One of the loudest messages shouted from the rooftops in Chicago at Successful and Outstanding Bloggers Conference (SOBCon) was: It’s not about you.

This came through on many levels. Let’s examine a few.

Your blog is not about you.

Your blog is not about you. Sure, it starts out about being about what you want. About what messages you want to send. About how you want to frame and publish content. About who you want to reach and what you want to get out of your blog.

But once you hit the publish button, it no longer is about you and what you want. It’s about the readers. It’s about what they want. It’s about what they need. It’s about giving them what they want and need in order to keep them, and attract new readers.

Your blog conversation isn’t about you.

When a commenter leaves a comment, sometimes they are talking to you, but the experienced blog reader and commenter know that they are leaving a comment for posterity, and it may or may not be directed to you, the blogger, as much as directed to the other readers and commenters.

Some commenters respond to other comments, not your comments. There is a whole interaction and conversation that can happen in the blog comment box without your intervention or participation. Don’t rush in to answer every comment. You may be strangling the conversation. Let others respond and direct the conversation. Let there be room for everyone.

Your blog’s purpose isn’t about you.

When you come up with a business plan, purpose, and mission statement, even the title and tagline of their blog, they think it’s about you, right? It’s not. You forgot who you are publishing and blogging for.

For example, one blogger said their blog’s tagline is “Finding Financial Freedom.” I asked, “For who?” For others, of course, they said. Other who? Is it about your story of finding financial freedom? Is it about helping poor single women about finding financial freedom? Is it young married couples finding their way to financial freedom? Is it about older people, learning to cope with years of building towards retirement only to find out that they can’t afford the house they live in?

Who are you talking to? Who are you blogging for? It’s not about you and your needs but connecting with others, so define the others so they will know they’ve find the right place.

What you do isn’t about you.

When you meet someone, the first question usually asked is “What do you do?” What do you say? And do you include your target audience when you answer? Do you take into account your listener when you respond?

“I help people find financial freedom” is nice as a tagline but at a party, it doesn’t say anything. You have to be more specific if you want to encourage a conversation.

The words you use are not about you. It’s about your audience. What will they understand in how you present your blog and its purpose? Will you use jargon? Are they familiar with the jargon? What words will work to connect directly to them so they understand what you do with your blog.

We get so caught up in me and mine, we forget that the reason we are doing this is to connect with others. When we connect, the relationship can start. Until then, if they don’t understand what we do, why, and for whom, it’s not a good starting place for a conversation.

SOBCon wasn’t about you, either.

There were a lot of amazing experiences, lessons learned, and connections made at SOBCon08 this weekend. What you didn’t hear was “What do you do?” in the greetings. There wasn’t the grasping quality of “I’ll tell you what I do so you will want to help me make money and get something.” What you saw were hugs and then people getting past the surface stuff immediately to say, “Tell me more about you.”

The connections made in blogging breakdown many barriers. Wendy Piersall of Spark Plugging said it best for me:

It was like walking into a room filled with your best friends that you haven’t met.

That’s the power of blogging. It’s not about you. It’s about us. It’s about inclusion.

By Robert Lavoie

Have you ever wondered if what you know about marketing on Facebook is accurate? Consider the following paragraphs and compare what you know to the latest info on marketing on Facebook.

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This past Saturday, I harped on a bit about a service called Shyftr, which recently sparked a momentary ruckus over its management of RSS feeds. In short, some bloggers, like Mathew Ingram (also a writer for Toronto’s Globe and Mail) and Tony Hung, thought it went too far in its handling of content culled from feeds across the Web, while others, like Robert Scoble and Louis Gray, had more favorable views of the service.

I myself took a sort of big-picture look at the methodology employed by Shyftr, and found that, though it might provide some measure of convenience to the user in its organization of blog posts and comments, I imagined it would create a disconnect among different portions of websites’ readerships due to its creation of its own base of commentary, independent of reader discussions on the original blogs themselves.

Today it appears that Dave Stanley, co-founder of the service, has chosen to at least partially heed the calls of us loudmouth pundits and “revise the format around (its) discussions.” Stanley says his company has deep respect for content publishers, and doesn’t intend to cause “unease,” and pledges Shyftr from this point forward to “only display the title, author and date of an item where discussions occur outside the reader.” (Note: the term “discussions” here is analogous to reader commentary.)

Will this alteration suffice? It might. It might not. To be perfectly honest, it seems little has really changed. Furthermore, if one is to look at the proposed changes, and one sees that Shyfter is now to perform a discriminating role in how it displays blog posts regarding the number of comments published on the pages where those very blog posts are found originally (a bit confusing, I’m sure), the service may not be quite as appealing for potential registrees. If it’s business as usual where commentary is not found at the source, and then somewhat different when commentary is found at the source, Shyftr could prove a little too “shifty” (pardon, I had to go for that one) for users’ likes. Hmm. Puzzling.

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