Anthony Bourdain wrote that there has to be something seriously wrong with your mental state if you chose to cross that line between being a chef to being a restaurant owner. The same can be said of a blogger becoming a manager of a collaborative blog.

My first official foray into this arena came this week at one of the blog writer’s regular meetings. As I discovered, when you’re dealing with multiple writers, you take on a whole other boatload of crazy. For those brave enough to stand at the intersection of social media marketing and modern management, the task is to not only to create interesting content, but also to motivate others to blog.

As for how the meeting went, let me just say that it could have been worse. The key takeaway from it was that collaborative blogs are just like any other social interaction – to bring results, you have to get personal.

Since this topic is broad, complex and completely up my neurotic alley, I think this is going to make an interesting on-going commentary. For now though, I’ll just mention that as blogs proliferate and marketers discover the power of harnessing them, I believe we’re going to see more of these collaborative blogs emerge. The reason is simple; with a collaborative blog the perspectives end up being more balanced and realistic than a single-writer blog. In turn, marketers and businesses are going to be more prone to work with them.

If this trend continues – and I’ll cover examples in future posts – the demand for talented and reasonable managers of these collaborative blogs will increase. Hopefully, by exploring this topic as I find my own way through collaborative blog management, readers can share their own experiences and we can figure out just what the heck we’ve gotten ourselves into.

Technorati Tags: Blog Management, blog manager, Marketing Diner