Fame is relative. And I don’t mean if your relatives are named Kennedy or Bush that you are famous, although that doesn’t hurt.

Every niche has its own superstars. You’ve seen them at conventions. Or you see their names everyone on the web.

But only the people in that niche have any idea of who those chosen personalities are. And sometime, niches are micro niches with their own levels of superstars.

Case in point.

I attended an Internet Marketing conference over weekend. Now, I don’t want to toot my horn, but I did write one of the first books about marketing on the Internet back in 1996 when the Internet was really new. And I taught the first course on Internet Marketing at Berkeley. I am pretty well known, although I don’t make a career of getting known. I have a life.

So imagine my surprise when I attended this conference and the conference promoter didn’t know who I was!

My ego was a bit crushed, I’ll admit, but life goes on in an interesting way.

The conference coordinator told his story. He had produced the first Internet marketing conference a year before my book had been published — and I had never heard of him!

I was known in the corporate marketplace. He was known in the business opportunities marketplace.

Coincidentally, we knew a lot of the same people!

Point of the story: Fame is relative. You could be sitting next to the president of the American Bar Association on your next plane ride and never know it.

Today’s Chipping Point: Treat every new contact as a potential superstar. They just might be.