Together Everyone Achieves More

If you're a blogger who writes several times a week, you often run into the anxiety of what to do when you have offline business to turn to.

Some people just stop writing, which works, but all to often when you remove blogging from your schedule, it's hard to put back in.

Some people moan about leaving, but can't seem to pull themselves away from the computer. Those people often have exasperated spouses.

And some, those lucky few, have friends that can fill in and write content that actually continues to build the value of your brand. I'm talking, of course, about Rohit Bhargava, who writes the excellent and essential, Influential Interactive Marketing blog.

Rohit had some personal family business to take care of, in the form of a new child, and he prioritized, correctly, putting family in front of the blog. For those of us with business blogs, that's a bigger deal than setting aside your political or personal blog for a few weeks. Rohit brought in some heavy hitters, and in this post, he thanked them for their top-of-the-line writing. The writing is great, but so is Rohit's. What's really great, for him, is that he found backup bloggers who stepped in to keep his site going.

And you can too.

Mark Collier of the Viral Garden explains it, fittingly in a guest post on Rohit's blog.

Recently, there's been some great discussion about measuring the effectiveness of social media. These discussions are important and necessary in order to give companies and organizations valid tools and metrics that they can use to measure their social media efforts.

But in the end, these marketers need to keep in mind that succeeding with social media means connecting with people. I cringe a bit when I hear marketers talk about measurement and statistics, because that's applying a business mentality to an area that's about connecting with and understanding people.

When I talk to businesses and corporations about blogging, I tell them not to think of blogging as a direct tool to grow their business, but as a community-building tool. A tool that allows companies to better understand their customers, and that helps current and potential customers better understand the company. Business growth is a pleasant by-product of connecting with your customers via blogging.

Yes, there are measurable aspects to blogging, but I've found it's the people I meet while writing that sustain me, and ultimately makes blogging worthwhile. If you want to measure the effectivesness of your social networking, take a week off and see which of your blog buddies is willing to write for you. If you are generous with your time, and inject value into your community, you'll find yourself with a surfeit of posters. If blogging is just something you rip off on Sunday nights, and you haven't left a comment in three months, well, you'll get your answer there, too.