 didn’t read a blog once a month in that year. Is this because they didn’t know about them? Didn’t care about them? Didn’t trust them? Need them?
Definitely shows there’s still room for growth in the blog world, with blog advertising predicted to more than double by 2012.
Get more details, and the option to obtain the full report from eMarketer.

The inverse proportionality of Facebook applications to friendship…

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As with any social network a pattern has emerged for me on Facebook.

The people closest to me, send the least application requests – and when they do, they’re pretty relevant and either useful or entertaining.

The people right on the very fringes on my network are the ones most likely to have sent me 20 pointless applications requests one after the other, meaning I’m going to delete all without even paying much attention.

At a time when I’m finding ways for a major company to choose quality over quantity for relevant communication, it’s ironic individuals, and in some cases, the users of that company’s products, are so prone to spamming without seemingly realising.

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