There’s a lot of competition out there. Everyday, thousands of new profiles pop up that say “Social media enthusiast.” They share very similar links and conversation topics while hoping for lots of attention. The equation just doesn’t balance out.

Personality and participation alone usually aren’t enough to draw accolades. The best way to get recognized is work hard to develop skills worth talking about and then use your skills to contribute directly back to the community. Here are 11 of most common ways people have made a “big name” for themselves:

1. Become a popular blogger

If you have a flair for writing and a never-ending flow of new ideas + insights, you might be able to blog your way to the top. But writing original, thought-provoking articles on a consistent basis is only half of the blogger’s game – the other part is constantly promoting and marketing your blog. This means doing guest posts, leaving comments, doing keyword research, outreach, partnering, pitching & pimping your blog as hard as you can (without getting people mad at you).

Skills needed: Clear writing, grammar, punctuation, image editing skills, HTML/CSS, social networking savvy.

2. Become a power user

Power users are people with a huge social media presence – the “big guys” with big numbers to back them up. Most spend several hours (or more) uber-power-networking each day. But once you get some momentum and people start to see your name all the time, your connections exponentially increase and it gets easier. Power users like @Zaibatsu, @Msaleem and @BryantSmith have climbed to the top of one site first… and then used their connections and relationships to conquer others. People see their name everywhere.

Skills needed: Stamina, speed, intuition for online trends and memes, great relationship-building skills & online etiquette.

3. Learn video production

If you truly have “rockstar” charisma, wit and personality – you might be able to get away with yammering in front of your laptop camera. Otherwise save yourself the time and embarrassment, and focus on improving your creative and technical skills. Follow the lead of guys like @unmarketing and @dugdale… keep churning out top interviews, comedy videos or tutorials on and eventually you will strike a chord and get recognized.

Skills needed: Visual intelligence, creativity, precision, compression & file format knowledge, $$$ to buy equipment and software.

4. Learn illustration

A picture is worth a thousand words. A clever illustration is worth 2,000 diggs. You don’t have to do “fine art” or photo-realistic quality drawing to get your point across or crack people up. @GapingVoid is well-known for sketching cartoons on the back of business cards, and @Oatmeal has spiced up his smash-hit viral quizzes with cartoon vectors. You can also create info-graphics… or buttons and icons that people need (like RSS or social media icons) – and give them away for free in exchange for lots of links, tweets and bookmarks back to your site. Get a graphics tablet, take an online illustration course… and make your mark.

Skills needed: Artistic flair, geometry, software learning and file-format skills.

5. Create quality tutorials or documentation

High-quality tutorials stand on their own and attract buzz with very little “push” marketing or promotion. @DaveTaylor has gotten a lot of web traffic by offering free technical support tutorials aimed at beginners. Video game blogs compete to see who can release the first “Walkthrough” guide for a new hit game. If you can sense where people are struggling and provide clear answers and help – you’ll be the light at the end of their dark tunnel. People will take notice. And they’ll remember you and thank you.

Skills required: Technical writing, video or image editing, illustration.

6. Do scientific or statistical research

Big companies and agencies often need solid, scientific evidence or statistics to make decisions. @DanZarrella does scientific analysis of Twitter trends and publishing the results into easy-to-understand graphs. @JOwyang of Forrester Research analyzes data, does surveys and predicts trends for Fortune 500 companies. Their solid research efforts plus smooth personalities have brought them large followings, awards and international speaking gigs.

Skills required: Analytical mindset, knowledge of scientific method / social research, graphing and presentation skills.

7. Start a new social site

Starting a successful new social site is quite a coup, but if you can pull it off… you’ll be rolling with ballers like @kevinrose (co-founder of Digg) or @ev (co-founder of Twitter). If you don’t have have the funds to build a site from scratch, platforms like Ning, Reddit will let you create custom, hosted communities frameworks from scratch. They’ll handle the plumbing, and then it’s your job to fill the pipes with people and conversations.

Skills needed: Visionary intuition, team building, project management, usability, investment fund raising, branding and PR.

