During my senior year of high school in Southern California, a friend told me about a job opening at Chuck E. Cheese.

This wasn’t just any job opening. It was for the actual character of Chuck E. Cheese.
To be Chuck E., to inhabit him completely, meant so much more than being a gigantic, life-sized mouse.
It meant embodying a symbol of friends and family, birthdays and straight-A-report cards, and my first favorite flavor combination: pizza and root beer.
Also, it meant making wild gestures and dancing on tables while hiding my true identity. In other words, a dream job.
My qualifications were stellar for the oversized-animal-character industry. I had already worked for 3 years as a puppeteer/actor in a Sesame-street like production for kids. And, I had 3 years babysitting experience. Who better qualified than me, I asked myself? Who?

I aced the first interview. The assistant manager seemed nice enough.
Her boss–my second interview–wasn’t so nice. I could feel him scanning me for signs of moral weakness. It seemed I lacked the gravitas Chuck E. required. This made me sad, which detracted from the cheerful, half-crazed, up-for-anything image I had created for myself.
Then he asked me this solemn question: “Are you a leader, or are you a follower?” I had to be honest. I conceded I was a follower. But a follower who loved Chuck E. Cheese. This must not have been the answer he was looking for. I didn’t get the job.

Since then, I’ve come to loathe the word “leader” and all the things it implies.
It’s as if leaders inhabit this special, higher plane of being, while followers trail slime and drool behind them.
When it comes to marketing, we’ve all heard the benefits of becoming a thought leader. But no one talks about the benefits of becoming a thought follower.
All of that seems to be changing, though. The internet is ushering in a new era for followers and followership, making it easy & respectable & normal to become a thought follower–and even to use this as a way of increasing your business’ revenue.

I was turned onto a book called “Connect! A Guide to a New Way of Working from GigaOM’s Web Worker Daily” by Anne Truitt Zelenka (thanks, Pam Slim).
This book finally helped me “get” what all the Web 2.0 fuss is about. Blogs, I get. RSS feeds, check. But IM & Twitter & Facebook just seem like distractions. “I’m washing my cat now.” “I’m drinking coffee.” “I just found an old sock.” “I’ve been turned into a Zombie!” Who cares?
But then I realized that Twitter and all the rest are really just better ways for us to follow each other. Not necessarily to show off everything we know, but to ask questions, to have conversations, to learn from others. The point of communications–and marketing–isn’t necessarily to persuade, to lead, to argue our points, to tell people this is this and that is that. Rather, it is to be open-ended. To invite discussion, iterations, disagreements, whatever. Just to be open.

We can start by never answering Twitter’s question: “What are you doing?” In fact, as a rule of thumb, we shouldn’t answer questions. Maybe we can start by asking them instead. Or, exploring the questions, the problems, without telling someone what they should do or what they should think.
Sometimes I learn more by posing a question than by answering one–especially with blogs.
It’s scary putting myself out there. Like that Chuck E. Cheese interview all over again.
But that’s the risk we take when we rise above the slime to reach out to human life forms.

So I will be proud. I will stand tall in my thought-followership. Because when I follow the right way, it helps me to be a better leader. And I won’t need a mouse costume for that.