• by Ross Fadner , June 17, 2008

Know thy audience; those were the words of wisdom doled out by Ammo Marketing's Gary Stein, moderator of the “Building Community into Content” panel at the OMMA Publish conference in New York.

Two publishers who definitely know their audience are CBS Sports.com's Jason Kint and MTV's Alexis Rodriguez. “We know sports is mostly about debate”â€"passionate debate, Kint said, which means there are myriad ways to spin any comment into a wider discussion.

MTV's Rodriguez said that building virtual worlds around brands like “The Hills” and “Laguna Beach” was a no-brainer for MTV's audience. “They all want to be celebrities,” she said. “They all want to be famous.” For this aspirational crowd, status is important, she said, so any platform (like a virtual world) that lets its audience build their status and revel in it, is a natural extension for MTV.