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.

We’re changing our website

18 March 2006 at 3:24 pm | In Blog | No Comments

I’m just migrating the Origin PR website over to WordPress.  I think the whole site looks a lot more appealing now and it gives me a chance to build in a blog.  I’d really never appreciated how effective WordPress was, both as a piece of blogging software, but also as a way of building a decent looking website.  I’ve been inspired by others in the PR blogging world to make this change and I’m really pleased I have done, so far!

A few more tweaks and I’ll reveal what I plan to write about in this blog.