Conferences are often emotional sine waves, oscillating between this is so great I can’t believe I’m getting paid to come here and why am I here? This is garbage. I should skip the afternoon sessions and go across the street to see “Les Miserables”. Digital Book World 2013, held last week in New York, was different. The weather was predictably lousy, there were plenty of panels that didn’t pan out, and the last few sessions had that usual airport-after-a-blizzard feel of coughing and sniffling people sitting in the aisles with their rolling suitcases. And don’t think the news was great for publishers–the sense of slow doom was still there, that something was going on amongst the mergers and self-pub explosions, all the while with Amazon lurking off in the far distance like Sauron’s fiery eye.
But I was thrilled. It’s rare when my predictions come true, but panelist after panelist confirmed that the age of the shiny new end-all cross-platform publishing technology (I’m looking at you, XML and EPUB 3, but more out of pity than anger) is over and we’re returning to focusing on the audience. You know, those people who buy our product, or perhaps read it for free but then buy something else, or perhaps just visit our website or institution and get some inspiration. Yeah, those people.
Audience was the mantra of the conference, often disguised by the term discoverability. I prefer audience because it humanizes them, our customers, makes them more than just content consumption machines. Audiences are restless, and despite their attraction/addiction to the Downton Abbey of the month, their willingness to go all in is flagging. They don’t care about brand any more, not in the way they did about Coke or GM; five truncated seasons of Mad Men isn’t the same thing as three generations of a family buying only one make of car.
Working at the Metropolitan Museum, that can be scary as shit for anyone who needs a steady audience for the sake of job security. But for those of us who’d been screaming about content taking a backseat to containers, never mind technologies we could barely keep up with and which our bosses were growing increasingly tired of purchasing, it’s the best possible news. Publishers may be suspicious of those of us who call ourselves content experts, knowing that all we really have is the willingness to try out new things, but we have a shot now to come up with content where quality matters, authority is critical as long as it’s not dictatorial, and connectivity with the larger world of knowledge is as important as air.
Think that’s blowing smoke? News flash: that’s why Obama won, straight from Teddy Goff, the digital director of the campaign that sent Karl Rove to the loony bin. Goff gave one of the keynotes on Wednesday morning and I was all set to eye-rollingly dismiss him as a political hack (I do hail from D.C.). Yet he was not only engaging but interesting. He described a social media operation that wasn’t only nimble, it was Agile (cap “A” mine), brainstorming idea after idea, trying them out, quickly ascertaining their traction, discarding the ones that didn’t work, keeping a quick expiration date even on the ones that worked, and then moving on, all the while keeping the overall mission in mind: connecting with voters. They went after the sources of influence with voters, the opinion drivers, the things that resonate and get people to go out to the polls on voting day. For anyone who read postmortems of the Romney campaign (“we had an app!”), you can almost feel sorry for the poor saps. They were fighting technologists with lawn signs.
If it sounds like there wasn’t much there for museum publishers per se, there wasn’t. You have to watch the corona, read the penumbra, and other SAT words. Torrents of facts about traditional- versus self-publishing led me to believe that everyone out there in the content creation chain needs passion and a sense of mission. That’s something us museum folks have in spades, but what we may lack is what self-published authors need from the get-go, and traditionally-published authors are only realizing they need: an understanding of the business of publishing, whether print or digital. Many of us have been lucky to have been shielded from those realities, whether in subsidized print divisions or experimental media labs. Not any more. No one creating content can afford to be uninformed any longer.
And what we have to know the best is our audience. The interesting thing about “discovery” is that it’s more about interest than categories. Potential buyers want links, recommendations from trusted sources, suggestions like tiny poking fingers, hey, you might like … . Recommendations have to be fast and easy. We have to think like an audience. For an art museum like mine, who are the power suggesters, the trusted sources, the behavior guiders?
We need to try everything, but most of all, we need to be good at something which reaches our audience, something that gets us passionate about sharing. At the packed panel called Closing the Discovery Gap, Angela Tribelli of HarperCollins said that publishers were crying out to their IT departments for good barometers of audience engagement, for better yardsticks to see what works.
The problem might be that no one thing works, that it might be the Amazon “you might like” combined with the emailed book review from the Times combined with what their friend at work is reading, that’s what gets them to buy. The Sock Puppet scandal, followed by Amazon’s over-reaction, may have been the death knell of good public review data, so audience engagement will need other methods and channels. It’s the marketing equivalent of what museums call “visitor experience”–call it consumer experience, as Tribelli said.
I think of something the Met did back in 2009. We encouraged the public, our audience, to take pictures of the art and send it back to us. We chose entries for our It’s Time We Met campaign, which has been a big hit, not just in terms of audience notice, but in terms of improving the Met’s image as a place that comes up with great ideas. It’s a content feedback loop, and a new frontier, however modest, for the Met’s commitment of active audience engagement.
I think those kind of ideas are going to be what leads content further into the new century. There’ll be a lot of overlap among writers, reviewers, bloggers, tweeters, all making up a pool of influence that will ebb and flow over audiences. We can help them by being better at audience relations. Curators don’t have to be shameless audience panderers, but they better find some people who are, because I think we’re psyching ourselves out about the decline of interest in art. Maybe having to engage with public is scaring curators and art publishers–it’s certainly scaring trade publishers. The question is, how do we turn this into a conversation?
As always, it starts with quality content, content that an audience wants. That’s never really changed, but now authors need to be more a part of it. Any website that can make marketing for dummies work can make metadata for dummies something fun, will be worth its weight in trillion-dollar coins for aspiring content creators.
I guess these things go in cycles. In three years, we’ll be hearing about devices again. For now, think about audiences. And breathe.