On the intertubes, everyone gets to be a rock star

In the Sixties, Andy Warhol predicted everyone would get their 15 minutes of fame. In today’s World 2.0, everyone gets to be a rock star. I’m usually not starstruck…but tonight I got to rub elbows with a true superstar – Guy Kawasaki. I bought Guy Kawasaki’s first book way back in the mid-eighties… it was called the Macintosh Way, and it is awesome.

Guy has had a pretty interesting career, especially as an early Macintosh evangelist, and when he started blogging, I started reading his blog. He is passionate about business, about entrepreneurship, and is an all-around cool guy. Guy is now a Venture Capitalist and entrepreneur in Silicon Valley.

Earlier tonight, @itsjustbrent (Brent Dixon) twittered to Guy Kawasaki that he should add Charlie Trotter’s (@chaztoo) cartoon/comic site called Lolzies to Guy’s new site called Alltop.com. Brent then twittered to the rest of his followers that everyone should petition Guy to add Lolzies to Alltop. At that time, my skeptical radar went on red alert. (I nearly turned into Mr. Grumpy Cranky, aka Ron Shevlin.) I thought to myself there is NO WAY GUY KAWASAKI is going to put Lolzies into his latest online endeavor.

Here’s some background on Guy Kawasaki’s recent online presence: Being well-connected in Silicon Valley, and with a great self-brand and entrepreneurial message, Guy quickly rose to the Top 50 of all bloggers in the world. (A-list, true technorati.) When twitter went mainstream for the technorati, Guy was there. Unfortunately, Guy didn’t follow the hundreds and hundreds of people who were following him. Since Guy likes to promote the projects he’s working on, many followers accused him of “using” his twitter presence just to shill his wares. Guy realized this wasn’t cool behavior, and to prove his detractors wrong, started to follow EVERY one who was following him. Well, that is now more than 6,200 twitterers. So I thought to myself, even assuming Guy is following Brent, how is he going to spot his tweet out of THOUSANDS that must be flying by his twitter-reader every second?

Personally, as much as I like Guy, I have slowed down with following his blog regularly. I’ve really enjoyed seeing the speeches he gives online there, but I’ve felt a need to focus on my own work. And since I don’t follow his blog as regularly as I used to, I definitely didn’t want to follow him on twitter. I didn’t want to see a stream of interesting, but distracting, information coming my way from him. But since Brent was trying to flag his attention, I figured I’d check and see if it were true that Guy follows those who follow him, so I followed Guy. And sure enough, I got an email back saying that Guy was following me just minutes later.

Then I joined in Brent’s petition to get Charlie’s Lolzies onto Alltop. This was followed by @CUWarrior joining in the petition to Guy for Lolzies. I think it might have been the giant feathers on @CUWarrior’s twitter picture that got Guy’s attention, because Guy tweeted back saying isn’t Lolzies a humor site and not a cartoon site? At this point my jaw hit the floor that GUY KAWASAKI was actually tweeting with us! So I jokingly asked Guy to sign my twitterrific interface, to which he responded “you’re scaring me”. He then returned the joke and said “sure, just send it over to me.”

After some banter, and Guy requesting that we all pimp Alltop in return for putting Lolzies into the comic area of it, he put it into the Comic feed, if Charlie was also willing to work some pictures of Guy into the comic itself if he sent over some photos of himself, and mention Alltop. Which Charlie quickly said yes to. (http://comics.alltop.com).

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the true story of how Charlie Trotter became a rock star overnight. Do something worthwhile, and it could happen to you, too.

Addendum: This is the promise of social media– that quality and talent wins. Everyone with something to say has a chance to say it. Within every single one of us is a unique talent, and we are all rock stars. Traditional media gatekeepers are no longer in charge of what becomes popular or not. As Brent tweeted this morning, “Congrats, @chaztoo. Awesomeness wins again.”