Business Media Articles (Archived)

Free global marketing thanks to blog

By David Thomson, CEO, Close Invoice Finance

What is blogging and why does it matter? Well, the giant search engine provider Google clearly thinks it matters. It describes a blog as "your easy-to-use web site, where you can quickly post thoughts, interact with people, and more. All for free." And Google should know all about it because through the site they own called www.blogger.com, they're the ones providing access to blogs.

Blogging is a new Internet phenomenon where individuals write directly for their own web sites. Some bloggers have achieved massive success, attracting over 100,000 unique monthly visitors. Bloggers are mostly solo businesses operators or commentators who bypass big firms and provide their services directly to the public. Unlike traditional websites, they don't require huge amounts of knowledge of Internet technology. What's more they're completely free to use. These people understand the benefits of PR and reputation management and are exploiting a free communication vehicle.

So while big companies are busy spending huge amounts of money on complicated all-singing all-dancing websites and IT teams, the independent businessperson, perhaps a broker, or anyone for that matter, can reach the same global audience and it will cost them precisely zilch. What's more, Blog technology as developed by Google is very flexible. You can update what you have to say every day, very easily without having to modify your website.

You could describe this as part of the array of internet-based guerrilla marketing techniques that favour the small guy over the large player.

Will the phenomenon of blogging survive, or will there be a shake-out as with the dotcom bubble and will the large companies simply crush and co-opt the independent operators in the struggle for dominance of the marketplace of ideas?

When it's too difficult to provide goods and services directly to the marketplace in one or two person operations, people often work for large companies. But the rise of blogging has meant that a solo operator can talk about his product or service, create and distribute his research and share his opinions.

Thanks to Blogger, it's now feasible for someone who is only mildly computer literate to create their own professional-looking regularly updated web site. Through Blogger, the Internet has perhaps spawned the means to undermine itself. The small operator no longer needs a traditional website when he can blog instead.

You can learn a lot from a bricks-and-mortar business. It's expensive for businesses to maintain a professional looking exterior, so you assume that if a premises looks good from the outside, it's probably a serious operation. But the Internet has changed all that. This allows new, small businesses to launch on a shoestring but it also means that we must be cautious about who we do business with.

Companies spend billions each year promoting brand names and this is the area where the small business operator is at his or her weakest. Branding is the area in which bloggers are unable to compete. However competent the businessperson behind the blog, the individual blogger still needs marketing muscle to promote their site.

Even though some bloggers are attracting 100,000 viewers a month to their sites, this may be a short-lived phenomenon in which the most successful businesses will be bought up by the big operators ­ as is so often the case in other areas of business. We may therefore be witnessing a brief golden age of independent blogging. But this is just one scenario. If the independents find ways to market themselves more effectively on the Internet, they could well out-compete the big operators.

Furthermore, there is increasing evidence that the big operators are starting their own blogs (sometimes within their established websites) to gain the advantages enjoyed by the small operators. A case of big business trying to look small perhaps which is a reverse of the norm. After all, everyone is able to get their voice heard on the Internet. It's the world's first truly democratic communications medium ­ and that has enormous implications for business.

Having said that, ease of access has also lead to information overload, as we have all experienced when trying to use a search engine, for example. This means that we have to fight that much harder to be heard amongst 'the noise' that the Internet has created. But at least more people have access to a global marketing tool which must be good thing for innovation and potential business success.

Long live blogging!



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