8. Start a conference or event

If you can build up a successful social media conference or event, you’ll be in a position of power where many of the top players in the industry will be asking you for speaking slots and other favors. Guys like @BrianSolis (Social Media Club), @BTabke (PubCon), @ChrisBrogan (Podcamp) or @AndrewHyde (Startup Weekend) started their own conferences and leveraged them to build considerable connections and influence.

Skills needed: Connections with top speakers, event planning, marketing and strong in-person social skills.

9. Learn how to design & theme blogs

Blog designers are like haute coture tailors. Guys like @pearsonified and @mezzoblue are the elite fashion designers of the online world who create the visual environments and set the trends we follow. They’re a rare breed of human with both brain hemispheres in balance – producing stylish art and perfect, valid code to match it — and their services are in top demand. Want to see your work everywhere? Get a double major in art & computer science and go for it!

Skills needed: PHP, CSS, XHTML + design & illustration.

10. Learn how to develop web applications

Code a new Wordpress gadget or web tool that fixes a problem and you’ll be everyone’s hero. (Until that tool breaks due to some external circumstance or you fail to provide round-the-clock instant free customer support during weekends and holidays – then people will hate you and say you’re a jerk.) Developer rocks stars like @FirstDigg (SocialBlade) or @Yoast (SEO tools and Wordpress plugins) — who create useful tools and keep cool while fixing them — get massive community respect.

Skills needed: PHP, MySQL, Ruby, Air, XHTML / CSS, technical support and documentation.

11. Get hired by a famous company

If you get hired by an influential company as an evangelist, social media guy or product manager… you can ride the coat-tails of the company’s brand power and get instant credibility. Plus you can go to conferences and land speaking slots on the company nickel. Some folks, like @GuyKawasaki (ex-Apple), @VanessaFox (ex-Google) or @Scobleizer (ex-Microsoft) – did some time under the limelight at a big company for a few years – built their name up – and then broke free while keeping their celebrity status.

Skills needed: Team player, cooperative, reliable, organized, superior attention to detail. Proficiency in Microsoft Word and Excel. Ability to lift 30 to 50 lbs. and travel up to 20% of time.

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How are you going to make your mark in Social Media? What’s your dream set of skills?

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Social media can be fun… but it can also be viciously distracting… like a hungry,
multi-headed demon who is hell-bent on sabotaging your productivity.

Insidious interruptions. image: publicenergy

If you have significant responsibilities (job, kids, clients) and a limited amount of free time, you have to play your cards carefully and marshal your attention and energy. Or else social media can easily become more of a liability than an asset.

In my own social media workflow, I have identified one dirty habit that eats up too much time and rarely produces anything in return:

Watching my own blog posts, tweets, and social news story submissions with baited breath…. anxious to see what kind of response they bring.

When you put your personality and life energy into creating something… your own writing, photos, headlines and ideas… it feels like a reflection of yourself. A digital reflection of the superego with a positive re-enforcement button: Our friends and fans can post comments and kudos to validate us and affirm we’re on the right track.

Getting sucked into your own digital reflection is a waste of time. image: Tawny Rockerazzi

You can post your gorgeous new Flickr pics and crack your knuckles while waiting for comments. Or you can watch your Digg story rise all morning long.. slowly going from 5 Diggs… to 7…to 12… to 21… to 29…to 34.. to 51 Diggs… and so on.

But this squanders a tremendous amount of social media attention that you could channel into something productive and beneficial, like:

• Adding new friends & followers who might be able to help you
• Nurturing and strengthen existing relationships – by helping other people out
• Brainstorming / creating new content to blog or guest post
• Searching for remarkable information (links) to share with followers or submit
• Updating your website / profile / business cards

The late magician Aleister Crowley taught his students to focus their willpower on what they wished to accomplish and not to lust after results.

I’ve noticed that many of true social media rockstars don’t lust after results – they just keep chipping away until they get where they want to be. They’re mature and disciplined – like a veteran stock market investor or a farmer – who doesn’t ‘watch the pot boil’ or harvest too early.

They don’t look back at the analytics, tweetbacks, or comments until several hours (or days) have passed. And they don’t need everyone’s validation and approval.

