As an online marketer, I feel that it is a part of my job to be a part of the series of tubes that we call the internet. Initially, it was a writing outlet for me back when my career didn’t require me to write nearly as much (it doesn’t require that much writing of me now either). Blogging was a nice way to express the multitude of opinions on random topics that I have and continue to have. Over the years, I’m finding less and less time to blog, which bugs me (but frankly, it bugs me more when some people get on me for not writing enough but NEVER post themselves).

I never saw myself as a specialized blogger. If you go back and read my archives, you’ll find some pretty out there stuff from music to candy to television to social media to politics (like how I supported Bush in ’04 and Obama in ’08). Look, I never claimed it would make sense. The bulk of my readership has always come from a great group of Kansas City bloggers, many of whom I’ve met at some point in the past 6 years. Even when I wasn’t blogging about Kansas City, people like Meesha and Lane and Shea and Joe and Marie and Celeste and Darren and Erin and so many others (even Tony) were the core of my readership outside of the people that I knew or my family members.

Twitter is a different animal entirely. Some people use Twitter to merely point to the other things they’ve written or done online. I use it for a multitude of reasons from annoying personal over-sharing to unfollow-worthy live-tweeting of the Oscars to connecting with colleagues and peers and for reaching out to brands I use.

One thing that I continually struggle with is this concept of followers, following and friends. Derek Powazek, a community management consultant and web guru whose opinion I respect very much, wrote a post called Twitter for Adults that explores this very struggle and has some great solutions on what to do if you want to participate in Twitter, but aren’t sure how. It’s a good place to start, but I’ve always wondered if there was a generally accepted rule of thumb when it comes to who you should follow, who should follow you and why.

After all, what is it that motivates our behaviors online? I know that when I first began blogging, it was for me. Joining Twitter was an exploration of the next new cool thing online.

You could even say I initially joined Twitter way back before it was the cool, hip thing to do. Way back in 2007. I remember being a little confused at first. I didn’t understand it. None of my friends were on it. What was I supposed to do with it?

So I quit. Cancelled my account. A stupid thing to do in hindsight, but whatever. I rejoined at the beginning of 2008 and 14,000+ tweets later, it’s one of my primary forms of communication. Ramsey was really onto something when he wrote: “If the people you follow suck, Twitter sucks.” Most of my best friends are now on Twitter. My wife and her sister use it to communicate mass messages to the members of their dance team. My parents even have Twitter accounts, but they don’t get it yet (that’s on me to explain, I guess). But the bottom line is: enough people now use the utility that it no longer sucks for me.

But that’s not what this is about.

What I want to talk about is the strange obligation that some people have to follow or be followed by people they may only be connected with on the periphery. I do my best to stay connected and up-to-date on all the tweets and Facebooking that happens, but I’ve found as I’ve taken on more and more responsibility that it can be difficult to manage. In the days when I was pushing toward a rather large project completion at work, I didn’t check in on Twitter at all. I may have even missed a day or ten of actually sending out a tweet. And for some reason I felt guilty. Why is that?

My Twitter account is my personal account. I may talk about work on it, but that’s because I love my job. I talk about things that interest me and I do my best to follow people with similar interests. Brand accounts are a different story. The following/follower relationship changes if you are representing an organization online. But that’s for another post…

So back to the question: who should you follow, who should follow you and why…let’s start with the easy one.

Who should follow you…

Ultimately, it is anyone’s prerogative to follow you on Twitter if you keep your account public. I tend to because I’m a fairly public person. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t blocked people in the past who annoyed me or harassed me. Like Bobby B said, “It’s my prerogative.” I can do what I wanna do… There are a lot of reasons that someone might follow you:

1. They think you are super cool.
2. Twitter told them to in the “Who to Follow” block. Which means that you probably follow many of the same people. This is a pretty safe bet.
3. They run searches about what people talk about and follow people who talk about certain things. Often times, I get followed by random accounts and I can usually attribute it back to one random thing I said a week ago about a product or service.
4. They follow everyone and will try to insist that you follow them back, only to unfollow you the minute you follow them. I’m going to suggest that if someone asks you to follow them for any reason and you can’t recognize them from their profile, you can safely ignore them.

Who you should follow…

Twitter if for 140-character communications, not for long conversations. That being said, you should always follow people who you are interested or invested in in some way. The people that I follow fall into 4 categories:

1. Friends and family. I use Twitter to keep up on what they are up to and to talk about sports with my buddies.
2. Co-workers, colleagues and peers. I probably use Twitter more for this group than anything. It’s where I share and receive amazing insight about the latest thing. It’s a great way to share a link, a picture or a quick thought on a topic and get instant feedback. In a lot of ways, it’s replaced Google Reader as my news reader of choice.
3. Thought leaders in my industry and area of expertise. This is a tricky one because you often times have to sift through a lot of garbage to find useful, thoughtful people, particularly when it comes to the area of online marketing. Still, I’ve managed to find quite a few people that I trust.
4. People who pique my interest or entertain me. This is a pretty wide category containing comedians, actors, random people I’ve met or folks who were recommended by others. This is a difficult area to manage because there are a lot of these folks out there, but I don’t often seek them out.

