Business Blogging is More Than Babble

"I'd rather have a million friends right now than a million dollars. Your social equity is far greater than your financial equity." That is the philosophy of a man who built a $40 million brick and mortar retail business in seven years, and then elevated himself to iconic status on the internet in 14 months. If you’ve heard of Gary Vaynerchuk, you can’t forget you know the name. If you’ve seen Vaynerchuk on a speaking platform, you can’t forget you’ve had the experience. Even if you try, he will haunt you in your dreams. Vaynerchuk brings Katrina force with him wherever he goes.

Vaynerchuk was one of the keynote speakers at the BlogWorld & New Media Expo in Las Vegas last weekend. The conference was attended by bloggers, vloggers, milbloggers, mobloggers, photobloggers, podcasters, RSS feeders, internet TV broadcasters, social media experts, and any kind of producers of new media. To most of us from the baby boom generation, what that last sentence means is "yadda yadda bling blog." Why would anyone working in the retail industry care about any of that virtual noise?

Blogging is one of those things which has inserted itself into American culture whether we like it or not. According to the BlogWorld site, of the 147 million Americans who use the internet, almost 40% of them read blogs. Twenty-two of the 100 most popular websites in the world are blogging sites. The only retailers on that top 100 list are Amazon and eBay. Most significant for those in the retail industry is the reported fact that blog readers spend an average of 23 hours online each week, and 51% of them shop online.

Like it or not, retailers who want to find where their shoppers are hiding these days need to start looking in the blogosphere. Vaynerchuck is one of the few who sees, and has successfully exploited, the business potential of blogging. He believes that bizblogging is America’s new gold rush because it allows a company to build a brand and position itself in the marketplace without the need for other mass media. “Social business is the future of our society,” Vaynerchuck says. “You need to get talked about in social networks.” Again, most of us hear "yadda yadda bling blog."

What “social business” means, according Vaynerchuk, is that you want to use blogging to become the company that people want to hang out with. This is not such a foreign concept. Starbucks, Apple, and Borders are companies that people like to hang out with. The constant presence of people in their stores is proof of that.

When looking for retail companies who are successfully working this new concept of “social business” in the online world, though, we find no standouts. Most businesses are using their blogs to push a marketing message, which makes their presence in the blogosphere nothing more than another commercial to be ignored. Business blogging best practices do exist, but the companies creating them are not often found in the retail industry.

Can retail businesses succeed in the future without social networking skills? Theoretically, yes. “New media” is just another outlet which doesn’t have to be part of anybody’s mix. Starbucks has done quite well despite never having used television advertising. But being dubbed “the first” or “the best” is always a good business strategy. So, the retailer that snatches up that first-best position on the blogosphere will likely be catapulted to iconic status in the retail industry. That’s a virtual reality that will undoubtedly translate itself into a profitable position in the real world.