The Collaboration Debate

This is another guest post from my most regular guest blogger, Ivin Viljoen (@Authopublisher on Twitter) whose passion is self-publishing.

BLOG COLLABORATORS WANTED

I posted an article on my self publishing blog on Monday inviting people to collaborate with me. I used a couple ideas as requirements for the collaborations from what I’ve learned from  Bizsugar and mentioned that participating requires a test commitment of three months.

This post is not necessarily to teach anything but to start a debate. Have a look at my proposed strategy where I  ask for blog collaborators. It speaks of a couple people (I think ten is a powerful number) adopting a ‘tribe’ mentality and building a small community of bloggers.

Social proof is instrumental in starting something to snowball and go viral, as the Traffic Blogger‘s guest post Content is NOT King here on Growmap did recently when it was retweeted by celebrity speaker @TonyRobbins and written about by highly influential Twitter user and blogger TweetSmarter who took Tony to task about not using retweet etiquette by retweeting his tweet about that post without attribution. That post ended up with 375 Retweets to date and received a record 3,078 page views.

Having a couple bloggers helping each other’s numbers go up couldn’t hurt. All it takes is for one prominent, influential blogger/celebrity to take notice and you’re pretty much made.

This is a mindset and practice advocated by Seth Godin and practiced to a degree on the Twitter powered social media site Triberr. The concept is leveraging the power of your tribe’s followers on Twitter which expands your reach. I’ve tried getting an invite and it’s very hard to get it. Even in the little tribes. I am not saying my proposal is better – it’s just more practical for bloggers. It takes time and effort, but I think it will make a great impact for bloggers to ‘huddle’ together and use their influence to multiply their efforts.

Synergy is when the result is greater than the sum of the parts. Normally when 10 and 10 is added, it equals 20! Synergy, on the other hand, is where the two efforts are multiplied. So it becomes 100. Our collective efforts are multiplied through the synergy that collaboration offers us!

Here are the prerequisites to participate. Have a look at them and let me what you think:

• We comment on each blog involved in the tribes’ posts at least one post per day.
• We ReTweet each other’s posts and engage each other on Twitter.
• We share each other’s posts on our social media platforms (all of ‘em). Minimum the following: LinkedIn (if you have one), Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon.
• We commit to at least one guest post for each of the other nine blogs in the group per month. (That’s 2 guest posts average/week) and linking to the post in twitter and blogs (both guest blogger and host).
• We will review the other nine individuals’ blogs once in the next three months.
• We will do an interview with the other nine bloggers in the next three months.
• We will review each others blogs on Alexa.

We’ll do the above combination of things for a trial period of three months and then evaluate the effort.  Here’s why I wrote the post this way. After I posted, I approached some of my blogger friends along with some I didn’t have a relationship with. The response I got from everyone was mixed. Some said that it’s a ‘false economy’. Others say they don’t have time being overwhelmed already. Then a few signed up.

Here is the call to action. I will be trying to get this collaboration effort going nonetheless, but I think a discussion around what I think will be a phenomenon that will sidestep search engine altogether through building networks that can exist powerfully without sucking up to search engines.

I know this is not really anything new, but my configuration is tweaked around the experience I have gathered over the last couple months. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the idea in principle and it’s viability in the greater web.

If you want to collaborate with me get in touch.

P.S. This effort is designed for smaller bloggers to get their effort together to make an impact quickly and grow fast.

NOTE from Gail: There is no debate in my mind. If you want to
see the power of collaboration see who was singled out in the
Cornell University Yahoo! Research Twitter Study

Join other bloggers who collaborate with us
See the list in this Small Business Advice post.

Tagged as: bizsugar, Blog, Seth Godin, StumbleUpon, Twitter