BlueGlass: When great minds come together…

I don't usually post too much on the ins and outs of the SEO industry. I'm in it I guess, but there are other blogs way more geared to report on that. However, for this merger that just happened, I'll make an exception. I'm talking about a new company called BlueGlass.

The reason this interests me is that we have a weird issue in the search marketing / social media industry: most companies have 1, in some rare occasions 2 figureheads. Hardly ever are there more than 2 true experts at a company. BlueGlass is different. It combines not 1 or 2 heroes of the industry. If you've been reading blogs in this industry, it's hard to have missed the likes of Brent Csutoras (a buddy from SEOktoberfest), Chris Winfield, Dave Snyder or Loren Baker. Or people like Danielle Winfield, Ann Smarty, Jordan Kasteler, do I need to keep going?

This amazes me. These guys and girls are among the best from several specialties within our industry, from online PR to viral marketing and SEO: it's really hard to get multiple great minds into a company like that. Usually there's cases of conflicting ego's, different interests. When I asked Loren Baker the question "how do you deal with those 6-7 ego's in one company?" he said:

"We all have our own divisions and services we are 100% in charge of, so for example, I run the Online PR & Social Outreach Division, and have a dedicated team underneathe me. Their only job is to do what I tell them, get assignments done, report to clients on calls when needed, and report on their assignments.

Utilizing a central project management system assists with that, but my team is my team, and my division's responsibilities all fall under me. In the same way, Brent is the SVP of Viral Marketing, if I need something there, I send it to him, if he needs bloggers to write about a client he's working on, he processes the order with me. This way, we don't step on each others' toes and have defined roles and responsibilities."

Sounds pretty solid and thought through. I'm very curious as to how these guys will do. But as Dave Snyder put it when I congratulated him on IM: "I love collaborating with people, always better when they are friends". I think that's the main point: friendship is the basis of all this, compared with a shared love for the trade. To end with another quote from Dave:

"My whole thing in life is that I care more about what I am doing than money
so the merger for me was amazing because of what we could accomplish as a team and not how much we could make."

It sounds amazing, and I wish them all the best!