Though I noticed a bit of a pile-on effect going on over on Tom Humbarger’s blog as we vendors all tried to show how active we all are. I’ll have to be sure to do my bit over there as well – I guess we’ve all learned the first lesson is listening.

That said, I hope we aren’t substituting quantity for quality judgments – there are some really great voices that for one reason or another aren’t everywhere doing everything all at once:

Chris Allen’s Life with Alacrity (http://www.lifewithalacrity.com) is seldom updated in favor of higher signal to noise, but I could re-read his posts again and again and get new insights and useful data each time.

Sean O’Driscoll (www.communitygrouptherapy.com) is one of the celebrated heros of the fledgling industry from his time at the head of the Microsoft MVP program. His blog posts are averaging every two weeks or so, but is he less visionary because of that?

And then there’s uber social celebrity Seth Godin, who went so far as to turn off comments on his blog (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/06/why_i_dont_have.html) – hardly social, but I can’t fault his reasoning.

Granted, these folks have social pedigrees longer than your arm, but I suppose that’s my point. Leading is about action, not words. I think Tom is fully justified in asking us to walk the talk. We’re proud at Lithium to be recognized as a leading company in this space and think that inclusion in the Wave is a great indication of our momentum and thought leadership. But this was just the first Wave, a milestone but certainly not the finish line. It doesn’t take vision to see that this tough economic year is going to be a greater test of each of us and of the promise of social media than any we’ve yet faced. Welcome to the Social Media Marathon!

It’s been a pleasure talking about community best practices and getting to know you, too, these last several months.

I think Tom issues a really good challenge for the vendors, wanting to see us be visible leaders and to use social media ourselves as a way of demonstrating its viability. That’s certainly what I’m trying to do at LiveWorld!

Bryan Person
Live World social media evangelist