With his book, Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust, having recently been named a Top 10 book of the year by Amazon, Chris Brogan is social-media marketing’s man of the hour.

And if you spend even a little time on his blog, it’s easy to see why. First of all, even though Brogan is president of a hot-shot marketing company, he is directly engaged with his audience, building relationships with his blog readers at the same time as he builds his brand — these two activities being, of course, mutually inclusive in social media land, whether you’re mom or a pop or a millionaire CEO.

Brogan is both wise and warm. Human is the word you’ll hear in conversations about the guy, such as this one, in which he’s compared to another social media expert, Gary Vaynerchuk, who is definitely engaging but a bit more over-the-top. (If the two geniuses were cast in a production of Dumb and Dumber, Vaynerchuk would be Jim Carrey; Brogan, Jeff Daniels.)

If you’re someone who’s still trying to figure out how to make blogging, new media, social networking, and so forth, work for your brand (read: everyone), Brogan is a guiding light, dishing out practical advice without bombarding you with jargon. His archived post from well over a year ago, Basic Business Blogging Suggestions, is one of the best primers we’ve run across in a while on getting started blogging. (Even though we’ve been at this a while, we always like returning to the basics, especially when guided there by really smart people.)

See that first point, “Above All Else, Be Human”? There’s that h-word again. Many business types don’t think it’s appropriate to show a human side when participating in online-based marketing. Being open about your life and yourself on social media compromises your privacy, right? Leaves you open for attack?

Come on. What are you afraid of?

Fact is, potential customers, clients, partners, employees — anyone who might end up working with you in any capacity — want to know what you’re like as a person. From his blog, to his Flickr (from which the above image was cribbed) to his tellingly @reply-ridden Twitter, Brogan has used the transparency (there’s that word again) factor of social media to present himself to the world as a guy you would like to have in your corner.

And that requires a certain fearlessness.