Small Business Blogging?

Ben McConnell from the well-read Church of the Customer marketing blog lists seven reasons a small business should blog. To summarize McConnell, blogs are beneficial because they:

1. Allow bloggers to "humanize" an organization
2. Function as an instant-feedback mechanism
3. Enable information sharing
4. Facilitate the spread of buzz
5. Enable simultaneous conversations
6. Offer any attractive online presence if existing web sites are lacking
7. Position the blogger/company as industry experts

These points all seem true, in general, but businesses must deal in specifics, and not all small businesses (and their markets) are built the same. First, because blogging requires time and writing skills, not all small businesses are well suited to the task. Plus, bloggers need a reason to blog. According to author Aliza Sherman Risdahl, "it can be challenging to find a legitimate reason for blogging unless the sector served has a steep learning curve (like wine), a lifestyle associated with certain products or service (like camping gear or pet products) or a social mission (like improving the environment or donating a portion of revenues to charity)."

Because of that, entrepreneur and blogger Guy Kawasaki says that not all small businesses need blogs: "If you’re a clothing manufacturer or a restaurant, blogging is probably not as high on your list as making good food or good clothes."

According to Risdahl, consultants are good candidates for blogs: “They are experts in their fields and are in the business of telling people what to do...As a consultant, blogging clearly helps you get hired. If you are selling a product, you have to be much more creative because people don’t want to read a commercial."

Blogs: "Unimaginative Failures"

Wall Street Journal blogger Ben Worthen calls most corporate blogs "unimaginative failures," noting, "Not only are these corporate blogs boring as paint, but the businesses behind admit they don’t have much value." Ouch.

The catalyst for Worthen's comments is a new study from Forrester Research. Forrester reviewed 90 blogs from Fortune 500 business-to-business companies and surveyed B2B marketers. As Worthen notes:

Forrester found that most B2B blogs are “dull, drab, and don’t stimulate discussion.” Seventy percent stuck to business or technical topics, 74% rarely get comments, and 56% simply regurgitated press releases or other already-public news. Not surprisingly, 53% of B2B marketers say that blogging has marginal significance or is irrelevant to their strategies—the rest call it somewhat or highly significant–and the number of new corporate blogs among the companies Forrester tracks has dropped from 36 in 2006 to just three in 2008.

Ouch again. The report notes that one challenge B2B companies face is selling to customers who follow their products professionally, not personally, like in consumer markets.

Forrester suggests that corporate bloggers spruce up their blogs by publishing more often, publishing regularly and injecting "personality" into posts, such as "musings from an executive, insight into how a product decision was made, something funny."

It seems like the real issue is the motivation behind blogging. If a corporate blogger is blogging simply to follow the pack, as opposed to blogging to offer something of value to an audience, then the blog is pointless. Disinterested blogging would certainly lead to flat blogs and no readers. If that's the outcome, why bother?

The More Things Change...

Marketing websites tend to serve as gateways for other new media tools, including blogs, banner ads, pop-ups, videos, etc. While websites may serve as a gateway and coexist with other new media tools (and vice versa), are these various tools integrated effectively, so as to enable unified marketing strategies/tactics?

Focusing on the relationships between websites and blogs, as an example, JupiterResearch found that 35 percent of large companies planned to implement corporate blogs. Prior research found that 34 percent of companies already utilize blogs. The new research, therefore, found that nearly 70 percent of large corporations would utilize blogs. Other research found that 76 percent of corporations that utilize blogs reported increases in website traffic and media attention as result of their blogs. These numbers would suggest that blogs are a growing component of corporate marketing efforts and are integrated well with corporate web sites in the sense that the blogs drive traffic to the sites, which are presumably the repositories of corporate and product information.

However, JupiterResearch also found that corporate blogs are under utilized for generating word-of-mouth marketing opportunities. Only 32 percent of surveyed marketing executives said they use corporate blogs to generate word of mouth around their company's products or services. Also, Porter Novelli found that 63 percent of respondents started their blogs in order to participate in the new medium rather than to satisfy a specific need.

This would suggest a dissonance in the corporate world of blogging. On one hand, the use of blogs is growing and the blogs seem to direct traffic to corporate sites. On the other hand, many corporations fail to utilize their blogs to supplement other specific marketing activities, or fail to understand the potential of their blogs in general.

As Frederick E. Webster Jr. commented in 1996: “Simply put, there is a real and persistent danger that, caught up in the excitement and hype of a new technology, marketers will once again let attention to the short-term and tactical overwhelm consideration of the long-term and strategic. In the new world of interactive marketing, tactics often precede strategy.” It seems, more than ten years later, that there are lessons yet to be learned in the world of new media.