Intro to blogging for small businesses

This article is drawn from a presentation I am giving at my local Lions Club on the promise of blogging for small businesses. I’ll be looking at what blogging is, who’s doing it, and hopefully by the end we’ll figure out if it’s something worthwhile for a small business to pursue. This article is by no means an exhaustive reference, more like a fun jaunt through the blogosphere. What I’m excited about is that only 4 out of the 15 people I am presenting to have even heard about blogging. This means I get to step back, challenge my own assumptions, and really get down to what’s basic and important about blogging.

Let start with the definition of a blog. I really like how Blogger.com puts it:

A blog is a personal diary. A daily pulpit. A collaborative space. A political soapbox. A breaking-news outlet. A collection of links. Your own private thoughts. Memos to the world. Your blog is whatever you want it to be. There are millions of them, in all shapes and sizes, and there are no real rules. In simple terms, a blog is a web site, where you write stuff on an ongoing basis. New stuff shows up at the top, so your visitors can read what’s new. Then they comment on it or link to it or email you. Or not.

This definition seems to do things at once; the first half seems almost maddeningly vague. “Your blog is whatever you want it to be”, well what does that even mean? But then it reveals the truth, that a blog is just a website. This is the first core lesson about blogs: they’re just websites that feature fresh content and enable multi-way communication: from author to commenter, and from commenter to commenter.

Blogs are the upgrade to websites; they’re the equivalent of upgrading to Windows Xp from DOS. Instead of having a website that is stale and expensive to update, you can have a site that you can update as easily as you send an email. And you can get your readers to actively participate in a conversation with you, which is key to growing your influence and increasing customer happiness.

Behold the Blogosphere Emergent

According to David Sifry, founder of the blog tracking service, Technorati, there were 50 million blogs at the end of July 2006. What’s perhaps more amazing is that the total number of blogs has been doubling roughly every six months for the past three years. That means there are 100 times more blogs now than there were three years ago when Technorati was founded.

There’s a strange thing that happens when millions upon millions of people blog. A network emerges. This network is widely referred to as the “blogosphere” and it is one of the most significant things to happen, ever. Why? Well, the short answer is, it can spread ideas and promote conversation across all geographical boundaries, and at a speed that is absolutely amazing. Adam Peneberg of Wired News compares the blogging phenomenon to free-market capitalism:

In a sense, Blogs function like peer-review journals do in the academic world, but there’s a key difference. The distribution of articles in academic journals is largely controlled by a publishing cartel that charges exorbitant amounts for subscriptions, which are subsidized by the institutions that can afford them. Think of it as a socialist model for information exchange.

With Blogs, however, anybody with an Internet connection can engage anybody else. Concepts are presented, attacked, sliced, diced, added to and subtracted from, mangled, massaged and molded until what is left is an amalgam of the finest we as an online society has to offer. For the digitally well-endowed, it’s akin to free-market capitalism, with information as its currency. And not only do we all get to watch, we can join in.

James Torio writes in his masters thesis on blogging:

According to a Pew Internet study, more than one-in-ten Internet users have posted material or comments on other Blogs…Many of those posters themselves have Blogs.People are just not passively taking in information but they are processing, adding, reacting and spreading it around themselves. The rate that the Blogosphere can spread information gives it the ability to move quickly to produce a major impact on whatever topic is being discussed.

Some Blogs attract over 400,000 visitors a day from all over the world; while others attract only a handful of the Bloggers’(See glossary) friends and family. There are Blogs that charge $4,500 a week for a small advertising space on the site. A number of people have used Blogs to launch into careers and other people have been fired from their jobs because of what they wrote in their Blogs. The one thing they all have in common is that they are part of an intricately interconnected cyber world—the Blogosphere, and to varying degrees they can participate in the global conversation.

Although Blogs are on the Internet, they are not like other forms of media, such as radio or television. Blogs consist of a person’s thoughts, feelings,and views. It’s a unique voice. Radio and television deliver a one-way message. Content is designed for their passive viewers or receivers; the system is similar to books and readers. Blogs are capable of being a conversation. Whereas other media is a one way message from a sender to a receiver, Blogs are two-way.

