Seth Godin makes a great comment today via Bill Sweetman when he asks whether it makes sense for a small company to Blog. A few great small companies are going to start this on PEI - so watch this space for their launch.
What blogging does is to offer a human alternative to the machine offering. So if you are running a small Bike Shop in Charlottetown - by blogging about your daily experience - the new bikes, clothes, maintenance, problems that customers bring you - events and so on - you differentiate yourself as being human and caring versus say Wal*Mart where all you get is a cheap bike. The small operation now can separate itself from the commodity competitor.
Here below is the example that Bill uses - a tour company called Quoddy Marine. Bill was in Atlantic Canada on vacation and wanted to go Whale Watching. Here is how the blog made the difference - He says:
"The companies without Websites immediately lost my business. (That’s a topic for another blog posting as well!) The remaining companies offered pretty much the same info on their Websites, with one exception. Quoddy Link Marine, to my pleasant surprise, also had a “Sightings and Updates” blog. The blog is maintained by Danielle, a marine biology graduate in charge of photographing, identifying and recording the whales and sharing that information with various marine research organizations. Danielle’s blog chronicles through words and photos (by Danielle) the recent whale sightings and had been updated earlier the day I first looked at the blog with photos of whales that had been spotted that morning.
I was immediately captivated by the near-immediacy of this information and the fact it chronicled the spontaneous nature of whale watching. The “Sightings and Updates” blog also demonstrated to me that Quoddy Link Marine really cared about whales and the environment, not just selling whale tour tickets. Thanks to their blog, I also felt one degree closer to the people behind this tour company than with those from any of their competitors.
Needless to say, I chose to go whale watching with Quoddy Link Marine, not because they had a blog, but because of what the blog revealed to me about the company and its staff, something a typical corporate Website is not usually very good at. And in case you’re wondering, the company and the whale watching tour lived up to my expectations. The afternoon we went out we played ‘hide-and-seek’ with a minke whale plus saw lots of harbour seals, harbour porpoises, and a young bald eagle.
Not only did I have an amazing afternoon on the sea, I also found a great example of a “real” company that has its own corporate blog.
Here is a glimpse of the site - Imagine what you could do with your small business?
Quoddy Link Marine - Sightings and Updates
Recent sightings and updates for Quoddy Link Marine - Whales and Wildlife Catamaran Style, St. Andrews, NB, Canada. A journal of whale and wildlife sightings for the West Isles and the Bay of Fundy
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
Another amazing day with humpbacks