If you can learn to make your best effort, submit it & forget it – and then move on to your next power play…. you’re well on your way to mastering social media – rather than getting owned by it.

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Social media has given us some amazing new channels for self expression. Common people are getting empowered and gaining an international audience by creating and sharing good stuff.

But just like digital cocaine, social media can also inflate people’s ego in a nasty way.

Rockstar? Or vapid starlet in love with your own digital reflection? image: jhuffman

It tempts us with a hypnotic, digital “mirror” that we can gaze into anytime – or all day long if we choose to. And it offers us hundreds of new ways to spread the latest gossip… which causes some people to get completely absorbed in the “me” part of social media.

The whole scene reminds me a lot of the dot com bubble of 1999… when a giddy, reckless sense of excitement over the new technology and culture heavily blurred the line between fantasy and reality.

One current phenomena that I find odd: just making a lot of chatter and noise is enough for some people to become “famous.”

What is a Social Media “Rockstar”?

Digg.com founder Kevin Rose. image: Garrette

Here’s my own personal definition:

A social media rockstar is a charismatic & highly-skilled person who gains a large audience because of their successful online projects and/or selfless community contributions.

A musical rockstar creates songs that inspires thousands of fans to fill stadiums, scream along and hold lighters in the air. A social media rockstar creates content and builds communities that inspire tens of thousands of people to link and leave blog comments.

While some rockstars can develop big egos, they’ve got recognized accomplishments to back them up:

• Popular bloggers who create valuable information resources.
• Community-minded organizers and top contributors on social sites.
• Founders, designers and architects of successful social technologies.
• Creators of “smash hit” viral content that spreads around the world like wildfire.
• Researchers and teachers who selflessly help lots of other people “get it.”

To me, people like Kevin Rose (co-founder of the top social news site ), Maki (#3 Digger and Technorati Top 20 blogger on social media culture), creatives like the Cracked.com publishers or Matt Inman (who consistently produce viral hit, after hit, after hit), or bloggers like Chris Brogan or Marshall Kirkpatrick (who spend a substantial amount of their time online creating guides and resources designed to help people) are the genuine social media rockstars.

What is a “Social Media Narcissist”?

There are plenty of people online who have managed to create a sizable audience without much in the way of skills or selfless community contributions. These social media narcissists participate heavily in the online conversation, but if you look closely you will see that most of it is just chatter about themselves, their opinions and their friends.

Some common traits of social media narcissists:

• Self-absorbed. They blog and tweet almost exclusively about themselves, their thoughts, their pictures.
• Rarely mention others except for personal buddies or admirers.
• Spend most of the day on Twitter.
• Perform little to no “real” work – don’t code, design, publish or promote much (except for themselves).
• Some live outside of the economic “real world”: independently wealthy, supported by their parents or spouse, live on venture capital $ or have a cushy job.
• Have a high noise-to-signal ratio.
• Complain a lot, yet create little of substance. Some use troll tactics to get attention.
• Attend lots of technology conferences just to party and hang out.
• Start their own conferences in order to feature themselves and friends as speakers.

Some examples of social media narcissists would be most mommybloggers, “Senior” social media strategists at big companies or PR firms (the ‘theoretical’ ones who talk big but have no social media presence or real life experience), and full-time Twitter “celebutantes” who hang out in cafes all day… chatting up several thousand mutual friends and spambots.

Some self-absorbed people may be very influential or get a large following but I still don’t consider them to be “rockstars.” I think of ‘em more like social media “talk show hosts” or “rappers.”

What Do You Think?

Am I a social media rockstar? Not even close. Am I a narcissistic new media douchebag? Man… I really hope not. But I admit that I am driven to learn how to use social media more effectively and to reach a wider audience.

Not for the warm fuzzies I’ll get from peeking in the digital mirror, but because I love connecting, sharing and helping people. I honestly believe that social media has potential to spark a powerful, positive force in human evolution if we filter the noise and learn how to use it uber-consciously. (And also because I’m totally hooked on it… so why not go all the way ?)

So, what’s your real social media agenda? Who do you think is a real social media “rockstar”? And what’s your take on the noise and the narcissism that comes served alongside the good stuff?

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