Participatory Consumers On and Offline: We should demand more

by Rosemari 


In my former life, I often organized large-scale events for local government. During the planning, my boss would always suggest that one of the top administrators give the opening remarks at these events. I think she wanted them to see the great work we were doing and make sure that they felt important.  She wanted to feed into their notions of own power and prestige.

However, the old school approach of power and prestige is changing. And I would argue that this change has, for the most part, started online. Online, consumers are interactive, participatory, and often the key determiners of what power and prestige looks like.  Online, it’s not enough that you have a seemingly important job if you don’t have anything to say or can’t say it in an intriguing and engaging way.

Digital politics guru Alan Rosenblatt (my professor at American University’s School of Communication), discusses how this new level of participation raises the bar and creates potential among consumers in his four part series titled Dimensions of a Digitally Networked Campaign for Politics Magazine.  He writes,

“Because activists and voters can talk to each other, produce and share their own media content, create local and national counter-campaigns (even from within a campaign’s own website or social network page), they can take the campaign in directions all of their own making.”

And as online consumers are able to transform campaigns for advocacy, I think that consumers should be able to call for the same level of engagement, critique, and quality offfline.  The point that my former supervisor missed is missed by many organizations both on- and offline.

Offline, your title shouldn’t matter if you are too afraid to be authentic in your opening remarks. Or if your public speaking are worse than an unironic Ben Stein calling roll in Ferris Bueller. Online, Colin Delany provides sobering (but much needed) advice about how to avoid getting caught up the old methods of what’s important to the consumer in his nitty gritty primer Politics 101:

“If your site structure looks like your organization tree, stop to think about someone coming to your site who’s never heard of you before. Not only do they not care about the welcome message from your president (unless he or she is famous, hot, unusually charismatic or is a candidate for office), the information they’re trying to find is probably buried somewhere deep in your press section, if it exists at all.”

Furthermore, we need to understand the responsibility we have when we create both on and offline platforms. When we provide these soapboxes it’s important that we keep the target audience on the forefront of every programming decision we make. Understanding how empowered and participatory consumers are taking their online power offline can guide us through those decisions.

While it’s easy to want to tout our programs to the brass, like my former supervisor wanted, it’s not worth it or useful. Consumers demand more. And so should we.