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.

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.