how to build your audience

Being a good daughter, I called my mother yesterday. She's having some health issues, so is at home re-discovering the horror that is daytime television. One of the programs that she has taken to watching is Trading Spaces. Yesterday, she complained about one of the decorators on the show: the decorator is rude and obnoxious, doesn’t listen to the homeowners, and creates conflict wherever she goes. ‘But Mom,’ I said hesitantly, ‘if you don’t like it, why are you watching it?’ ‘It’s interesting to see how mean she can be.’

There are many methods of building an audience. One method that has grown more popular recently is the method of creating conflict: be detestable, and they will come. Some come to tell you how wrong you are, some come to rally around you, and others simply watch the train wreck. But come they do, and if sheer size of your audience is all you’re interested in, you get exactly what you want.

Some people who do this are unabashed about it. John Dvorak has recently joined their ranks. I think I’m not alone in saying that I assumed that many of his articles have fallen into the category of trolling, but his strong (and rather amusing confirmation of it was a surprise. I prefer substance to style. Creating conflict isn’t about substance. It generates traffic, but it doesn’t generate anything useful. It’s just style, and it’s tacky style at that. All attention is not good attention.

Another method of building your audience is to have something to say, and to say it well. If you have something interesting to say, you will build up your audience. Conflict will occur naturally, but in the context of a natural debate instead of yet another boring and meaningless ad hominem attack.

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 15, 2006
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  June 15, 2006
  I won't go so far as to say that John Dvorak is the Ann Coulter of technology, but he's close.  More like a near-Bill O'Reilly.  Which still puts him firmly in the category of pundits that aren't worth listening to except for entertainment value.
  
  I'd love to see him - or maybe Robert X. Cringely - on the receiving end of a Jon-Stewart-on-Crossfire-style smackdown.  
• Anonymous
  June 15, 2006
  I won't go so far as to say that John Dvorak is the Ann Coulter of technology, but he's close.  More like a near-Bill O'Reilly.  Which still puts him firmly in the category of pundits that generally aren't worth listening to except for entertainment value.
  
  I'd love to see him - or maybe Robert X. Cringely - on the receiving end of a Jon-Stewart-on-Crossfire-style smackdown.  
• Anonymous
  June 15, 2006
  I see bill gates is gonna leave just when the world wakes up to the full horror that will be Vista.
  
  http://www.macnn.com/articles/06/06/15/gates.steps.away.from.ms/
  
  Maybe he'll set MacBU free to become an independent software vendor by then.
• Anonymous
  June 15, 2006
  Here here!  Dvorak has trolled Mac users for years -- I too was surprised at how candid he was.  I read somewhere that there was some debate as to the legitimacy of the video, though, since the audio-video synching wasn't too good.
• Anonymous
  June 15, 2006
  When we got the announcement today, I was in a meeting.  After it was over, several of us stayed in the conference room an extra few minutes to talk about the announcement.  'What do you think the response will be?' was the question everyone asked.  I said that I was certain that I'd have a trolling comment in my blog by the end of the day, and sure 'nuff, Asam didn't disappoint.  
• Anonymous
  June 16, 2006
  Now is the time for MacBU to be different, make a case to become independent to the rest of the comany and secure it's future.
  
  Parallels has gone final, every copy sold is one less copy of VPC that you'll sell in the future because of all the time wasting you've done since Apple announced it's transition to Intel chips at last years WWDC. I wonder how many developers Parallels had working on this product and yet it's still managed to make a fine product from scratch! I also don't see Parallels having any deal with MS to package legit copies of XP as a bundle, that's more revenue loss for MS and means most people using Parallels are not going to bother with any licensing their copies of  Windows.
  
  The rest of Microsoft is hurting the MacBU, you need to demand more independence and become a sister company with a seperate CEO.
  
  Asam@bday :)
  
• Anonymous
  June 16, 2006
  Asam -- I hate to break it to you, but you're immensely ignorant of the business side of being the largest all-Macintosh developer.  
• Anonymous
  June 16, 2006
  Oh, the LOLs and ROFLs Asam is good for.
  
  Seriously. (dries his tears of laughter)
  
  You just don't have any conception of how silly that statement is, Asam. Really.
• Anonymous
  June 16, 2006
  That's exactly the point Nadyne, you're the biggest all-Mactintosh developer yet still you have to play second fiddle to demands made by another platform vendor with monopolist stratergy and vision.
  
  It would have hurt Vista too much long term if MacBU had a shipping universal Office and VPC product, instead the MacBU will have to put up with lost revenue and a smaller market share of the Mac market.
  
  You still have two whole months before WWDC, don't make Steve Jobs pull out native virtualization in Leopard and Pages 3.0, or that really will signal the start of the end of MacBU....
  
  
• Anonymous
  June 16, 2006
  I'm probably going to regret asking this, but I just have to know ... why on earth do you think that MacBU shipping Virtual PC and Office:Mac would hurt Vista?  
• Anonymous
  June 16, 2006
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  June 16, 2006
  It's kinda like a drunk uncle.  You don't really want to provoke him, but sometimes he says something so far out there, that you just have to ask the question, even though that the response will be even worse than before.
• Anonymous
  June 17, 2006
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  June 17, 2006
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  June 17, 2006
  Was correcting a spelling mistake :P
  
  What ever future killer apps are developed, be they for Windows or Mac, they will work perfectly on an Intel Mac, but only some of them will work on a PC running Windows, the tables are turned in this desktop war.
  
  Sorry but MS will always be evil empire, and if you're scared and censored by  your  orangutan man then that's your problem....
  
  http://homepage.mac.com/asam/.Pictures/X-Files/compfight.gif
• Anonymous
  June 19, 2006
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  June 20, 2006
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  June 20, 2006
  The blogging system here assumes that comments do not include HTML.  Thus, if you use a tag, it converts the brackets to LT and GT.  The system will let me do some minor changes (for example, I can fix it if you use the italics tag by manually changing the LTs and GTs to the brackets), but I can't fix the HTML.  Whenever it sees a URL in a comment, it automatically converts it, even if I've manually edited the link in an attempt to make it look correct.
• Anonymous
  June 20, 2006
  Yeah, that's it Asam. Can't be because I've, oh, met Nadyne in person, and think she's a fun camper, and a good read too.
  
  Nope, it's alllll about you. Oy
• Anonymous
  June 20, 2006
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  June 20, 2006
  I haven't discovered 'all kinds of problems'.  Not being able to have standard links in comments is a fairly minor concern.
  
  I do appreciate how you were kind enough to apologise for falsely accusing me of sabotaging your comments, though.  Thanks for that.  No, really.  You shouldn't have.