Chris Bro­gan and I first met when I was in Africa. We “met” through the won­der­ful world of blog­ging. I was work­ing as a man­ager at a non-profit orga­ni­za­tion whose Africa head­quar­ters were in Nairobi, Kenya. I found Chris’s blog through another long-forgotten social media author­ity. Chris’s blog quickly made it to the top of my daily must-read list. His easy-going man­ner, wide knowl­edge of many top­ics and above all, humil­ity, drew me in. He has the abil­ity to relate with a large num­ber of peo­ple and make them feel like they have value. Rare indeed.

Chris found me through our mutual friend Jon Swan­son. I was blog­ging about the quirk­i­ness of life in the fren­zied city of Nairobi. Chris enjoyed my per­spec­tives and appre­ci­ated some of the work we went there to accomplish.

How did Chris change my life? He intro­duced me to the world of social media. I real­ized that I enjoyed that world! Man­age­ment was not my cup of tea — at least when it involved directly man­ag­ing 15 peo­ple, none of whom were Amer­i­cans. (Cul­tural gaps were mag­ni­fied in ways that I never expected.) So when our tour of duty was up, we returned home to Col­orado — and social media became part of my job mix. Thank you Chris!

Dis­clo­sure: a small part of why I wrote this post is that I’m enter­ing this post to try to win a free trip to #SOBCon2010 (the Suc­cess­ful and Out­stand­ing Blog­gers Con­fer­ence in Chicago). I met Chris and Jon face-to-face at SOB­Con 2009. I must say that more peo­ple than Chris changed my life as a result of the 2009 conference.