For further reading, I highly recommend James’ whole thesis. It’s quite long, but for example, the first 15 pages are absolutely priceless. He paints a picture of the rise of media in general and how it has affected the transmission of information in the last 200 years. He then illustrates with deft touch how blogging fits into the picture. It’s so good that it frankly gave me chills reading it. You can’t help but feel like you’re in the middle of a new revolution and that things will never be quite the same again (in a very good way).

Now that you’ve heard some admittedly bold claims about the promise of blogging, let’s pull our focus back and dive into a wide range of blog examples. What we’re after here is proof of the aforementioned and montrously large claims.

Guy Kawasaki, a venture capitalist blogger

Guy’s blog is for entrepreneurs and it offers a great perspective from someone who’s been there and done that for years. The post pictured above is one of my favorites because it features his “Art of the Start Video” (which is being served via Google Video). By blogging and making himself available, he is positioned in the best possible way to capture every venture capitalist’s dream- that is to find and fund the next Google early on. Guy says he spends between 2-4 hours every day blogging. This is the first indication that coming up with quality content isn’t a walk in the park; in fact, it’s usually a part time job at least. His reward for being so dedicated? He is one of the top 100 bloggers in the world and as such he wields massive influence online.

GapingVoid

GapingVoid is a popular blog written by Hugh Macleod. Hugh makes great (and often very salty) insights into marketing and life in general via his unique cartoons. He’s finding the success online as a global microbrand that eluded him when he worked at a “real” job. He’s leveraging his blog’s popularity by helping other companies launch successful blogs. I’ll be showing you two examples of his handiwork.

Mark Cuban - Blog Maverick

This is Mark Cuban’s blog. He writes about the Mavericks, his business experiences, and well, whatever pops into his head. He’s an outspoken billionaire so his blog is pretty popular. What’s interesting is that he blogs even though he doesn’t need to. He’s probably the most like a scrappy first-time entrepreneur of any billionaire I’ve ever heard of.

Creating Passionate Users

A woman by the name of Kathy Sierra writes this blog entitled “Creating passionate users” and I have to tell you it is one of the best blogs on the internet. If you’re looking for inspiration on finding success by treating your customers right, this is the blog to read. It’s so good in fact that you won’t believe it’s not a best-selling book (of course it probably will be soon).

Signals vs. Noise

Signals vs. Noise is written by the web software firm, 37Signals. They seem to be single handedly spearheading the freemium software movement, where essential productivity and business software is offered free for the entry version and at a reasonable cost for premium plans. All their apps are hosted online for you, available wherever there is an internet connection. I couldn’t live without their flagship product, Basecamp, the best project management tool you’ll ever find.

On any given day, about 30 thousand people read SVN, and this translates to major influence. For instance, they recently decided to release their second book as a pdf online, without going through a publisher like they did for their first book. Since March 1st 2006 they’ve sold over 18 thousand copies and grossed about $215,000 in revenues (almost pure profit). They compare that to 8000 copies of their first book sold over two years time, for a profit of only $11,000. They credit their blog audience and their choice to self-publish as the difference.

Stormhoek

Stormhoek is a small winery based in South Africa that is leveraging the power of blogging to create a global microbrand for itself. Their mantra is “freshness matters” and they blog about everything having to do with that and wine in general. They’re doing some exciting things beyond blogging too; for instance, with the help of Hugh of GapingVoid they launched a “free wine for 100 bloggers” campaign.

Stormhoek realized that if they could influence the influencers, they could get their brand known in a wine world crowded with entrenched competition. Their strategy worked and is helping them get into stores all over europe simply because their name is going out before them. When they talk to these shop owners, their blog approach is part of their innovative story; it sets them apart and helps make them interesting and attractive.

English Cut: Bespoke Saville Row Tailors

English Cut is the blog of bespoke saville row tailor, Thomas Mahon. He sells $4000 suits, so he’s definitely trying to reach the high end market. He started out struggling to get new clients, but with a little blog help from Hugh (again!), he has changed all that. He now reveals his passion for bespoke tailoring, and his vast knowledge and open approach, all through his blog. As a result, he’s been booked so solid that he’s considering saying that he’ll only do 100 suits a year, introducing the element of scarcity into his work even further, and probably causing his services to be in even higher demand.

English Cut is another great example of a global microbrand. Thomas is simply sharing is expertise on bespoke, and in return, he is now the authority on the subject for discerning men with means from all over the globe. Utilizing a blog has helped him reach a global audience with a ludicrously small investment of money. The main investment is the time he takes to update his blog and make consistently excellent suits.

