Blogging is Better for a Small Company

John Cass, Director of Internet Marketing Strategies here at Backbone recently posted about a conversation we had about whether Blogging is better for bigger companies or smaller companies. While I do agree with much of what John has written in regard to larger companies having more resources to blog, I submit that blogging has leveled the playing field giving smaller companies the opportunity to share the stage and leapfrog ahead of their closely sized (non blogging) competitors. Sure, as John argues, larger companies have great resources in terms of existing customer base and depth of personal. Those are great reasons to blog and big companies should do it too. I don’t think either one of us is saying that blogging is good for small companies and bad for big companies. I think the biggest determining factor of whether a corporate blog is successful is the people who blog not the size of the company. Nevertheless, this is a fun case to argue so I will stick by my statement and try to prove the case even further.

Here’s my line of thinking. In mainstream online and offline advertising, small companies are at a disadvantage because they cannot match the marketing budgets of their “bigger” rivals. However, a savvy company can leverage their ideas to establish thought leadership, improving coverage by journalists and influencers and also develop a great contextual back link network to improve long-term organic search positions. Traffic and coverage from these activities can be parlayed into lead generation and brand equity. A small company can get the benefit of several marketing activities from a single comprehensive corporate blogging strategy.

Since a key currency of blogging is ideas, a small company is not limited by the size of their budget; they are only limited by the importance of their ideas and ability to cogently communicate them through posts on their own blog and through their specific blogging community.

Now, what does it take to have good ideas? A couple of ideas come to mind, and I don’t think large companies hold a monopoly on any of these -- Imagination, research, communications. Good ideas do not develop in a vacuum. The large or small company creating and providing the ideas have to be aware of their surroundings. Otherwise you’re putting forth a good idea that is about six months old, and then you’re not a thought leader, you’re late to the party and that’s possibly worse that not showing up at all. This is the essence of my argument. A small company can beat the bigger company to the punch.

Leaders of a small business need to stay fully aware of their niche. These are not blogging investments; they are all essential qualities and practices for any business leadership. Whether you’re going to blog or not, the key visionaries in your company should have a real sense of how their business fits into the larger picture and how that business may or may not fit into the picture three years from now.

I believe blogging provides a medium for the best ideas to rise to the surface. In my experience small dynamic companies are intensely aware of their niche. Their advantage is also in their ability to react quickly to changes.

Usually big companies have an advantage when it comes to marketing budgets, but with blogging, it’s no secret that the tools needed for blogging are cheap. The real investment needed for blogging comes in the time involved with developing a strategy, monitoring your sphere of influencers, researching and generating ideas. These are activities that any sized company should be doing whether they are blogging or not. So I would not consider it an investment into blogging, it’s an investment into the business. A small company can do this just as well as a large company and apply the intelligence into developing an influential blog if they understand the medium and know who there audience is.

The benefits of blogging are documented in our corporate blogging survey. A key benefit is organic search engine positions, link building that supports search engine marketing efforts. Due to lack of budget, many small companies cannot compete Paid Click for Paid Click in the paid search regime, but they can compete for organic search engine rankings. The act of blogging has been proven to help with organic rankings because focused blogs are search engine friendly publishing engines full of relevant organized content. The culture of blogging supports contextual back linking, which is a strong factor in how a search engine like Google decides on who gets the top search position. So, a small company can blog and get their ideas out into the public while also improving the natural search traffic and link popularity. To me this is an effective use of a small company’s limited marketing resources.

Small businesses have more to gain and less to loose. A large company has many employees, investors and lawyers. Company leaders have a fiduciary responsibility to this group of stakeholders, which can hider the ability to blog. Many companies like Microsoft, Maytag, and Macromedia have dealt with this issue and decided to blog but I’m sure they did that knowing that they are taking some risks. I think that they rightly decided the risks of not blogging were greater than the risks of blogging.

Another advantage that a small company has over a large one is its size. A smaller company theoretically can act quicker to changes because they’re less cumbersome.

Last point (for now) is based on a theory that smaller companies can do more with less and that the measurable gain in terms of annual revenue has a higher probability of being relatively greater for a smaller company. Now I’m sure there is a simpler way to explain that. Here’s another way of saying it -- the relative benefit of a successful corporate blog could be more substantial for a small company. For example, a small company selling a high ticket complex product could pick up two or three new customers in one year and those new business sales attributable (at least in part) to blogging efforts could mean 100% increase in annual revenues for that company. The bottom line is that a small company can gain relatively more, more quickly and they have only time and a bit of face to loose.

John’s argument is essentially that blogs are better for a big company because it’s ‘easier’ for them to do while my argument is that blogging can be more ‘beneficial’ (relatively speaking) for a small company. I’m sure there are at least 40 bullets that we could generate for both sides.

Doing a quick search i found a couple of blog posts to support my case. Carson at Buzzmetrics argues in favor of blogging for a small company vs. big by saying "a small consultancy has an even BIGGER imperative to blog than a big advertiser, given what a great thought leader marketing technique they (blogs) can be." Seth Godin covers Small Vs. Big from a different angle in his post titled Small is the new big. Specificly referring to blogging he writes "Small means you can tell the truth on your blog."

I’d love to hear what our readers have to say on all of this.