I met Mack Collier back in the early days of blogging… eeeeeh, a hundred or so years back. He commented often on my blog, as I did on his, and eventually he brought me on board Beyond Madison Avenue, a popular Advertising and Marketing blog he edited at the time. He made virtual introductions left and right, coached me through my first podcast, and gave me a real-time intro to exactly how this whole blog community thing worked. In one incident – the thought of which I still wince at – I wrote a post that Mack found circumstantially irreverent… and he called me on it. I thought I was being cheeky; Mack saw a careless use of language. No doubt, Mack was right. Tail between my legs, I learned that the blogosphere is, well… big… and diverse… and that if your word choice is flimsy and slipshod, your audience will treat your content likewise. (Seriously… thanks, Mack.)

Skip forward a few years, and Mack has become a thought-leader in the social media world, juggling speaking engagements, multiple blogs, and consulting work for companies as large as Dell and Microsoft. This success is in no small part due to Mack taking real investment in his online community, treating his “blog contacts” as true friends and telling it how it is. His goal is to be part of a thriving blogosphere – period.

Before I continue… No, it’s not Mack’s birthday (at least I don’t think it is).

I bring him up because his post on Marketing Profs earlier this week brought up a question that I think Mack could not be more perfectly suited to answer:

Has social media also changed the way you interact with others?

Mack explains that he’s inherently an intervert but that social media has made an extrovert of him:

When I am on Twitter, I look for items in my feed reader that I can link to my followers. When I meet people at conferences, I want to evangelize my favorite blogging friends to them. As I make more connections, I want to tell more people about social media, because I want to see them make these connections as well.

Mack’s Social Graph flows seamlessly from the physical and digital worlds, which isn’t an easy balancing act. While I think Mack underestimates his talent as a community builder, he certainly proves how robust and rewarding a digital community can become when we treat our online friends with the same respect and attention as we do those IRL.

As online media and out-of-home locations continue to merge, we’ll look towards community mavens like Mack to define a new set of healthy emerging behaviors.

[tags]The Web Outside, Mack Collier, The Viral Garden, Marketing Profs, community, social media, emerging behaviors, digital media, old vs. new media[/tags]

[Flickr CC Photo Src]