Global PR Blog Week 1.0

Case Study: Blogging to Spot Trends & Forecast Markets

Small Business Tends LLC is a company that uses blogs to spot trends and forecast the likely behavior of the small business marketplace.

For nearly a year now we have been collecting and organizing information about small business. The process has been an educational one.

With more than 300 pages up at Small Business Trends and the launch of a second TrendTracker website, we have learned that blogs are great for identifying trends and for disseminating insight into developing trends.

Spotting Trends

We daily roam the Web, print publications, TV and radio looking for information that tells us something about small business.

We rely heavily on news reports, traditional content-oriented websites, print publications, and newsletters for the intelligence we gather.

We scout out subject matter from a wide assortment of other blogs.

• First of all, blogs point us to original sources that have raw data. (Bloggers have a way of discovering the most intriguing information!)
• Second, blogs by their nature, with their culture of linking and creative thinking, tend to create buzz around popular topics. In other words, the more the blogs are talking about something, the more we pay attention -- it may signal an emerging trend.

Based on the most popular blog topics, we pull together a critical mass of information that we can then run through our small business filters.

We also rely on events and conferences, and our daily work interactions to identify trends. For example, we both are consultants with half a century of experience between us. We have worked at virtually every size organization, from large corporations, to small businesses under 100 employees, to solo home-based businesses. We have bootstrapped. We have raised outside funding. Our experience and how we apply it to ongoing relationships with small business clients are important ways that we take the pulse of the small business market.

And last but not least, we rely on input from our network of contacts -- and from our readers. A blog offers the opportunity for our readers to make comments. We learn from them. That level of interaction feeds back into our content gathering and trend recognition process. It also supports our efforts to bring more readers to the site.

Tracking Trends

Using blogging tools has helped us develop our websites and eased the process of publishing.

In a past life, we ran the Web's most popular motorcycle website. It had thousands of pages of content, multiple databases, and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to develop and manage. Even so it was a lumbering beast compared to the immediacy of a blog.

With a traditional, dynamic, database-driven website, we were able at best to publish new information once a day. The process of publishing was laborious. Content would first have to be created. Then it would be passed on to developers who would code it. Next it would be loaded into a database. And finally it would be called up in a template.

With a blog we can publish new content at any time with the click of a mouse. Almost no coding needs to be done. There is no dedicated staff of developers. The people who gather and analyze information post it without having to rely on an IT department, content management specialists, Web developers, or database managers.

Because a blog is so easy to publish, we are light on our feet. We spend more time developing meaningful content and analyzing how the data supports developing trends. Almost no time is taken up in the process of organizing the presentation of our content.

Blogging has allowed us to pull together a creditable level of content far more rapidly and easily than we could have using earlier Web development tools. Take a look at Small Business Trends’ 300 plus posts and see if you don't agree.

What we have done with Small Business Trends and TrendTracker, would have been prohibitively expensive for a business of our size if we had stuck to traditional content management and Web publishing schemes.

Site Marketing and PR

We also use other blogs to market our blogs. By becoming active members of the blogging community we are able to trade links with blogs and to post on other blog sites. This, along with good focused content, has given us excellent search engine position, which in turn increases our traffic. Technology such as RSS feeds and newsreaders helps us get our content out to even more people.

We also utilize a traditional email newsletter. We’ve simply placed the signup link on our blog. We increased ten-fold the signup rate once we placed the link on the blog, versus the commercial website. The newsletter is free and serves as a marketing vehicle for the blog.

As a blogger, you are able to develop your reputation very rapidly. All you have to do to be an expert is to post good information and insights on a regular and frequent basis on a focused topic, and then let the world know about it.

Summary

Blogs are tremendously versatile websites. That makes them multi-purpose tools when it comes to spotting trends and forecasting the behavior of different marketplaces.

The process we have followed at Small Business Trends is one that can be adapted to any subject matter. It's simply a matter of immersing yourself in the blogosphere and seeing where it will take you.

Contact:

We will be available from 10:00 AM to 12:00 Noon (Eastern U.S. time) on July 13th via instant messenger to answer questions. We can be reached at "Smallbiztrends" on AOL instant messenger, and "smallbiztrends" on Yahoo messenger during those times.

Author: Anita Campbell | Jul 13, 04 | Permalink | 0 comments
Category: @ Anita Campbell | Topic 2 Corporate Blogging

 

 

About

The Global PR Blog Week 1.0 is an online event that will engage PR, marketing and business bloggers from around the globe in a discussion about blogging and communications. The event is scheduled for July 12 - 16, 2004.

Links

The New PR Wiki

Recent Entries

Looking forward to 2.0

Site Statistics and Trends

A participant’s final thoughts

Traditional PR is dead - Long Live DIY PR

Quiet is the new loud

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