Amy Vernon "Own Your Audience, Don't Give It Away" | INBOUND

Which is good because during our rehearsal call, my dog ran away and I had to cut her off. Yeah. So, hi. I guess I should say, this is what I'm talking about today. Own your audience. Don't give it away. Because I've watched my beloved media industry basically throw their audience away over the last 10, 15, basically my entire career. So just really quickly, 20 years in newspapers. I was a member of the Miami Herald staff that won the Pulitzer for public service in 92. So, yes, I'm old. I played around on this website called Digg, which was once an important thing. That and 50 cents won't get me a cup of coffee. So it doesn't really matter. Some people said I'm influential on Twitter on intact. I don't really know what that means. And I am a mother, wife and Siberian husky owner. That is Lumi. She is more popular online than me. I have lifelong friends who follow me on Instagram for her. So I wanted to start with just a little bit of history, because the fact of the matter is, is that we've been building audiences for thousands of years. It didn't just start with newspapers or even the Internet. This is BC59, the Acta Diurna in ancient Rome, where they would car the news of the day into stone or metal and hang it outside the government offices. And everybody would come there to find out what had happened. So these guys in togas sitting around had their audience just like, come right to them. If people wanted to know what was going on, they needed to come to right here to the offices. The invention of the printing press, you know, Gutenberg gets a lot of credit for this, and surely he deserves a lot of. It was a way to democratize the Bible in a sense, because before that, the only Bibles were handwritten. They had to handwrite all of these or just. It took forever. Pretty much only super, super, super rich people and the churches actually had Bibles. There wasn't like you wouldn't go to the inn and there'd be a little Bible in your bedside stand. The thing is, the church refused to allow any translations out of the original Latin. And this guy named Luther, that was one of the things he really didn't like. So he took his 99th theses and nailed that to the door of the church and then proceeded to translate the Bible into German. And we know what happened next. So all of a sudden it's in all these languages all over the world. Fast forward a little bit, because we could just spend the entire hour here just talking about history. And that's not what you came for. But I just sort of wanted to point out how this idea of building audience is not a new thing. We've been doing it forever. When newspapers first started, this was a very common looking front page of a newspaper. They were very conversational. Lots of little tidbits about the community and the world at large. You can see there's like all sorts of different things here. This is the El Paso Herald from 1960. Just side note, this was my favorite story on that front page. This guy had several teeth extracted so that he could take the gold fillings so he could buy more whiskey. So yeah, the thing is, as magazines and TV news and then cable news ate into newspapers dominance, and I want to pause for a second and say I'm talking about this from a media viewpoint because that's my experience. But the fact of the matter is, this is true of anyone who's any publisher of any kind. And haven't we been told for the last six years, everybody's a publisher now. You're a publisher, you're a publisher, you're all publishers. So this all applies to all of you. I'm just coming at it through the lens of the news media because for better or worse, that's where I've spent my life. They could have doubled down and become even more important to their communities, but instead they chose to become more objective and objective, whatever that means. And a lot of different people have a lot of different ideas what that means and to be more distant from their communities. And they didn't. They consolidated reporters, they consolidated companies. They became much more regional and much less vital to the everyday life of the people they were supposed to be serving. Sure, the community could still actually be part of the newspaper, writing letters to the editor. But the problem with that is you had to be extremely motivated to actually write a letter and mail it to the newspaper. And then even then, you might not see your letter in the newspaper until long after the article you were writing about was published. And it lost a lot of its oomph. So then we got the World Wide Web and we put comments on articles and we built forums for our readers to talk to us. And what's great, this is Washington Post from 1996. That coffee in the upper left actually was animated. It was very geocities ish. Okay, there's a few people here who actually know geocities. Yeah, I built my geocities site in Athens because that was like the center of knowledge. I was very proud of myself. The problem is News people didn't actually want to know what their audience thought. The first time I saw this, I chose to be polite and choose the version that had hell instead of fucking. But the fact of the matter is, the first time I saw this was actually my boss gave