Guest Blog by Emily Cagle

As part of #BeMyGuest month, we are delighted to have a guest blog by one of the originators of the campaign Emily Cagle on how she and Adam Vincenzini developed this great idea.  It just goes to show how easy it can be to use social media to connect with imaginative and insightful people. #BeMyGuest is a simple (yet clever!) way to demonstrate the value of collaboration – a great way for small businesses to expose and promote their ideas to a totally new audience.  It doesn’t matter if you are new to blogging or been writing for years. Give it a go – take part in #BeMyGuest!

Blogging fever: how #BeMyGuest was born

I met Adam Vincenzini about 4 months ago. We both blog about PR and communications, and we are both very active on Twitter, so we were soon firm social media friends.

Chatting one evening on Skype, we were sharing experiences of what had worked for building engagement of our respective blogs (here and here). Adam has recently experienced a big jump in his audience after running the #140from140 initiative, which crowd sourced 140 definitions of social media from comms professionals. Meanwhile, I’d had a lot of success hosting guest posts written by others in the PR and related industries, creating something of a hub for expert advice in the industry.

We hit on the idea for #BeMyGuest about 2 minutes later. Sharing content = sharing audiences, so what if it was easier for bloggers to find each other and mutually benefit from an exchange of content? And what if all this was concentrated into a month of concerted blogging activity? We announced the initiative on Monday 1^st March.

The use of the hashtag #BeMyGuest to indicate you’re looking to swap blogs is the key activity driving the initiative, but during the week, we have also created a number of other ways for bloggers to engage, including:

• a Posterous blog, #BeMyGuest Blogger, to house regular #BeMyGuest updates, including a full list of participants;
• a Twitter account (@bemyguestmonth) to share updates, help facilitate connections, and tweet out tips (alongside @emilycagle and @adamvincenzini);
• a Facebook fan page to capture the highlights of activity across the other platforms.

By Friday (Day 5), Twitter had seen almost a thousand uses of the hashtag and we had over 130 bloggers on board from the UK, US, Australia and all over Europe. As I write this, the campaign is still gathering momentum, and guest posts are beginning to pop up on all manner of subjects, from social media to shed working, and from writing to working mums.

Visit http://bemyguestblogger.posterous.com/ for more information about how to get involved, and follow @bemyguestmonth on Twitter for regular updates.

— Emily Cagle

Emily is Director of Emily Cagle Communications and Adam is a Senior Consultant at Paratus Communiations