But like so many wonderful things there is a dark side. Too much champagne creates obnoxious dinner guests. And too many followers  can create obnoxious tweeters, bloggers and human beings.

My four year old love to say, “that’s not how you do it. Let me show you how to do it” after figuring something out on her own or being shown something by her pre-k teacher. She wells with pride and is hoping for a pat on the back and a little admiration. I’m sure this reminds you of a blogger or two that is looking for a little more than an opportunity to share.

Fortunately, this is as far as it goes for my daughter. You see her audience has yet grow — it’s still limited to her immediate family. So far she has yet  to build 6,000 twitter followers and then morph into the the obnoxious, Rock Star, social media maven.

But frankly we all need to be conscious of loosing perspective once we get a little following. So how can you recognize if you’re suffering from the Rock Star Complex?

1. You constantly preach transparency but you don’t respond to tweets or comments on your blog because you’re so gosh darn busy.
2. You have an auto-play video of yourself on your blog that illustrates how great you are.
3. You refer to yourself in the royal “we.”
4. You’re constantly writing about how great you are rather than sharing great information.
5. You spend more than minute talking about yourself as a brand and not your business.
6. You call business trips “road trips” or even “tours.”
7. You think about how you will blog about a job more than how you will deliver value to your customers.
8. You think you’re more important and smarter than your readers.
9. Your original profession has been subsumed by the marketing of you,  your blog, your e-books, and your workshops.
10. You’re thinking of hiring a personal assistant.

I know people who are bright, energetic and engaged in person but don’t come off that way online. They have Facebook profiles that are never updated and Twitter accounts they haven’t posted to in weeks. Or worse, a blog that has gone entirely dark for months.

Sure it’s hard to keep up with but with a little planning it is completely possible to keep it real online 24/7. Here are a few things you can do to plan for it:

1. Post to your blog at least weekly. Try to Tweet everyday. If you’re using Facebook for business try and do something there daily. You don’t have to post everyday – commenting on other people’s posts goes a long way.
2. Exploit auto-posting features. Most blogging platforms, like WordPress allow you to set a later publication date. If you know you’re going have a busy week, you can set it and forget it.
3. Put time on your calender for social media activities. Most people put other important things on their calendar but don’t bother to for social media.
4. Use mobile apps. Take a few minutes on the train or waiting for a meeting to hammer out a post or send a couple tweets.
5. Write non-time-sensitive material and leave it on the back burner. Then pull the material out when things get busy.
6. If you’re maintaining a business profile don’t be shy about delegating all or a portion of the responsibility.  You may find one of your employees is more comfortable in the space than you are. It can be better when someone higher in the food chain takes responsibility for social media activities but if you can’t maintain an active presence, it’s better to go ahead and delegate.

Sure, your offline existence is more important than your online one – no doubt. But the two are increasingly intertwined – so it makes sense to be your best both off and online.

I’m writing this from “video village” on the set of a video and print production in LA. I’ve been really, really busy with this campaign so I haven’t had time to blog as much this last week. So what better time to address blogging frequency – which is exactly what I write about this week at the agency blog.

I had two conversations with talented ad creatives yesterday that reminded me of how far maintaining this blog and my other sites have taken me in the last year. The first was about SEO and the second was about proficiency with development. Neither one of them had been expected to have any technical expertise until they were laid off last year and started job hunting. Improving my skill set is something I’ve been passionate about on in the last couple years — obviously I have good reason.

Working with the Web began for me professionally in 1996 while writing the first website and banners ads for a car company. I’ve continued to work on digital assignments since. Writing possibly hundreds of sites, thousands of banner ads, and various web components to advertising campaigns since. I even had a blogger blog and a WordPress.com blog for awhile. But I never had a reason to get too involved in the technical side of things till I began this self-hosted blog.

It was having this blog that caused me to start thinking about all of the things that I took for granted when someone else was doing them. SEO, CSS, analytics and just getting things to function the way you want them too. It’s also allowed to be experiment with tools, like those neat buttons at the top and bottom of this post.

Where am I going with this? Reading blogs is a great way to gain useful information, be exposed to different things, and have a good laugh. But actively maintaining a blog will build a deeper understanding of how things actually work. And may also help you develop some marketable skills before you really, really need them.

Edit note: I know some folks are going to say I’m missing the point or I’m redefining the term.

I’m writing this because I feel like it has to be said. Blogger transparency is mostly bull squeeze.

Fellow bloggers, you may feel open and transparent but you can’t escape who you are — a person. And that means you’re a complicated mess of contradictions, illogical instincts, and sub-conscious emotions.

Sure, we all put on our blogs where we work, who are clients are, and that we’ve got Amazon affiliate links here or there. That’s all dandy. But it’s all pretty damn obvious that you work at places that have clients and if you link a book or review a camera, you might wanna make 50 cents.

What I’m writing about now are prejudices that we all have that are not so obvious. The stuff we can’t escape because of who we are and how we’ve lived our lives. How we were raised, the economic conditions we face, our families, race and religion. Or even the things other people have done to us. These things shape our perspective on life and the world around us. That also shape how we think.

Sometimes this is negative. What happens to us makes us narrow minded, inflexible in our thinking and intolerant of other’s perspectives. Just try reading a political blog or two.

But sometimes it’s great. It creates the edge we have that makes what we write more interesting than a fact-only piece written by the AP. And it fills a blog’s content with passion, insights and maybe a few curse words. Let’s face it, if you weren’t different than me, with your own biases and peculiarities, I probably wouldn’t be all that interested in what you had to say.

This gooey stuff is what makes people who they are. But is it really none of anyone else’s business? On a professional blog? And should every blog post with “I was born to a South Carolina share cropper and robbed a convenience store when I was 14″? Or “I had a daddy who was an alcoholic but I was a cheerleader and captain of the debate team”? It’s personal, but it’s also the stuff that could informs the way someone writes and the opinions they have — which is what blogging is all about.

And what about politics, religion, parenting and social affectations. Does stuff belong in the workplace? Opinions differ on this, so it differs on whether it belongs on and appears on one’s blog.

To be transparent and truly understand one’s motives, is this stuff is important? I think it is on many issues. And do you really think people would discuss issues as freely if they were completely and totally open about their pasts and their burdens? I doubt it. And that’s why I’m OK with opaque.

I’m not saying basic disclosure shouldn’t be defacto — I should know if you’re speaking about your client. I’m just getting a little sick of people telling me how transparent and unbiased they are and how I can trust everything they say to be fact because they let me know who they take money from. You know what? I should be able to trust you that you’re telling the truth. And advertisers generally get sued when they say something that isn’t true or intentionally misleading. So get over it already.

What do you think?