Why you should follow people…

This truly is a personal decision. If you are looking to Twitter for news and current events, it might be helpful to follow news outlets or perhaps even reporters. If you want to use Twitter for personal reasons only, that’s completely up to you. You might think about marking your account as private, even. Ultimately, I can’t tell you why you should follow people and I certainly don’t like when people try to tell me why I should follow people or who I should follow or try to guilt me into following them just because we’ve “known each other online”. Shoot, there are people I’ve met in person that I can’t stand to listen to. If I can’t stand you online, why should I follow you?

I’ve found myself at times trying to justify why I should or should not follow someone or whether I should unfollow them because I spend an inordinate amount of time being annoyed by their opinions or the things they continue to share. What is it about our human nature that keeps me from just unfollowing that person the minute they start to annoy me? Is it because I have an “online reputation” to uphold? Hardly. If anything, I want my online reputation to be this: the same in person as online. That’s why I don’t believe in the concept of a personal brand. My personal brand is me. It isn’t calculated or cared for…it’s just me. That may irk some people and close some doors for me, but so be it. I’m not about to start pretending that I’m someone I’m not in order to please some amorphous collection of avatars on the internet.

Hope it wasn’t too rambling of a post. Let me know what you think in the comments.

That’s kind of the point here. I’m considering a permanent move over to Tumblr and wanted to do a quick poll as to how you consume my blog. If you can’t see the poll for some reason, a comment will suffice. I’m just trying to get some quick idea as to how people read so I know how best to make the transition.

Thanks a lot for your participation!

I learned about Silicon Prairie News last year when I attended Big Omaha, a one-day conference devoted to “forward-thinking creatives, entrepreneurs and innovators” (more on my trip to Big Omaha). You may remember me mentioning Silicon Prairie News earlier in the year they featured me and this blog in their 5 in 5 series.

Dusty Davidson and Jeff Slobotski have cultivated a phenomenal startup culture in Omaha and with the help of writer Danny Schreiber, they’re showing the nation that Omaha and the rest the Midwest is capable of some really great stuff.

Today, they launched the new version of their site and it’s really great. Congratulations to SPN and everyone involved in the new site for the great work. I’m looking forward to seeing what comes next.

…more on the launch of SPN 2.0 from the site itself

• The Realtor, (who snagged the vanity URL from all of us a long time ago)
• The musician and author,
• The storm chaser,
• …and now the teenage fiction writer from Philadelphia (who is also on Tumblr)

Great.

Now I realize that I’m probably not doing myself any favors, since I’m currently fourth on the Magnificent Google List despite having been online for longer than all of them.

But I just can’t help myself.

(reposted from my Tumblr)

I’ve even seen it used for full corporate sites and photoblogs elegantly.

But it almost does too much, is too powerful, requires too much attention.

I’ve had my eye on Tumblr for a really long time, but I could never pull the trigger on it. Frankly, I’ve got over 5 years and 900+ posts that I want to keep. But the concept of the community that Tumblr presents, combined with the fact that a lot of really funny and interesting people are on there has got me interested enough to give it a try.

I’m currently trying to figure out how to feed my Tumblr into my Feedburner account so those of you reading through Google Reader (or whatever other RSS reader flavor you might be using) don’t really notice, but as of yet, I haven’t figured that out (any help on this would be superb).

For now though, if you’re my friend on Facebook or Twitter, you’ll see my Tumblr posts come through. Or, you can just go follow me on Tumblr:

ShaneLife.Tumblr.com

I’m not abandoning WordPress just yet. But it’s on notice.

But it’s not something that is impossible with WordPress…just something I’m not doing for whatever reason.

I also have a tendency to be long-winded. Maybe I need to try and focus on keeping my posts shorter.

What do you want to see?

Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again.

I feel like I’ve been saying some version of this since I had the chops enough to give advice on what people should be doing on the Web (not nearly as long as Derek). In my opinion, search engine optimization is about two things:

1. Write clean code – this means semantic HTML, with structure and presentation separated.
2. Write great content – see Derek’s comment above.

That’s it. When I was job searching earlier in the year, many of the web-based jobs I interviewed for asked me what my expertise was in SEO. I promptly told them the above two things. In my opinion, SEO is just about as easy as that.

