Blogging - more than just a marketing tool
December 29th, 2007 by Lloyd Gofton
A piece in the New York Times caught my eye. Titled: ‘Blogging’s a Low-Cost, High Return marketing tool’ it was never one that I was going to skip over in my RSS feeds.
The piece by Marcia Alboher, confirms the power of blogging as a marketing tool for small businesses, and features comment from well known business commentators such as Guy Kawasaki.
Overall the piece introduces the concept of small business blogging well, but it would have been more interesting, and perhaps more useful, to take the conversation a little further.
Agreed, blogging is a good marketing tool in the right circumstances. Agreed, the piece is written from a small business perspective rather than a social media perspective, but I was a bit disappointed that it didn’t go further by looking at the advantages and opportunities beyond marketing, such as opening up a two-way communication with your audience, and learning and sharing information, etc.
Some may think I’m being a little harsh, but I think its time we started to look beyond the skin deep advantages of blogging and social media if we’re to keep moving forward. Understanding, especially in a business environment - large or small, must be improved.
I can appreciate that small business bloggers are in the minority, the piece confirms American Express’ figures of the less than 5% in the US, so education from the ground up is vital. That’s fine, but let’s also build the story beyond the start line and start changing gear. Let’s look at the bigger picture and begin to understand where blogging fits into the bigger social media picture, and where the future for business communications lies. Some of the commentary in the piece hooked onto wider issues such as ‘a source of commentary on regulatory issues’ and ‘focusing on the customer’, but left these as side issues.
I don’t mean to highlight this piece especially, but I do feel that overall the commentary on social media issues needs to step up a gear if we are to continue progressing.
This is something that we at Liberate Media will be addressing in 2008.
Technorati tags: small+business, blogging, new+york+times
