Make your Audience a Community in Social Media

I found something interesting on Chris Brogan's blog. Chris Brogan has been blogging for years, written books and is the president of a new media marketing agency. He is a rock star of social media. I was checking his "best-of blog posts", and found one called "What to do with influencers" which was good for my research. It is about how companies now are trying to get to know how to build relationships with communities through bloggers. He writes about how companies are trying to build relations with bloggers who have big audiences, like "publishers sought to build relationships with magazine readers and TV viewers". This is a problem because the bloggers do not have the same relationship with their readers as the magazines. Brogan means that bloggers have communities around them that they have built up during a long time, and not audiences that they can influence to sell just anything to:  "..audiences are not the same thing as communities".



After having read other blog posts about influencers I have learned that bloggers are addressing their readers differently. Some talk about their community and others about their audience. The difference between community and audience is quite obviously a question of engagement, both from readers and bloggers.

In the performing arts we don't usually talk about our audience as our community. Some theaters certainly treat their audiences like a community and get very positive results from it; theaters and companies that have an ongoing dialogue with the audience and focus group discussions when working with new productions etc. 

So, when approaching social media and creating a social media strategy in the Performing Arts, we will definitely get better results in treating the audience as a community. Theaters that have a strong relation to their audience (and have been creating a "community" around their brand) will be able to adopt a working social media strategy faster.