it to me and he was like, don't you just sometimes feel like this? And it's like, you know what? Yeah, of course we all sometimes feel like this. But when your job is to be connecting with readers and finding out what's going on and serving them and telling them what is important in their life, having this attitude on a daily basis really is not really a good thing. So in these forums you had all these people commenting, and I know this is my all time favorite XKCD comic, hands down. And the thing is, so you would have these loudmouths come into the forums and people who were actually engaged and motivated and thoughtful really didn't want to comment in there because if they did, they would be attacked or worse. And. And newspapers didn't want to. And not just newspapers, all news organizations. And this applies to digital native publications too. They didn't want to moderate these comments because that takes time and energy and thoughtfulness and what is okay to say and what is not okay to say. And there's a subjectivity in that. You know, it's hard to be objective. What is objectionable to one person is not objectionable to another person. So they just like, they just walked away and let everybody say whatever they wanted. So then people started having conversations on places like Facebook and Twitter. And the thing is, they were having very civil conversations, which is kind of funny when you consider the state of Facebook and Twitter today. But we're talking like five years ago when the platforms were young and people were not as horrible. I don't know, I could do an entire talk just about that, but I would probably end up screaming and crying at the same time. So the newspaper's all like, this is every single newspaper, every single news organization, every single magazine in the entire country right now. This is. Their circulation's going down, their advertising revenues are going down, and they're running around and what do they do? They just fire more reporters. Because that makes sense. And the thing is, they've done it to themselves. They didn't listen to their audiences and so they drove them away. And then they had these horrible sites with pop up ads and autoplay sound and it was like a bad mashup of MySpace and GeoCities, which nobody wants either of those. And so when people come to the sites, they. They come, and then they're like, okay, I'm out of here. They come, they read an article, and this is because we have pushed them away. We have told them we don't care. Yeah, go. We'll publish all our stuff on Facebook, on Twitter. And this isn't peculiar just to news organizations. Digg decided one day that their community had too much power on the site, and they decided to take away the ability of users on the site to. To talk to each other on the site other than through comments. So they said, go to Twitter and Facebook. So we did. And a lot of people said, ooh, I like this a lot more than Digg. I'm reaching many more people. I'm talking, having conversations with a lot more people. And so Digg basically declined, died, and was sold for parts. Not all organizations. BuzzFeed is actually amazing at this. From the very start, they included engagement and comments on articles. And look, it's a little easier to do that when you traffic in cute pictures of cats and dogs, like I will admit. But at the same time, they have built their audience on their site. They have built their audience on Facebook, on Twitter, on everywhere, and they're able to monetize that everywhere too. They're able to actually use that audience that they have built and brought to them and make money off them on every single one of these platforms. So then everybody else basically, other than buzzfeed freaks out every time Facebook changes its algorithm, and that's because nobody knows where they are. It's like you ask someone, oh, where'd you see that article? And they're like, oh, Facebook. Not the Washington Post or El Paso Herald, which doesn't exist anymore. And that's because, you know, we are Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction. We have just been like, get out. So they come to Facebook sometimes. They don't even have to come to your site. They just, like, look at an instant article and they read the entire thing on the site. There are some organizations now trying to bring some civility back into comments, which is very nice. Corporate project, civil commas. It's really nice. It's been heartening as a news person to see some news organizations actually say, wow, we need to really do this, because if you can actually make that civil, people will actually want to spend time on your site. This is the thing. This is building community. It is so vital. It is so important. We need to find our communities and to build them and to just thank them for being a part of our lives. I know vine is on here. I'm sorry. I just didn't have time to change it out. We have all these platforms. We need to use these platforms, not let these platforms use us. And we need to build our own communities. Bring them in house and tell them, show them, bring them home and show them that how important we are to them and they are to us. Because if they don't get that, that's it. And instead of just saying, see you on Facebook, thank you.