Small Business Start-ups and Blogging-- The Category is Horizontal, Not Vertical

    The great hope for a lot of start-ups aimed at small business is to promote their technologies and businesses through blogger out reach. I was reminded of this over the weekend as I looked over my notes from a series of interviews I did with companies at Demofall07.

     Superficially,using social media to reach potential clients and customers seems like a good idea. Increasingly, contract marketing firms are staffing up with specialists in social media outreach skills. And, building a targeted campaign designed to reach small businesses through bloggers seems like a strategy that's easily implemented.

     But there are big problems with this line of logic as it pertains to reaching small business:

1.    Small business isn't a vertical opportunity. It's really a very wide horizontal slice of the market that's defined by a long list of factors including gross revenue, number of employees, and service segments.

2.    There is no one blog or blogger that reached even half of this market segment. So finding an appropriate social media outlet could be an exercise in wasted fees for many small businesses.

     Consider the following: A small land surveyor business with gross revenues of $1 million a year probably doesn't search for the same information as a plumbing business of equal size. The same is true of flying schools and morticians. Furthermore, It's unlikely that any of the A List bloggers are actually read by small business decision makers.

3.    The problems small business owners face in using blogs to build brand and product awareness, get bigger, not smaller, when contract marketing agencies begin to get involved. If you're an account exec at an agency tasked with developing a strategy for a company that wants to reach small businesses via blogs you're first reaction might be to go to any of the sites like Technorati that classify blogs. The problem with this approach is the width of the small business segment. See item #2 above.

     Moreover, the top-ranked small business blogging sites tend to be loaded with general, not specific. information. Most start-ups want and need the results that targeted campaigns generate.

4.    I question whether or not most large agencies really have the in-house experience needed to generate a tightly focused blog campaign for small business clients. The requisite experience needed for such campaigns would appear to be found in small contract marketing communications organizations with clients such a trade associations, building contractors, real estate or other categories.

    If I were a consultant helping match a start-up to a marketing firm one of the most important current or former clients I'd want to hear about in a pitch is Intuit's QuickBooks group, or anyone who worked with other companies such as Great Plains Software (before the acquisition of that company by Microsoft).

5.    If i seem negative about the concept of using blogs to reach small business, it's for a good reason. Over the last 15 years I've seen a lot of companies try to mine this segment but seldom ever hit pay dirt. The really good news is that colleges are now beginning to teach how to use blogs to reach customers.

Anecdotally, at a local southern California college, blogger outreach and blog campaigns that focus on segments is now part of the coursework taught in the Communications School. Veteran blogger Phil Gomes, noted the same trend in a recent post at www.PhilGomes.com.  Sitting in the back of a large class room this week I smiled when a professor challenged his class to find three bloggers that could be used by a client in the small business sector to create product or brand awareness.

    I believe in social media as a valid channel to reach clients.  However, unless a company in small business has very deep pockets, I think they will need to do their homework and take great care in setting expectations when turning to third-party contract marketing communications agencies chosen to implement blog-based mar comm programs.

    I wish I could take credit for categorizing small business as a "wide horizontal, not a vertical, opportunity." I can't. To give credit where it's due, the line comes from th best editor and supervisor I worked with in my 15-year career, Chris Shipley, executive Producer of the Demo Shows and co founder of the GuideWire Group in San Francisco.

And that's my two cents worth on blogging as a media outlet that can be used to launch new technologies or brands aimed at small business.--Jim Forbes, 10/17/2007.