AMEN!

I think you’re right, Adam. Too many bloggers spewing a bunch of mumbo-jumbo without any real-world experience to back it up. I actually have a blog entitled “Does the World Need Another Blogger?” that I’m looking to publish here in the next few weeks. If you think about it logically, though…if a blogger really has nothing new to say and ESPECIALLY if they can’t say it in a clever, interesting way…no one will read it anyway. So maybe it ultimately doesn’t really matter.

I post more often on the “Big Blog” now, http://socialmediasun.com/ – you’ll see me every Monday. Be sure to stop by! We have a lot of other great guests as well. I’ll still stop by here if I feel like being irrverent or have something more personal!

You’re right, there is a Blain “blog” – but it appears to just be a reflector for her G+ posts – quirky memes and the like – things people like to share on FB and G+ and what have you. She just does it with several orders of magnitude more people!

What Blain is not doing is talking about technology in a way that a company like Microsoft or Google can say, “We want her in our roster,” like they did with Scoble. He talked about technology and influenced people long before “influencer” became the hot buzzword du jour. I mean literally *influence*. If Blain starts doing that kind of thing, she can look forward to the kind of future you talk about. She already has the audience – she seems to be sitting on a gold mine, and doesn’t seem to know it. She just needs to start digging.

It’ll be interesting to see how this develops, or if her fame simply wanes as G+ is replaced by the inevitable Next Hot Platform. It could go either way and I would not be surprised.

(BTW, you may be right that being a young blonde woman online personality is unlikely to work against her, but let’s give some credit where it’s due, too! Other than that, stay sharp, and keep up your good work.)

But seriously, I appreciate your viewpoint. The Robert Scobles, Chris Pirillos, Julien Smiths, they’ve been in this space even longer than me, and having experience is probably my only merit. When they started blogging, me (and most of the Internet) thought that only girls and sissies blogged. If you would have called my Network site a blog (we called it an E-zine) I would have banned you from comments lol. They pioneered this stuff, and are more likely to retire making an income from the Internet than me any of your aforementioned Google Plus queens. But thanks for that moniker, I hereby declare all the “Social Media Gurus” Google plus Queens.

And add me on some Social Network. I don’t care about your identity, won’t expose it. I’d just like to meet you because you seem pretty sharp and have an agreeable view of things.

I know you can go to his Wikipedia page and read about his accomplishments (remember that that page was probably curated by his hardcore fans, or Rackspace themselves because outside the Internet, no one knows who Robert Scoble is), but in 10 years you may be able to go to Amanda’s and find out things about her too. Scoble was exactly what Amanda is now before Microsoft hired him, an Internet personality. The only difference I see is that he offered Tech support and had a knowledge of technology, and Amanda has a different gig, she has a social media network for women, and I’m pretty sure there’s a blog in there somewhere.

Remember, like I mentioned in this article, each network that goes mainstream will create a handful of instant celebrities. Pinterest is another example, but usually those celebrities have been building their worth through some other platform an are just in the right place at the right time, the right set of circumstances.

One reason a lot of people try to gather big followings is vanity. You don’t have to monetize anything if that’s what drives you. On my newest website, http://socialmediasun.com/ , we’ve already published several articles that visit this theme. The big conversation among social media blogs right now is ROI, and that has been invented by the mid level social media bloggers to shame the fakes into quitting lol. Seriously, how often has the print advertising world been in a funk about return on investment? Never, because having that discussion is detrimental to their business. It helps social media managers who can spin numbers though (which I can do quite well ) so they’re pushing it hard.

Anyway, ROI as it pertains to this discussion, it’s the seperating point to where you’re going to see who does Social Media as a business and who is just playing in it. You wouldn’t want someone who was playing in it for their own sake managing your online marketing, so it’s a way to denounce what is essentially vanity. If Amanda turns her huge following into a speaking career (which is what most social media blogs do. I’ll eventually have to start speaking or hiring other people to speak on my behalf if I want to fully monetize the Social Media Sun), she’ll prove herself to be a businesswoman who turns an opportunity into financial gain. 10 years from now, she could be the keynote at blog world (guess who it is this year? None other than the Scobleizer himself).

However, it’s the comparison to Scoble that I find so perplexing. He *worked* for Microsoft – it was his job to evangelize Loghorn. He was hired for that because of his blogging. According to wikipedia, he’s been menationed in The Economist.

