It was interesting reading Chris Brogan’s post about talking about yourself. It came at a time when I have been criticized for “teaching too much”. Apparently some people think giving advice is somehow patronizing and condescending (or maybe both, I am not quite sure).
These thoughts combined to make me seriously consider how we decide what to talk about, how to tune that over time, and how to guage the success of that.
One of the diagrams I often use in my talks is this one featured below:
It is the simplest approach and the one that works best in most situations.
Now there will always be exceptions to this rule. I am sure the vast majority of successful bloggers and social media folks do not conciously seek out the opinions and preferences of their audience before writing. We do however soon learn what our community reacts to and it is a rare writer who goes against what works on purpose.
This does not mean that we should pander. Even though I have been blasted for doing “too much how-to” there is no way I am going to stop. Why should I? Yes, I have received some strident feedback, but the feedback I received was one person’s diatribe and not the opinion shared by most of my readers across the many blogs that I write for.
We tend to listen to the loudest voices but a vocal minority can scupper what we set out to acheive. One complaint does not a trend make!
Here is my basic strategy:
- Work out through conversation and research what your community most wants and needs, what their common challenges are, what they most want to achieve.
- Help people towards those goals and encourage feedback.
- Listen to the feedback you get and judge it based on repetition, sincerity and sanity.
- Observe and record your metrics.
- Look out for trigger events (eg. subscriptions going up or down, traffic spikes, comment ratios, etc).
- Tweak and tune.
As Chris says in the linked article, there are a lot of sites out there that are useless and boring because they are self referential. On the other hand, many of us flock to self-referential celebrities because their autobiographical stories give us a taste of an aspirational lifestyle. And yet, I wouldn’t really want to read a book review written by Paris Hilton. What works for one or the other will not necessarily work for you, but it does not make it wrong just a bad fit.
Bottom line: Your peers, gurus or outspoken critics are not the people who should be telling you what to write about, and you should not try to cater to them over your community as a whole. You will never please everyone, focus on your target audience and reaching your goals. Do not be distracted from your priorities.





If you search in Google using some search terms then do the same search while adding a city or county, you see the results change quite dramatically. Local results also influence the standard results, especially the paid results. Facebook advertising has some very granular targeting, check out the screen shot here.