Britain’s First Pub Blog

18 April 2006 at 12:23 am | In Blog, Small Business, Social Media | No Comments

Thanks to Paul Woodhouse, The Shooters Arms which overlooks Pendle in Lancashire appears to have become the first pub in Britain to start blogging.

The Tap Room is already shaping up to be a cosy, smoke-filled haven to enjoy jokes, strange stories and a virtual tipple or two. It certainly brings the place to life, even if you’re not a local and “if you don’t like it, you can always f**k off somewhere else,” to quote Dave Coffey, an icon of a pub landlord!

One of the great things about blogs is that they can capture the thoughts, stories and characters of a place like a pub. Blogs are the pubs of the website world. Places to congregate and share, places where you feel at home.

If, as I think Paul hopes, several of the regulars start contributing, it’ll become a phenomenal record and meeting place for regulars old and new for years to come. Imagine looking back on the blog in 5, 10 or 20 years time. All those stories, half-remembered in pub legend over the years, will be there to be enjoyed by generations to come.

I think sometimes people forget, you don’t have to be blogging to the world for a blog to be successful. Having said that, which pub will you make a point of visiting when you’re next up Pendle way?

Small Pittsburgh Coffee Shop Blog

13 April 2006 at 10:48 pm | In Blog, Blogging, Small Business | No Comments

Never one to ride the wave of a fresh meme (!) I’ve just been catching up on a bit of blogging controversy between Microsoft uber-blogger, Robert Scoble, and the CTO of Amazon, Werner Vogels. Anil Dash at blogging software company Six-Apart gives the low down on the show down.

The nub of that particular debate concerns what hard-nosed business reasons could/should motivate a business to start blogging. In responding, Scoble draws attention to the benefits of blogging to a small coffee shop in Pittsburgh as one example.

Scoble says of the Aldo Coffee Co:

When I visited that shop myself the owner raved about what blogging had done for his business. It turned his little coffee shop into one with an international presence. Thanks to search engines like A9, Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Oh, and he said he never got written up in the press before blogging, but now that’s a regular happening.

Interesting. The Aldo Coffee shop website is built entirely around a cheap piece of blogging software, Typepad. No expensive web design required. The blog itself displays all the passion, knowledge, insight and conversational style that characterises most of my favourite blogs.

So you want to create a bit of profile beyond your local town and have it come reverberating back across the internet into the consciousness of your local media? Blogs can make strange things happen, once people start talking.

Blogging And UK Companies

11 April 2006 at 10:51 pm | In Blog, Blogging, Events, Global Microbrand, Marketing, Small Business | No Comments

I recently moderated a panel on podcasting at the Blogging4Business conference which, as the title suggests, primarily focused on blogging.

Matthew and Bernhard, the guys at Custom Communications which organised the event have done a great job of getting coverage for the conference as yesterday’s BBC story testifies. Good to see Hugh MacLeod quoted on the global microbrand and his work with Stormhoek and English Cut.

“… creating global micro-brands is cheaper and easier than ever before.”

What’s particularly interesting about both the small business blogs Hugh has been involved with, is that they’re not the techy businesses you might expect to be leading the way. Tailoring and wine-making must rank a close second and third to the world’s oldest profession.

What both these businesses have done successfully is reveal their passion for the sometimes arcane details of their craft – a level of detail and knowledge that strikes a chord with geeks everywhere. And then they’ve gone and out-geeked the geeks, SEO merchants and marketers by turning the social web to their very tangible advantage.

Seven Days That Made The New World

10 April 2006 at 5:27 pm | In General, Social Media, Web | No Comments

Interesting leader in The Guardian today on the impact of broadband:

The rapid – albeit long-delayed – roll out of broadband is changing the face of commerce and entertainment, unleashing a wave of creative potential across the world. It is even possible to view the past seven days as the tipping point for a new era.

For small businesses, networks create opportunities. They always have done. If there is a new era, there’s an argument for saying that it’s the small guys who are going to benefit most.

Podcasting The Niche

10 April 2006 at 2:39 pm | In Marketing, Podcasting, Small Business, Social Media | No Comments

Charlene Li gives a sneak preview of the latest survey from Forrester Research on podcast listenership, a story that has been widely picked up by the media including the BBC today.

