We come as we are

So this Manimal wrote us (or phoned us) and asked us out on a date. He told us we could be one big happy blogging family and not give anything up in the process. Well, actually I can’t remember what he told me because he’s a smart Manimal and spent all his time chatting up my girl (and who can blame him). I have to tell you that
Shannon and I thought twice about getting cozy with this Manimal, but in the end our positive experiences with him and our appreciation of his work were so pervasive that they motivated us to get on board. At least that’s my story of how we have come to be part of RecruitingBloggers.com. It may have been that he kept calling us and bugging us as well. And then there’s that whole Canada based plot that he and Jason Davis have to take over the entire Recruitosphere and annex Seattle, NYC, California and South Florida as new Provinces. Blame Canada eh!

In considering whether this project made sense for us we concerned ourselves with marketing silliness like would having duplicate content on our site and RecruitingBloggers.com hurt our Google rankings, what it might due to our oh-so-important online persona
and brand and…well you know. Let’s just say we caught ourselves taking EXCELER8ion just a little too seriously. It’s not that those things aren’t worthy of some consideration. But you have to ask yourself the right question. Is blogging about page views, unique visitors and fishing for some new clients or is it about community and connecting with people? “It’s about none of that!” you yell – it’s about satisfying our egos! YES! So in that vein why wouldn’t we all want to be authors in untold communities? Well, the effort for one of course. But Manimal says we don’t have to do extra work and can just cross post. Perhaps. I think the jury is out on that still but we’re game to figure it out.

I read some quote about 10 years ago (can’t remember the source) that was something along the lines that having context for a given situation raises your IQ by 10 – 20 points. It really took me by surprise when I first heard that, and then the more I considered it, the more it made sense to me. So the context of the RecruitingBloggers site, and the community to be built there, may in fact alter how you come to see or interpret the various authors and their posts. It is a different lens that you’ll be looking through after all. That’s one point about context. The other context is the one that our decision was made around for doing this and that is based on what we find valuable about blogging. And what we find valuable is the connections we’re making with real people. People like Ami Givertz, Jason Davis, Michael Keleman, Jason Warner, Heather Hamilton, Dennis Smith, Zoe and Gretchen (hey, they don’t have last names do they?), Yvonne LaRose, Regina Miller, Josh (definitely just “Josh”), David Manaster, Jim Stroud, Astha Parmar, Jim and Frankie Durbin, Gautam Ghosh, Michael Specht and his son BJ, Stephen Fowler, Steven Rothberg, Easton Ellsworth and so many more (you get the idea). We also value that blogging helps us develop our thoughts on business and our areas of marketing and social media expertise (there’s some gratification in working some brain fart through to some semi-coherent conclusion). It makes you sharper in the way that doing a presentation over and over gets your speaking points down to ‘just the good stuff’ or how your elevator pitch eventually becomes so well rounded that you could communicate it to your President, your six year old, and your pet Jack Russell Terrier
Scooby equally well (Ruff, Ruff, yap, yap – rohkay!). It’s not that we don’t get the occasional client because of our blog – we do (and sure we value that) but finding money isn’t as fun as finding someone to work with that you can appreciate and vice versa (and still make money eh!).

Blogging helps us find people we can have great conversations with and many times a doorway to true friendships. When you consider these things that we value how could blogging for another site really hurt us? Will we meet less people than before or make less interesting connections? I doubt it based on this being such a relevant and similar forum to what we’ve already gotten plugged into with EXCELER8ion. To contrast what I just said, I’ll compare our experience with Newsvine, a social media news site. My experiences with the Newsvine product were all good ones but the community left me flat. I’m SURE there are interesting people on Newsvine but for me the experience was like being at a dinner party and not having anything in common to talk to your table partner about – forced, uncomfortable, tedious. That probably has a lot to do with how I ended up there (interest in social media vs. a hard core news junkie and specifically one interested in politics). So as Newsvine is about news and political news more than anything, Digg.com is a community that is rabid about tech stuff, gadgets, web 2.0 sites, Ajax (not the cleaning kind) and Firefox (not the video game). If those things make your heart skip faster then you’ll probably enjoy your activities and interactions in those communities. So on Recruitingbloggers I think we’ll all be in good company.

A Manimal got this group of people together and together we now have the chance to become a community. And maybe our community will grow and evolve or maybe it won’t. But I can tell you that because of people, (I mean Manimal) I bothered to put aside a lot of other pressing deliverables today and write these thoughts down. So, here’s to our favorite Manimal who has led us to this precipice, and here’s to the bloggers who joined us in our folly, and here’s to you for coming to join in on the conversation. Won’t you sit down and stay a while? We’d love to talk.

Julian and Shannon
RecruitingBloggerna8ion

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