Our ongoing focus on audiences is a pile of rubbish!

Earlier this week I was reading some articles on different aspects of internal communications.  Something about them all disturbed me but I wasn't quite sure what or why.  The general sense of each of them was that those of us who work in the world of internal communications needs to do a better job of understanding our audiences, tailoring our messages and channels to those audiences in different ways and so on.  Nothing we haven't read before - and something I know I have written talked about and lectured on many times over the past 20 or 30 years.  I figured that the disturbance I felt stemmed from a need to move on from this conversation - simply put, maybe I was just getting tired of the same stuff being rehashed over and over and over.....

But then it hit me - all of this talk about the audiences we communicate with a pile of rubbish and if we really want to understand our role and provide a truly strategic return to the companies we work for and the people inside of them that we serve we had best understand that!

Our job internally is not to communicate with or to different audiences.  To do so is a complete waste of time as it shapes our views and our approach.

So if that is not our job then what is our job you ask?  An important question indeed, with a very simple answer:  We need to focus on the PARTICIPANTS in our business and communications.

Think about it for a bit... consider how dropping "audiences" from our mindset and replacing it with "participants" changes how you think about and approach your work.

Now that you are done thinking you can get on with making true progress.

Comments

[Jennifer Davis]

You've summed up the reason I prefer the term "stakeholders" as opposed to audience. For me, audience implies a one-way, non-consultative communication approach. Whereas stakeholders, describes those who have an interest in the process, product, or principle and therefore due diligence dictates that they should be consulted. Consider the similarity between stakeholder and shareholder. For shareholders, business has a legal responsibility to provide an accurate, transparent report of the business on an annual basis, ie. a legal acknowledgement that shareholders "hold an interest" in the business. Not to say that shareholders are consulted on the business strategy or operations, however, it is an acknowledgement that they do have freedom to disassociate with the business if they feel their interests are not be served. Whereas an audience, by definition, sits completely outside of the process as more of a spectator. Audience has no stake or share that must be considered. Hence there is no responsibility to provide them with accurate or timely information, or to even consider their interest, should one so choose.

Perhaps just an exercise in semantics, but my linguistics background gets the better of me sometimes....