Bringing it into a small business context

Ok, so we see how people are blogging online, becoming authorities, and growing large audiences that then help them in whatever they do. With the exception of English Cut and Stormhoek, the blogs I mentioned above are all “top 100″ blogs as rated by Technorati. Does English Cut care though that it’s not a top 100 blog? Not one twit because they are going after a very niche audience online, and that’s all they need to do. This is the same mindset local small businesses should take when considering blogging. They aren’t trying to be global microbrands (although they could be, should they find a reason to try for that). Instead, they’re trying to grow their business at home. Once again, blogging can help them. Here is my favorite example:

Quoddy Link Marine

Quoddy Link Marine takes people out on whale watching tours, so they naturally run a blog called “Sightings and Updates”. I love how this blogger put it:

I was on holiday in New Brunswick last week and stumbled across a seemingly unlikely but unquestionably “real” company that has its own corporate blog. There are at least a half-dozen small companies in the Bay of Fundy area that offer whale watching tours. Based on the limited information I had gathered from various regional tourism brochures, the whale tour companies all seemed to offer pretty much the same service for a similar price. So, like many other people would do in my situation, I turned to the Internet and explored the various companies’ Websites.

The companies without Websites immediately lost my business. (That’s a topic for another blog posting as well!) The remaining companies offered pretty much the same info on their Websites, with one exception. Quoddy Link Marine, to my pleasant surprise, also had a “Sightings and Updates” blog. The blog is maintained by Danielle, a marine biology graduate in charge of photographing, identifying and recording the whales and sharing that information with various marine research organizations. Danielle’s blog chronicles through words and photos (by Danielle) the recent whale sightings and had been updated earlier the day I first looked at the blog with photos of whales that had been spotted that morning.

I was immediately captivated by the near-immediacy of this information and the fact it chronicled the spontaneous nature of whale watching. The “Sightings and Updates” blog also demonstrated to me that Quoddy Link Marine really cared about whales and the environment, not just selling whale tour tickets. Thanks to their blog, I also felt one degree closer to the people behind this tour company than with those from any of their competitors.

Needless to say, I chose to go whale watching with Quoddy Link Marine, not because they had a blog, but because of what the blog revealed to me about the company and its staff, something a typical corporate Website is not usually very good at. And in case you’re wondering, the company and the whale watching tour lived up to my expectations. The afternoon we went out we played ‘hide-and-seek’ with a minke whale plus saw lots of harbour seals, harbour porpoises, and a young bald eagle.

First steps

Let’s assume you want to grow your influence and audience, make more money, form long-lasting customer relationships, and all that good stuff. Well, if you don’t have a website already, you need one in the form of a blog, and if you already have a website and it’s not a blog, you should either replace it with a blog, or add a blog to it.

Before you jump into blogging though, you have to think about what you want to blog about. What are you an expert at? Are you even willing to devote time to growing your influence by giving back to your audience? There are many weapons in the arsenal: text, pictures, video, and a wide array of subjects to wax on about - think about how you can use these weapons in your effort to make your blog unique and compelling. In the end, if you can’t imagine having fun doing this, you probably shouldn’t blog because your lack of passion will betray you.

If you want to dip your toes into the water, there are two great free blogging services you can try: Blogger and Wordpress.com. These are fully functional services, but you’ll notice they feature ads and their corporate branding. That’s why for serious small businesses, I always recommend a custom designed blog. There’s no need to pay an arm and a leg for this option though. In years past, coding full blogging functionality would have cost several thousands of dollars, but today there are open source tools that provide all the functionality your blog needs for free. All your web developer has to do is customize the design and functionality for your business. This isn’t an easy task, and every blog is different, but at least the cost is far less than it used to be.

Each one of you is a dynamic business person. You know that you have to constantly be learning and adapting to stay competitive. A blog facilitates that by making your website as dynamic and flexible as you are. A blog can be the cornerstone of your efforts to succeed locally. And, if you have any aspirations of creating a global microbrand, you have no other choice but to blog!

For fun, take some time to check out different blogs. Start by visiting the 9rules.com blog network, a place to, as they say it, “explore the best content on the web”. You might also look at Technorati’s list of the Top 100 blogs. Who knows what you might be inspired to do!