Comments on: Could local blogs save local businesses?

By: JohnA

JohnA — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 01:45:36 +0000

Wow Pete, I think we were separated at birth. HAHA now i didn’t implement all the ideas you suggested but an awful lot of them and this was a week before I read this. I have found since Chris’s post the best thing is a perfect marriage between social media and actual interaction. I am going to give it another week and then I will be writing a post abut what I have learned but business has increased and I have used alot of the ideas that you listed. Thanks for the advice and the mention.

John

By: [BookCamp] [PaperCamp] follow-up #1 - collecting a few posts and ideas – mondo a-go-go

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 18:25:52 +0000

[...] questions I asked at the end of this post on creating new readers, I found Pete’s suggestions on local blogs helping local business full of useful ideas and information, and a possible approach to getting started that we hadn’t [...]

By: dp

dp — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 11:28:32 +0000

I don’t know about having a blog saving a business, but I do know that not having a web presence might be costing Rooty’s a bit of business.

I’ve been trying to set up a meeting somewhere in the city centre, and based on your mention of SocMed surgeries at Rooty’s, that they might be a good place to meet. But do they have a web page with their hours? Nope. The closest thing is a review by someone that gives location and phone number. However, by the time I’d tracked that down other people had suggested different venues, whose info was available immediately. So, no web presence, no business.

BTW, if the Custard Factory blog has a directory of businesses and their hours, it isn’t showing up in Google results.

By: anthony tattum

anthony tattum — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 10:01:31 +0000

I like that you are constantly comparing online with offline. These analogies are really helpful in contextualising the relevance of each point. I have been involved in promoting lots of bars and restaurants and can not emphasise enough the importance of managerial/owner involvement. We are looking at a platfom like this for hare & hounds and bulls head and I will use this post as a starting point for the managers.

Another key point of the post is the promotion of the blog offline in the venue. While the web is a great resource and platform, unless you promote the thing you may as well not bother.

By: Dave Harte

Dave Harte — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 08:45:42 +0000

Great post. The Selly Sausage tried this last year (http://www.sellysausage.co.uk/) but they seemed to stop posting up news after a while. That’s probably because they don’t need to employ social media tactics to retain customers as they have thousands to pick from who pass their window everyday. As it stands though their site is funky and tells the casual customer when it’s open and what kind of vibe to expect.

I have ideas on which other cafes would make good candidates around Birmingham but the worry I have is scale. Is using social media scaleable so that it becomes a genuinely useful tool for tackling the downturn? Do we need an army of digital mentors to implement this or just a few examples and a bit of publicity? Given that the other ‘digital’ solutions take a utility-based approach as their starting point it may well be that social media has a role to play now in connecting businesses to customers in tougher economic times.

By: srb

srb — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 22:55:03 +0000

I’ll give you a few more tips since there are some things that have recently really been bugging me with this blogging business model missing important information.

a) Make sure the non-blog information is there somewhere – location, phone number, opening hours and holiday details – and make it prominent – it is the main reason person are searching for your business
Jibbering records in moseley doesn’t have hours listed anywhere on their site that I can find. They have all kinds of other stuff but not what I needed most.

b) Visitors don’t come in by the front door and they may have never read any of your other posts and they may not want to read any more after the first one. Always explain everything as if you are talking to someone who knows nothing about you.
A recent post on the custard factory blog assumed i knew where a certain custard factory gallery is ( I don’t) and when it is open (I don’t) and when a show for an upcoming artist is (I don’t).

c) FTLOTFSMDUA! (For the love of the flying spaghetti monster don’t use acronyms!) Nobody but you knows what they mean and sometimes you don’t even know!

The internet isn’t really a conversation with friends. It is shouting at random strangers passing on the street. People who know you won’t resent the repetition of the details but the people who don’t know you will resent partial information. Get your whole message out, not half of it. Make it easy for people to be your customers because they are lazy and have lots of things competing for their attention.

By: a week of large and small steps, revelation and reminiscence « graphiquillan |

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 21:43:36 +0000

[...] steps have the potential to lead to good things. Thinking differently and using tools in places that you wouldn’t usually associate them with creates the opportunity to offer something different and more [...]

By: Digbeth is Good » Blog Archive » Could local blogs save local businesses?

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 21:02:31 +0000

[...] Could local blogs save local businesses? – Asks Pete Ashton at ASH-10. This caught my attention not only for saying nice things about Digbeth is Good (doesn’t hurt, mind) but because it uses cafe’s as a prime example of the type of business that can be helped by blogs. There are a hell of a lot of these in Digbeth. So come Eastside Cafe, Salters, Rooty’s, etc. Get to it! convert this post to pdf. [...]

By: Nicky Getgood

Nicky Getgood — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 19:54:18 +0000

Good post. I think the way The Spotted Dog pub have used the internet to answer their noise abatement problems via http://www.keepdigbethvibrant.co.uk/ has been very interesting, the spoof Stells ad was just pure genius.

Rosa’s Cafe near Millennium Point also had a blog at http://blog.rosascafe.co.uk/ but again this wasn’t enough to save it, though have a feeling it had to close for development as all businesses on that row are boarded up?

It was very popular though and the blog probably strengthened the community feeling it had around it, which was probably what was responsible for this bizarre YouTube tribute film: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=acYDNA1E48M

By: David Nikel

David Nikel — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 15:43:24 +0000

Free wi-fi is the first step, it will almost certainly result in more coffee and cakes being sold!