Blog on! Social networking redefining marketplace
The hard part: Figuring out how to make it work for your business
By Brian Carroll -- Furniture Today, December 24, 2006
High Point — A Business Week magazine cover story back in May 2005 proclaimed: "Blogs Will Change Your Business."
More than 18 months later, it's safe to say they've indeed changed business, particularly small business, becoming as common as iPods and PDAs. Corporate America is embracing blogs and the millions who read and write them.
Just the word "blog" causes many readers' eyes to roll. Before you tune out, a few numbers:
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81% of corporations report they are either blogging now or plan to blog, according to the ePolicy Institute.
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In the United States, there are more than 5,000 corporate bloggers.
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10% of small businesses already have incorporated blogs into their marketing plans.
In short, the opportunity blogs provide to build informal, lasting relationships with customers is proving irresistible.
There is much more to the blogosphere than narcissists and nut cases — although they too are out there. As a new-media academic told The New York Times, "There's a conversation going on out there about every company and every brand, and talking with people engenders better relationships."
A search on blog search engine Technorati for mentions of Ikea, for example, turned up nearly a half-million blogs, and that's for instances in the previous 24 hours. That's buzz.
A Google search for blog postings on the topic of furniture turned up 7.8 million hits. This surely qualifies as a trend.
Tech specialists can make a Web site more visible, but bloggers can generate buzz. Ikea, again, is a good example, garnering hundreds of positive blog mentions every day. For small businesses, blogs can be particularly powerful in shining a spotlight on a product or aspect of the business that deserves attention.
As a side benefit, blogs create additional inbound and outbound hyperlinks that, in the aggregate, serve to raise a company's profile with the big search engines.
The hard part
Of course, it helps if you have something to say. That's the hard part. Anyone can blog, but few write well enough, with enough substance, to make it a worthwhile read over time.
For a model of how to say something worth reading, check out Robert Scoble's Scobleizer blog. He's a software engineer at Microsoft who blogs about technology, even admitting when the Apple folks do it better.
GM Vice Chairman Robert A. Lutz also has a blog, as does Jonathan Schwartz, CEO at Sun Microsystems. At blogmaverick.com, you can read the daily musings of billionaire Mark Cuban. There's even a blog on and for CEOs who blog.
The dot-com bubble's burst six years ago still has many thinking of the Internet as a spectacularly flawed business model. But it was never really about being a vast new commercial marketplace, at least not primarily so.
The Big Idea
The Internet was and increasingly is about information — lots of it — and its exchange by consumers who increasingly are sources of information themselves. That's what's meant by social networking, and social networking is 2007's Big Idea.
Back during the dot-com boom, many believed the Internet would be all about doing away with expensive brick-and-mortar investments and selling directly to consumers. The schematic of that model was, and still is, correct, but the labels on it are all wrong.
It's becoming much more about enabling retailers — those with stores and those without — to engage the public without an investment in mainstream media or the spinners who court them. Advertising dollars thus are increasingly targeted, and niche audiences and consumer groups have become more important.
This is the "long tail," a way of understanding distribution via the Internet that Chris Anderson describes in great detail in his powerful new book, "The Long Tail."
Look at the efforts being poured into localized search tools that enable retailers to reach customers without ever getting exposure on radio, television or the newspaper. Note how few Gen Xers pay heed to mass media, choosing instead to "pull" information using their computers.
The trick is engaging in this conversation without offending the online community. Marketing, if it is perceived as such, offends, and fudging or lying in the blogosphere is a prescription for failure. Overt or underhanded sales pitches also do not work in this new ethos.
So here's the challenge: Say "furniture" and "sales" in combination and the image most people have is of a slick huckster trying to sell them something they don't really need. Because the blogosphere resists the hard sell, because it is (mostly) a rational place, one that values logic, transparency, dialog and evidence, some old dogs will have to learn new tricks.
The phenomenon of social networking explains why Google bought Blogger.com and, more recently, YouTube for over $1.6 billion. It's what News Corp. bought for $580 million when it acquired MySpace.
Furniture stores don't necessarily have to hang out a shingle in MySpace. But furniture companies surely should consider leveraging the unprecedented power of social networking, or at least try to figure out what it all means for them.
How many have tried, for example, LinkedIn.com, a social tool for business acquaintances? Think of it as FaceBook or MySpace for business. This tool easily could be deployed to keep up with customer relationships, and to store dynamic information on thousands of contacts, consumers and acquaintances.
Social networking comprises hundreds of Web sites that cover all sorts of consumer products, including furniture. Boompa.com, for instance, enables auto enthusiasts to share content on all things automotive, from classic cars to motorcycles. These sites enable regular folks to contribute reviews, photos, rants and recommendations.
Is furniture getting mindshare in this incredibly large and exponentially expansive information exchange?
Not yet.
If you're looking for a worthwhile New Year's resolution, try: "This year, I'm going to get into the game. I'm going to engage my customers daily, directly and disingenuously. I'm going to see my business as a competitor in the information business, not just the furniture business."
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