Handing Over the Keys to Influential Marketing (and Having a Baby)

As I have shared with many folks over the past few weeks, my wife and I are expecting our second baby any day now.  It feels like getting ready for an extended vacation, except I'll be trading the overrated benefits of sleep and relaxation for three hour shifts changing diapers and burping (which any father will tell you is the first skill we truly get to pass along to our kids).  I considered simply skipping blogging for a few weeks when the baby comes, or even trying to post less frequently, but I realized that I can't count on being able to put out content that I'd be proud of and spend the time I want to with the new baby at the same time.

So for the rest of this month, I am taking a break from blogging and "handing over the keys" of this blog to a group of marketers who have all kindly agreed to step in.  Primary duties for managing the blog will fall to two extremely smart and capable marketers who have been helping me over the past 3-4 months collect research and insights for my book: Jinal Shah and Geeta Saini.  They will both be blogging, responding to comments, and trying to schedule posts to happen on some sort of regular basis from other contributors.  On the point about other contributors, I reached out this week to a group of bloggers and writers whose work I admire, and whose voices I think all of you would be interested in hearing.  Most of them generously agreed to do a guest blog post sometime over the next few weeks, including:

• Ann Handley - content officer and smart thinker behind the intensely useful MarketingProfs.com
• Debbie Weil - author of The Corporate Blogging Book and fellow DC- based blogger
• Jay Berkowitz - CEO of Ten Golden Rules marketing agency and marketing blogger
• John Bell - head of our 360 DI group at Ogilvy and author of Digital Influence Mapping Project
• Karl Long - works for Nokia and authors the insightful blog ExperienceCurve.
• Kevin Dugan - super smart PR blogger and co-creator of the Bad Pitch Blog
• Lee Odden - one of the most prominent marketing bloggers at Top Rank Online Marketing
• Mack Collier - fellow marketing blogger and creator of the Viral Garden Top 25 marketing list
• Nedra Weinreich - author of Spare Change, my favourite blog on social marketing
• Peter Kim - an analyst with Forrester who also writes an insightful blog called Being Peter Kim
• Tim Ferriss - best selling author of 4 Hour Workweek, blogger and expert in "lifestyle design"

There are a few more names that I may add over the next few days, but based just on this list of contributors above, my guess is the quality of posts on this blog will probably go way up from what I have managed to do so far - so I know you are all in good hands.  I'll be back to posting on December 1st, and until then I know I'm leaving Influential Marketing in some capable hands.  I look forward to reading it along with you.