Striking Independence by Getting Authentic …Blogger Style

Last night I attended Ignite Boulder 5, which totally rocked.  Besides being a fun outing to see friends and create community, it made me reflect on some things.

The first Ignite Boulder was probably a year ago, I got on Twitter on Mothers Day 2008 and I started attending local tech meetups about 2 years ago.  The Boulder tech community and social media have blossomed in a myriad of ways in this short period.

Last night at the Boulder Theater there were 741 people at Ignite.  There were only 150 at the first one months ago, though it was sold out, so the leap has been huge.  I presented a talk on influence at Ignite Boulder 4 in April when 500 people seemed like a lot.  I felt sad today seeing tweets of some friends who were there that I didn’t see because it was so packed.  This made me realize how quickly I’ve connected with a lot of really smart, fun, creative people.

This is what I love about social media.  Over the past 2 years I’ve created more community in my life than ever before, aside from the indie rock scene I was a part of when I was a teenager.  The depth of connections to people I’ve only tweeted with is surprising; not to mention the dozens of people I’ve met in person after meeting them on Twitter.

After watching a very genuine video of Micah Baldwin today talking about social media influence I crossed a line.  Some friends have mentioned to me that my blog doesn’t seem to have my voice in it, that the tone is generic.  So beginning today my posts will come from the heart more and I’ll step deeper into radical transparency.

Making the blog more nakedly personal than professional (but still having professional posts too) makes sense. I’ve never been a corporate kind of guy and as much as I love professional blogs, I’m always going to be a little bit more on the rock n’ roll side of things.

It probably wasn’t a mistake that the main corporate industry I was in was the music industry – which wasn’t exactly an IBM type of environment.  My ‘corporate’ memories are things like babysitting Joey Ramone as he went swimming when I was 24 and he was 45 or something and we were on tour.

It’s time to practice what I preach a bit more and stop holding back opinions, experiences and topics that don’t seem to fall under the social media or influence banners.

When I get into writing about things like how metaphysical and new age followers (I was one of them for 35 years) are as unconsciously fundamentalist (anyone thinking they ‘know’ THE ‘truth’) as my Baptist friends, how your beliefs are not really your own even though you’ll insist they are or how strange life can be, I’m either going to suck you in with authenticity and humor, piss you off (still good as long as you bother to write a comment on the post), or you’ll write me off and stop reading the blog (which is your prerogative…be like Bobby Brown.)

So, ready or not, on this independence day my first action is to not worry about how I’m percieved on the blog and start to connect deeper to my tribe …whoever you all are.  Happy almost Independence Day.