Surround sound communication

From Frank Shaw at Microsoft:

So what are the steps that lead to surround sound communications?

Audience: It starts here. We have to be relentless in making sure we are identifying the audience(s) we are more interested in reaching, and in driving to depth understanding of that audience. The better we do here, the easier our work will be later. Last week, we had multiple audiences – government officials, academics, gamers, developers, the list is long.

Avenue to reach the audience. This is where we lean on our understanding of the audience and look at the different ways we might reach them. This includes but is not limited to things like where they get their news, which communities they participate in, how they engage with social networks, who they trust as sources of information. This is another way we study the evolution of influence, the way demographic and geographic audiences are the same, or are different.

Assets that matches the avenue. Long gone are the days when we could create one or two assets for a news moment. Now we need to make sure we have the right artifacts that suit all these newly created avenues. Aiming for a financial audience? A press release might be best. The needs of a terrestrial or cable or online broadcast might be the same, but even though it might look like that would work for short form video, it won’t. Academics and scientists look for depth and peer review. Influencers need both assets and access to them in a timely fashion.

Amplification. Once we are live, we find ways to amplify the news/content. This is not restricted to paid amplification, though that can be effective as well. What we are looking for here is to find natural ways to amplify – sometimes this is as simple as grabbing quotes or screenshots from an interview/podcast and bringing them onto social. It could be reaching out to scientific influencers via our scientists and sharing some assets. It could be engaging in Hacker News, or encouraging MVPs to share. One of my learnings over the last set of months is how critical this is – given the fragmentation of the information ecosystem, our ability to find ways to effectively move assets/conversations from one channel to another is critical. A good example is the way the screen shots from Satya’s CNBC interview at Davos were grabbed and shared across all social channels and then picked up by other news orgs; in that interview we weren’t just talking to the audience for CNBC we were talking to everyone on LI, or X, etc.