Leif Hartwig was traversing the country as a small business consultant when he realized that he — his body flying to and fro in an airplane — was serving as a conduit within and between businesses. “I figured that there really must be a better way (of sharing business information),” he said, and so he created YourOfficeAnywhere.com, a cloud-computing solution to the communication problems he was encountering regularly.

The University of Arizona alumnus saw an opportunity for a business that put all the tools necessary for workers to cooperate from disparate locations in one place. Services include a private, encrypted workplace, 100 Gigabytes of storage and sharing and web conferences for up to 200 people, not to mention an aggregated calendar. It also offers a “bird’s eye view” feature as a way to keep track of status updates and clients.

YourOfficeAnywhere.com is both a web and mobile app, and it uses encryption on par with financial services companies and defense contractors. “Our chief technology officer works for a defense contractor,” Hartwig said by way of emphasizing the seriousness with which he views security.

Although Tucson may at first seem an inauspicious place to launch a tech company, Hartwig said he intends to stay. “We’ve found incredible talent here,” he said. “We would like to remain in Tucson.”

To access an audience outside of the Old Pueblo, Hartwig and his team have relied on revenue-sharing deals that allow YourOfficeAnywhere.com to make use of the marketing channels of large associations such as the National Association of Wholesalers, which has 32,000 members.

With an increasing number of people working from home, Hartwig’s strategy seems timely.

The TucsonCitizen.com presence is expanding. Check us out now on Foursquare, as well as Instagram. This weekend we’ll be posting photos of life in the Tucson Festival of Books booth on Instagram, tweeting the day’s activities using the hashtag #tcbooks and checking in from the various festival workshops. Check in with us to get the inside scoop on one of Tucson’s great events. We hope to see you there. (In you miss us, check the site at the end of the day for a Storify recap of the festival of books as told by Tucsonans using social media.)

The reasons for bloggers to use social media are many, but here are some key points as I see them.

1. To connect directly with your readers. Most of us write to communicate with other people. Isn’t direct contact with people who have read your writing and want to respond to it a good thing? Perhaps the conversation will push that idea at the root of your blog post further. Perhaps even more ideas will result.

2. To build community. Many bloggers choose a subject because they are passionate about it. (There’s not much money in it, after all.) Passion is often related to a desire for change, and that change is often easier to effect by a group than by an individual. Social media helps put us in touch with like-minded people. Sometimes those people are influential – online and/or off – people you may not have direct access to otherwise.

3. To ensure that potential readers can find your work. Search engine optimization has been the name of the game in getting readers to Web sites, but the algorithm being optimized is in constant flux. Social media are increasingly being factored into the formula for determining search results. Plus, broadcasting on more than one channel is not a bad idea. Why not send party invitations to more than one address?