Appallingly Bad Small Business Marketing Advice from Business Week
Business Week apparently has absolutely no affinity for small business marketing. At least that’s what a recent column by regular contributor, Gene Mark, would lead me to believe. Entitled, “Tech ‘ Solutions’ Your Small Biz Can’t Use,” the article shows an appalling lack of understanding of some very important content marketing enablers.
The author made a lame attempt to critique numerous online marketing components including blogs, RSS feeds, online video, and search engine marketing tools. The Blue Chip Marketing Tips blog did a wonderful job of eviscerating his article from the January 4, 2008 issue of Business Week. Blogger, Caroline Melberg, critiqued each of his points, by pointing out how wrong he was. You can learn both from what she had to say–and by doing the opposite of what Gene Mark suggests you do.
One example will suffice to show why Caroline went after him. Here’s what Gene Mark had to say about blogs, betraying complete ignorance of the potential power of a small business blog:
Jamie! You started a blog for your business? That’s dope! Now go out and get some accessories, like a pair of black-rimmed rectangular glasses and a Starbucks card. And oh, by the way, you’ll need to set aside about 17 hours each day to keep it fresh. Dude, it’ll be so viral. What’s that, Jamie? You’re not in the media business? You don’t work for a software company? You just own a hardware store? Dude, that’s a drag! If you don’t have something new to say each day, no one’s going to bother to stop by and check out your blog. It’ll be, like, so lame.
In fact his hardware store analogy is terrible because it’s pretty easy to imagine how a hardware store could have a really cool blog. We all know that going to a hardware store is a guy thing. As for me, I’ll use any excuse to go to the hardware store.
You just know that a local hardware store could put together some terrific stuff guys would love:
- what are the latest gadgets to arrive in the hardware store,
- the best way to accomplish essential home-improvement tasks
- how to select a radial arm saw
- how to do a better job of grilling steaks– and why you might want to come in and look at the latest models of barbecue grills
Caroline pretty much completely demolishes his comments about blogs.
She notes, for example, some very important reasons a blog makes sense for small business owners.
Even if you’ve got a static HTML website, a blog will add fresh daily content to your website and bring the search engine spiders to your site more often to crawl it. Like high rankings? A blog will help. Want to fall to the bottom of the content pile in the daily search engine shuffle? Take Gene’s advice. You’ll never rank well for your key terms anyway so why bother (wink wink). Trust me, I’ve got two blogs and I’m so glad I do.
You can learn from Caroline exactly what small business marketing advice you should ignore with regard to the Web. Just read her devastating critique of this Business Week article. I’m astonished that any Business Week editor with any understanding of online marketing or of the small business universe could have approved Mark’s column. But you’ll enjoy her demolition of it anyway
Be sure to visit her Blue Chip Marketing Tips blog. But, if you are a small business marketer, you may want to give Business Week a miss.
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Comments [2]
Thanks for the tip. I read some of it and am going to her blog for more. The WSJ should not be talking about small business. Last year I sent a scathing letter to the editor about one of their columns. They are simply out of touch.
Hi Newt,
Thanks for keeping the heat on Gene Marks and his completely ridiculous comments in his article. I was shocked to find something so absolutely lacking in research and credibility published by BusinessWeek (guess that explains why I let my subscription lapse). Thanks for the great post!
Caroline