I just returned from my industry’s largest convention (the American Academy of Audiology) where I gave a talk on cognition with Prof. Hafter from UC Berkeley. As always, the audience had a mix of backgrounds, several of whom I met after the talk.
I value these interactions that arise from responses to my presentations, as I do the ones that have arisen from responses to my blog. The vast majority of those who read my blog are not associated with my field of work, and my communications resulting from the blog have been with people whom I would have never met otherwise. Thinking about these two ways of meeting new people with common interests, I thought about the similarities that exist between giving presentations and blogging—the former I’ve done for many years and the latter just for a few months.
Ideation
For me, both blogging and giving presentations have multiple purposes. Both are forums for conveying thoughts and ideas to others, a way to communicate with several people at once on a topic of common interest. Both require that I spend time to understand the topic in a coherent way. I try to express my ideas as a compelling story and with a logical structure, requiring that I be able to give the big picture on ideas but also tie them to supportive details. Giving presentations and blogging causes me to refine my thoughts and understand the topic at hand in a more thorough way.
Dedicated Audience Members
At the conference where I just spoke, there were many competing talks on a variety of topics. Those who attended my presentation therefore made the choice to invest their time to the one-way communication: they read the program, they planned their schedule to attend, and they spent a significant amount of time listening to what I had to say. I see this as similar to people who subscribe to my blog or are repeat visitors. They actively seek to hear what I have to say in my blog posts because we share similar interests, and they dedicate a certain amount of time to reading the posts. But, while the majority of people who hear my presentations fall into this category, the majority of people who read my blog fall into the different category of…
Drive-by Visitors
By analyzing the statistics of daily visitors to my blog, I can see that most of my readers are people who found my blog from a keyword search. They most likely skim the post that they were directed to and then go back to what they were doing. My post may or may not have been what they were looking for (“Those weren’t photos of Lindsay Lohan!”), and many spent negligible effort absorbing the thoughts that I was conveying. The equivalent of this for presentations doesn’t really exist. If it did, this would be a large and slightly unreal conference where attendees jump in and out of meeting rooms based on posted titles on the door or from snippets of words they hear from the hallway, making quick judgments whether to stay and hear the whole presentation or move on to something else.
Audience Feedback
I think that both bloggers and presenters hope to receive feedback from their audience on what they say, and that usually happens when people come up and talk to you after the presentation or when people add comments to a blog post. Most blogs that I read, though—as well as my own blog—have received few comments from readers, with most posts having none at all. As with presentations, the vast majority of a blog’s audience are passive receivers of information who choose not to become active participants in the discussion. In general, only the most popular blogs receive comments on every post. This could be because those blogs are so interesting that they elicit a desire in the reader to respond while other blogs are not, but I suspect that it is simply numbers: if only 0.1% of blog readers write comments, then there will be an average of one comment for every 1000 viewers of a post. Most of us do not have that kind of traffic.
FYI, the talk I gave was very successful. About 250 people were in the audience, and someone actually yelled out a cheer at the end of it! I got to meet several interesting people afterwards, including a cognitive scientist from Brandeis University, the author of the blog HearingMojo that I link to on my Squidoo site, and audiologists whose office is close to where I work.
I was watching Tivo on my Sony TV tonight while browsing the TechCrunch and The Loose Wire blogs on my Dell D600 laptop when what I read almost made me gag on my deliciously chewy Snickers bar. Apparently, some bloggers are being paid to promote products in their posts! I chugged a hit of pure energy from my refreshing Red Bull and read on.