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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Friday, September 10, 2004

Your Target Audience Isn’t Who You Think It Is

jr conlin: "There’s a group out there in the world that is (finally) of great interest to the business and marketing folks. They’re called 'Early Adopters' or 'Influencers' or any of a number of names that marketing drones and high priced consultants are willing to pull from shadier portions of their anatomy. I call 'em geeks. You know, nerds, computer literates, the folks that spend hours gazing at 70+ Hertz monitors and communicate best via keyboard. The theory being that these are the folks that 'influence' others. They’re the ones that generally try out new tech, improve it, and then become increasingly religious about it so that it finally drills through the denser matter of their surroundings and other folks start picking up on it. These are the folks that discovered the Internet, email, web, instant messaging (IRC to you old-timers) and id Software when all they had to offer was Castle Wolfenstien ... Thing is, influencers are SIGNIFICANTLY different than the normal audience. Much like college professors, the best they can ever hope for is that the folks they tend to talk to pick up a tiny fraction of what they offer. Usually stuff that takes the least amount of effort to pick up ... Influencers use weird crap. They use Macs and Linux, Mozilla, and other eminently hackable systems. They don’t generally run Windows and IE. Note that this is in stark contrast to the greater unwashed who do use that stuff."

[ Posted at 9:41 AM | Permalink ]