For proof, if you search for “SEO” on Google, you’ll find that Derek’s post is on the front page within 24 hours (as of the time of this post). For a term like SEO to appear on the front page that quickly is unprecedented if you are an SEO specialist. If you’re looking for a better way of proving Derek’s point, I am guessing you’ll fall short.

Thanks for the post, Derek.

I’m still Brian Fellow!

Five years ago, I started this blog with a simple Blogspot account and an innocuous post titled “I’m Brian Fellow!” At the time, I was working at Perceptive Software and my buddy Kevin and I used to laugh constantly at this skit. It always makes me laugh.

In that post, I stated the following, in an attempt to introduce myself to the blogodome:

Things I like:

• hanging with my wife and dog
• movies
• music (I really really like my iPod + iTunes)
• Chipotle burritos
• the TV show “Alias” – the best show EVER
• Apple computers
• most EA Sports video games for PS2
• poker (only recently really, but I like it a lot)
• reading (but only sometimes)
• cheeseburgers
• Mountain Dew (most forms, though I have yet to try the new black kind)
• The Chiefs

Things I dislike:

• ignorance
• people who drive with their lights on during the day
• temperatures over 85 degrees
• people who don’t vote because “one vote doesn’t make a difference”
• pants other than jeans
• old navy t-shirts (they are too short for my long torso)
• the general refusal of PC users to accept the Firewire interface, favoring USB (for some god-forsaken reason) over it

I’m a generally happy guy. But I’m opinionated and when I think a certain way…I’ll tell you. Just FYI.

Most of this is still true.

Sure, “Alias” isn’t on the air anymore. And it definitely went downhill in its later years. I rarely play my PS2 anymore (although I might play a Wii if I had one with Beatles Rock Band. I still dislike ignorance and temperatures above 85 degrees (which makes the glorious weather in KC all the more…um…glorious). And while I would prefer to wear jeans everyday, I don’t, since I can’t really. At least not currently. Old Navy did something to their T-shirts and they fit better now. And I’m totally over the Firewire/USB thing.

But not really.

So it’s been five years since I started blogging. Not much has changed about me. I’ve always treated this blog as an extension of my real life and I hope that it is reflected in my writing and when people meet me.

I can’t believe it. 863 posts in 38 categories with 1,164 tags and 2,182 comments. Thanks for reading. I will keep writing and I don’t intend to stop anytime soon.

I was fortunate enough to get a preview copy of Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone is Connected, Connect Your Business to Everyone. Joel is the president of Twist Image, an interactive agency from Montreal, and is an authority on blogging, podcasting and entrepreneurship on the Web.

The book is an extremely quick read and is great for people who are interested in getting their businesses involved in social networks like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and others.

Everyone is connected. Connect your business to everyone.

Not only does he have a catchy subtitle, but Joel backs it up with many stories about the successes and failures of companies and individuals over the past decade on the Web. I found so much of the book extremely relevant to my work at Cerner, although for someone who has been working on the Web for as long as I have, a lot of the concepts were ones that I am aware of and have been talking about at work.

I guess I’ve got a head start on the majority of Joel’s audience. I’m not saying that arrogantly — I found a lot of value in the book and it was nice to have someone speak so clearly about the strategies that I’ve been attempting to implement. But for those that work in the arena of social networking as a part of their profession will find themselves maybe saying once or twice: “I’ve heard that story before.”

There are lots of great nuggets of information peppering the chapters of Six Pixels of Separation. I particularly appreciated his section on Web sites and why they are one of the most important parts of your brand (I especially appreciated it since I am, by profession, an online marketer, and I make Web sites sometimes).

I recommend it for entrepreneurs, business owners, marketers and anyone who is ready to get connected to their customers online. Mitch Joel has made this ever-changing new world of the social web approachable, interesting and implementable. It’s becoming more important to businesses everywhere and those that are doing it well are seeing benefits to their bottom line.

One important thing that Joel points out in his book is it’s not too late to get involved. Most of these platforms are still in the very early stages of growth (Twitter launched only 3 years ago!) and while there are some companies who are already in these venues, companies and entrepreneurs can still get involved.

Go pick up the book on Amazon now. It is released on September 7.

As I was navigating around her site, I was reminded of something that she does called the Daily Chuck. Dooce takes a picture of their family dog Chuck (and sometimes their other dog CoCo).

Floss | Photo copyright 2009 | Heather B. Armstrong | dooce.com®

Now I don’t have near the readership that Dooce and Blurb (her husband) do. But I love my dog equally, if not more and he is certainly as cute. Now he probably won’t sit still so I can balance a bowl of Cocoa Puffs on his head, but he’s cute all the same. So starting September 1, I’m going to start posting a daily picture of Dreyfuss here on Shane Life.

It won’t interrupt my normal posting schedule, but I thought it would be fun to take pictures of my dog. You know…for posterity and stuff.