Audience or Community?

Image by David Fisher

Settling in and catching up after being away from home for a couple of weeks. It’s probably going to take me a few days to get back into the rhythm of life. Until then, thought I’d share a great post from social media guru Chris Brogan that he posted last week on his blog. Although he is writing from a business point of view, I believe there are implications that stretch across into the church space and our own personal space as well…

The difference between an audience and a community is which direction the chairs are pointing. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. When we say community and we mean our selling demographic, that’s not the same thing. When we say community and we mean audience to absorb our message, that’s not the same thing. It’s important to understand this.

It’s okay to want an audience. When we’re trying to build awareness, we want an audience. We create things to get people’s attention. For some, the creation is advertising. For others, it’s face to face events. For others, it’s content (like this blog post). If you’re clever, you create in a variety of formats.

This builds audience. Audiences are those folks who gather to hear what you have to say. But that’s not a community.

Read the full post, “Audience or Community?” on Chris’ blog.

Posted 06.10.2009

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