The 1% who regularly listen to podcasts in the US seems like a very small number. The 20% of US households who will regularly listen to podcasts by 2010 seems like a pretty big number. The message seems to be that despite the hype, those looking to reach mass audiences through podcasting will have to wait a while. That said, a survey by BMRB suggested recently that 8 million people in the UK will be regularly listening to podcasts by September this year.

The other interesting numbers game associated with podcasting is how to measure listenership. Once a podcast is downloaded it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s being listened to. It would be good to have data around the proportion of podcasts that are listened to after download. Measurability of podcasting doesn’t, however, seem any less or more robust than measurabiity of newspaper or magazine circulations against readership. How much of a newspaper does an individual read? How often do they throw a newspaper away
without reading it? How many newspapers included on circulation figures are left in piles unread at airports? Uncertainties in this market have never stopped advertisers advertising, until perhaps now when their attention is increasingly turned towards niche audiences.

What’s interested me about media coverage of podcasting, however, is that it’s become increasingly focused on numbers – Ricky Gervais’s success being the most obvious example – equating podcasts to the metrics of mass media itself ie the volume of listeners. But podcasting, in my view, is all about the niche, not the numbers.

While big numbers are important, if you’re planning a piece of mass marketing or want to advertise on a podcast network, they really miss the point that podcasting provides a fantastic opportunity to get niche content to highly focused groups or individuals.

Why Small Businesses Are Scary

9 April 2006 at 11:52 pm | In Blog, Global Microbrand, Media, Small Business | No Comments

Quote of the day from a VC Blog:

While big companies deliberate, small companies obliterate.

Although this primarily applies to tech companies, think what Google in its early days did to Altavista, the same could potentially be said of the disruptive potential of the likes of Skype on mainstream telecoms companies.

While I don’t subscribe to the view that the news print media are doomed in the medium term, there are already examples of small citizen-based media outlets such as Agora Vox, that could cause serious problems for readership of dead tree newspapers.

These days small and fast is so much faster thanks to broadband internet connections. Small, smart businesses really do have the chance to become global microbrands.

Small Fish Making Big Waves

9 April 2006 at 1:00 am | In Blog, Blogging, Small Business | No Comments

I’ve just stumbled across a relatively new, but very good blog devoted to small business, simply called the SME Blog.

It’s written by Philip Woodgate, a London-based accountant who lives down the stereotype with some innovative thinking and linking about how small businesses can make the most of web and other technologies. He also presents some very practical, but well written and accessible advice on accounting.

Definitely one to add to your RSS feeds.

Small Business Public Relations and Conversations

8 April 2006 at 2:02 pm | In Blog, Public Relations, Small Business, Social Media | No Comments

There are hundreds of blogs on public relations.  There are thousands of blogs on small business.  What there aren’t, in the UK at least, are very many blogs by small businesses.  Although consultancies and consultants have tended to pick up and run with this credibility building, window opening medium, there remain few blogs like the two most celebrated British small business blogs – The Tinbasher blog by Paul at Butler Sheet Metal and
the tailoring blog of English Cut.

Equally small business podcasts seem few and far between with the really rather wonderful Wiggly Wigglers, a Herefordshire based organic gardening products company, leading the way with style.  And I see that Heather at Wiggly Wigglers is now blogging too.

What’s all this leading to?  Well, this blog will be very much about small business, social media (like blogging and podcasting) and public relations.  Sometimes it will be about where these three meet, sometimes it will be practical, sometimes it will be tangential.

Small businesses above all know the value of word of mouth and referrals.  It’s how they live and breathe.  The rapidly becoming over-used Cluetrain aphorism, ‘markets are conversations’, was very much directed at corporations, but has a small business ethos at its heart.  If big business will only maintain success by becoming more like the small, then small is already the new big as Seth Godin has pointed out.

My hope is that by pointing to interesting examples and ideas, and adding a few of my own thoughts and a little analysis, I might just help inspire one or two more UK small businesses to start experimenting with some of the new communications tools that are changing the way we all interact online.