Google probably couldn’t find a more enthusiastic flag-bearer, but she’s not a Google employee (as far as I know… Maybe that’s the magic answer!). Outside G+, she and Todd seem to be kind of on the same level, doing their own things, all good.

But on G+, she rivals Scoble. He blogs on tech issues and has for years. She posts, “I’m bored”, and 500 people reply! She even seems taken aback by it herself.

Many would kill for her flollowing, yet she doesn’t appear to be monetizing it, at least not visibly. It’s like she doesn’t know what to do with it. Maybe there’s nothing *to* do with it, and that was kind of my original point.

It’s impressive, on some level, to build up the world’s largest ball of previously-enjoyed chewing gum. Might take years of dedication and a fair bit of chewing. But while the effort is impressive, the result is just a big ball of chewing gum. It has no value. Without monetization, that’s what three quarters of a million followers is. A really big ball of chewing gum.

It’s just a very strange phenomenon. I don’t understand the currents here.

Disclaimer: I bear no ill-will to any of these fine folks or anything they do. Just trying to question and understand.

Indeed. You pretty much sleuthed everything there is to know about them up. Amanda runs the Girlfriend Social Site, but that site isn’t as popular as she is. It’s a chicken and egg argument ya know? Jessica Simpson has a multi-billion dollar fashion empire, but she is much more famous than her clothes, and we all know it wouldn’t exist without her right?

Robert Scoble though, he’s know different than Amanda. He’s well known because he is an extremely popular blogger who either started out, or moved on to work for rackspace. You hear what you said though? He’s been an evangelist for Microsoft… well, Amanda has been an Evangelist for Google+. I don’t know the exact specifics about either of those 2, but I do know they’re 2 fish in the same boat. I was under the impression for a long time that Robert owned Rackspace, but now I think he may have been a VP or something that took a public facing position and turned it into something golden.

MQT is a little different, he is trying to be a blogger and author, and I believe he got off on a good start. He should have wrote a book about Twitter back when he had a few hot blog posts out, but I really have no idea what he does for income. I think he’s just happy to be on the Internet lol, and that’s fine with me. I told him once that he should have hosted a children’s TV show because his voice is calming like a therapist on barbituates.

You are totally right about parts of your comment, but there are some things I don’t think you quite understand. There is absolutely no way to get the following that Amanda did by networking among other networkers. She was on the lucky end of a programming bug. She is beautiful in her profile picture, and on Google + if you add 10 people, most likely 3 or 4 will be friends with Amanda. When she comes up as a suggestion with 10 other people (Robert Scoble included) who are you going to circle? She put a lot of leg work in to get her initial following in hangouts and stuff, but after a while it takes care of itself (I am still getting between 30-100 adds on Chime.in everyday, and i’m not that pretty).

If you would like to know more, shoot me an e-mail or Facebook Message. I’m in the process of actually monetizing this type of thing, and you seem astute enough to pick up some things yourself, I can fill in your blanks for ya.

But I’m bewildered by the central assumption: that this level of followership has value, or is even desirable other than for its own sake.

Robert Scoble, I can understand. He is a writer, and has been an evangelist for Microsoft. He’s recognized in his own right – his views are valued, so it stands to reason that people would listen up.

But the Amanda Blain example – and there are others, not to pick on her – is perplexing to me. Her popularity on G+ appears to be built on… well, her popularity on G+. It’s a staggering achievement that she has at this point about three quarters of a million circlers – considerably more than Vogue magazine, for instance. But to what end? She appears to run a website for women to find platonic friendships – a nice idea, but not one that strikes me as lucrative, and the size of the operation sort of confirms my suspicions. And there seems to be little else out there with her name in the credits. So how does she actually make a living? How does her almost unrivaled popularity pay the rent?

Another example is Michael Q. Todd. Nice guy, by all accounts. I’d be happy to share a beer with him. And if he accepted, I’d have to figure out a way to ask him – politely -what the hell *is* a Twitter Mentor? His branding is impressive, but what’s he actually got to offer? How does he pay *his* rent?

I get the unsettling impression that *much* of the Social Media frenzy seems to be networkers and supernetworkers, networking largely amongst themselves. Case in point – I came across the Twitter Mentor while trying to understand what it is, exactly, that the G+ queen does.