The other day Chris Brogan tweeted the following:

When I saw the tweet pointed out to me by a friend I joked that Chris Brogan will do anything to get me to follow him. Truth be known, he won’t and his tweet is just part of who he is, a very cool guy. Full disclosure, that @mattgalloway put him up to the tweet but that’s the kind of guy Chris is, really would do just about anything for his audience, especially someone right in front of him.

In a continuation of my full disclosure, I don’t follow @chrisbrogan and he doesn’t follow me, not on twitter at least and that, snarky headline aside, is what this post is about.

I stopped following Chris about the same time I stopped following a lot of other folks on Twitter. My reasons for the mass un-following of a few social media stars and a few hundred other folks are my own so I won’t bore bother you with the finer details but let me just say every time I looked up, my entire twitter stream was Chris and a few others. That’s the way he rolls and when someone has tweeted 62,340 times you have to expect… domination of your feed. Multiply that by all the other A-listers and I was loosing contact with the folks I wanted to stay in contact with.

Let me assure you though, I still follow Chris Brogan. My weapon of choice? The old fashioned RSS feed. Chris is on my weekly reading tab for folks I follow but don’t read on a daily basis. I should also point out that Chris is also listed in my social media syllabus as a follow and three of his articles are part of a must read before the students start blogging. I also encourage anyone starting out to follow Chris in some fashion, not just his new stuff, but go back to some of his sage advice over the years.

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that his tweets still come across my stream by way of those I follow. I let them do the dirty work of filtering out the best of the best and do click those links.

A few other points:
The first time I ever twalked to Chris was when I was in a “discussion” with my sister regarding cloud computing and whether any large organization was actually using the cloud for all their needs. I asked the question on Twitter and Chris was the first and only to respond to the question including a follow up question – all on a Saturday night at 9 p.m. Like I said, that’s the way Chris rolls and That interaction left an indelible mark on my opinion of social media and how some of the best use it.

A lot has changed since then, two years later Chris has 125,514 followers (Chris, size will be the demise of your community… oh wait, never mind) and I don’t. And I’m happy about that – both stats.

Chris’s tweet immediately generated a number of followers.  For you new followers (and for you long timers) stay tuned, I am about to take a major shift on this site and my presence on the web. I hope you enjoy but more important I hope you learn.

Finally, I’ve never met Chris but I plan to chat with him soon – Chris, you want to meet my social media class and share some of your wisdom?  Oh, and if you keep tweeting that I am the greatest prof in Oklahoma I might just follow you again…

p.s. Why the snarky headline? I learned that from Chris.