(Volume 1 of a Series: Audience)

Most college kids think of English Comp 101 as a course to get through as quickly as possible so you can finally get to the good stuff. I'm a writer and even I didn't want to take Comp 101 (so I didn't--I tested out of it instead). But then I spent several years *teaching* freshman composition courses and began to realize that for all the esoteric uselessness of writing an essay about imagery in Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome, a lot of what is taught in freshman comp is actually useful in the real world.

Take "audience" for example. Remember that? I don't know how your English teacher taught "audience," but in my formal education it was mostly used to mean that I had to write what and how the teacher wanted me to, if I wanted a good grade. Which is, in fact, precisely what "audience" is about:

1. Figuring out what you want (a good grade, more sales, respect, connection),

2. Figuring out who can give it to you (the teacher, the prospect, your sister, your wife), and

3. Figuring out what #2 wants in order to give you #1. 

And honestly, you already know a lot about audience. When you tell an unhappy customer how you are going to resolve their issue, you tell a pretty different story than when you are later complaining about it to your spouse. Why? Because in the first instance, you want to keep the customer and solve the problem; you have to please the customer to do so; you have to talk to your customer in a certain way in order to save the relationship. In the second instance, you want sympathy and relaxation, you have to please yourself and your spouse to get that, and you know just how to talk to please that particular two-person audience.

Of course, it gets much more complicated when the audience gets bigger, and modern media makes the concept of audience both more interesting and more dangerous than ever before. Take the Brixx Pizza waitress, for instance, who was recently fired for something she would never have said directly to her boss. In the old days, knowing she wanted to keep her job and that she needed to please her boss to do so, she would have told her boss about the obnoxious customers in a respectful and pleasant manner, knowing that's what he wanted to hear. Then she would have gone for beer with her friends and cut up in a noisy bar about how obnoxious those jerks were.

But with the advent of Facebook, Twitter, and even old-fashioned email, suddenly the audience becomes much more complicated. When you write something on-line, you have to think about dozens, maybe hundreds of potential audiences. You may think you're talking to your friends, but if they re-tweet or share your post or email, you may end up talking to your customer, your competitor, your client, your best friend, even your mom (ouch!). Ashley Johnson lost her job because the audience for rantings on Facebook was more complicated than she realized.

But don't let the complication fool you. Whether you're writing marketing material, a poem for your anniversary, or a case study for your company website, the equation is still the same as it always has been:

1. What do you want?

2. Who can give it to you?

3. What does #2 want in order to give you #1?

Figure out how to serve that up, and you've got a winning communication. But don't stop there--the equation has one more set of steps:

1. Who else might read or hear this communication?

2. Will the communication change how #1 acts or feels toward me or my company in a negative way?

3. If the answer to #2 is "no," then you still have a winning communication--go for it.

4. If the answer to #2 is "yes," then you need to tweak.

Sound complicated? Remember--you already know this stuff. It's what happens when you're sitting with your best friend over lunch complaining about a demanding customer and that customer joins your table. You tweak. Do it enough times, and you've got a message that's ready to publish. Go for it.