Branding Friday: Building my 150

I just finished reading Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, so expect to hear a lot about it in the future. It’s the best book I’ve read since The New Rules of Marketing & PR by David M. Scott.

In the book, the guys talk about it being difficult to maintain authentic relationships with more than 150 people. I can attest to that. I’ve got over 4,000 followers on Twitter and 1,000 friends on Facebook. After scanning the streams, I feel like I know less about all these people rather than more.

So I decided to make my 150 list. It’s going to have 150 of the people I want to interact with regularly. That might mean checking in on their blogs once a week, sending a Facebook message, paying attention to their Tweets. And that’s not to say I won’t pay attention to anyone else. But I want to make an effort to really listen to these 150.

So where am I with my list? I have about 40-50 so far. It’s harder than I thought. For each person in my contact database and Facebook friends list (I haven’t even hit Twitter yet) I ask, “Is this someone I want to pay extra attention to?” I want to pay attention to everyone but the real question comes down to: will I benefit from listening to this person? Will they benefit from listening to me?

I will make my list flexible. I can switch out people as my interests change. I used to read ProBlogger much more than I do now when I was starting out blogging, but these days I’m less about the how-to of blogging and more about developing solid content. That’s not to say Darren Rowse isn’t worth listening to; I’m just knee-deep in other areas right now.

My goal in this is to cut through the noise. Hearing so many virtual voices in my head is starting to be a deterrent from my work, and it’s keeping me from building really good relationships with the people I do care about.

What about you? Could you stand to focus on a few less people? Who would be in your 150?