Could local blogs save local businesses?

Photo by James Thornett. Whether a blog could have saved the Knife & Fork is debatable…

One of the main themes for me last year was ultra local blogging. Setting up and running Created in Birmingham in 2007 taught me many things, one of which was it was possibly too broad in scope. Birmingham is a huge city with a million people living here (double that if you include the Black Country) and to expect one person to cover all the creative activity happening here in unrealistic. That’s not to say Chris hasn’t done a fantastic job since I handed CiB over but there’s definitely scope for more focussed blogs concentrating of smaller areas to fill in the gaps. That was part of the thinking behind setting Nicky up with Digbeth is Good, to see whether an small district in the centre of the city with a low population density undergoing massive regeneration could provide enough content for a blog. Nicky quickly proved there is and in six months has developed the site into a fantastic resource for the community exceeding all my expectations and teaching me a hell of a lot. But she’s driven purely by her desire to do it – while she’s no doubt earning significant social capital from the blog there’s no financial reward. So one of the stumbling blocks to developing similar blogs in other communities is finding more people like Nicky. Sure, they will exist but pinpointing them is going to involve casting the net very wide and throwing in a big lump of serendipity. I’m on the lookout for shortcuts.

Last week Chris Brogan asked Can Social Media Save a Local Business?

John Andrews runs the Simply Gourmet Bistro and Groceria in Peabody, Massachusetts. I was fortunate enough to attend a grand opening ceremony the other day, and sample some of his amazing hot food.

John’s situation is like a lot of other small businesses. Things are tight, and he really needs more business to stay afloat. For those of you in Massachusetts, swing by and visit John at 297 Lynn St, Peabody, MA 01960 or call (978) 530-1100. For those of you on Facebook, check out the fan page.

But seriously, is there anything that we could do with social media that would save John’s business?

I really don’t know. Because if you don’t leave near John (and I don’t really), I can’t buy his food often enough to keep him funded. If you do live near him, as @CharJTF from Twitter does, you already know about him.

So how would you help John?

There’s loads of useful advice in the comments but the first thing that struck me was John should look at what he has already. I’m assuming his bistro has regular customers from the local community. I’d imagine these customers fit into three groups: a small number of passionate customers who visit every day and hang out, a larger number of regular customers who think of it as their store but don’t engage too much and a much larger number of occasional customers who come in irregularly or at random.

An online community (be it based around a blog, forum, Twitter or whatever) has a similar distribution of users. The small core people who do most of the work, the regulars who read and chip-in occasionally and the randoms who come in on a whim or via Google. So slotting in a social media space shouldn’t require too much change. He already has a social space – we just need to media-ify it a bit.

Let’s make some more assumptions. The bistro has a cafe-style area where people sit to eat and drink. They have a few staff – a couple full time and a few part time. There are busy periods but also quiet spots mid morning and mid afternoon.

Next we need to look at what John wants to achieve from all this. Let’s say he wants to move people up the chain from random to regular and from regular to passionate. That way he gets more repeat trade and builds more word of mouth marketing. To do this he needs to enable people to feel they have some ownership of his space. The traditional way to do this is by letting people put on their own events off peak (meetups for groups, poetry readings, the usual) and it can work really well, so let’s put that on the list as something that makes sense for a bistro.

Finally, what do people get from the bistro other than that which they buy? Let’s put a sense of community in there, be it gossip and news about the area or simply a sense that there’s something tying everything together.

So here’s my no-brainer social media strategy for an independent cafe-style business that’s looking to increase trade.

1. Set up a blog. Nothing fancy – a basic Wordpress.com blog will do the trick. It’s free and takes about 5 minutes to get running.
2. Separate the blog from the business, but not too much. You want the blog to have an independent feel but it still be clear where it’s coming from. In other words it’s not about the business, it’s about the community which revolves around the business.
3. Give whoever is working the counter the ability to update the blog. You could have a small laptop behind the counter or give them 20 minutes a day to transcribe their notes, but make sure the news comes from the front line.
4. Work out an editorial policy for the blog. By placing some boundaries you’ll help the writers focus more. Think about what people want to find out about (and what your writers are interested in writing about). Is it events in the area? Planning applications at local government? Decide on a few themes and use them as the backbone. You can spin off to other subjects but give people something to pigeon-hole you with so they can spread the word easily.
5. Once you’ve got something you can show, have a look at your passionate customers. Identify a few that you think would be good and get them on board. Give them the editorial remit (they’ll appreciate this) and feed back to them regularly. Maybe have a regular evening for blog contributors with free cake.
6. Write about the whole area where your community lives. Get a map and with your business in the middle and figure out the boundaries of walking distance. This is your patch. List the cinemas, bars, venues, libraries, etc and start monitoring them for news. Subscribe to newsletters and RSS feeds. Pick up leaflets. Get a sense of what’s going on outside your doors.
7. Include the competition. This might seem counter-intuitive at first but for your customers there’s no real distinction. Most of them will also buy stuff from the competition so pretending they don’t exist is insulting and petty. Anyway, this isn’t about your business. This is about the community which your business serves.
8. Be positive. Positive can be interesting and is an important part of bringing people together. There’s plenty of places to bitch online should people need one. And you’re looking to convert random customers into regular ones so showing off the community as a nice place to hang out is in your favour.
9. Be campaigning. Nothing brings people together like a good campaign. Look at some of the issues in your area – road safety, graffiti, litter, policing – and allow your blog to be used to campaign on them. Get people writing to local government and, most importantly, keep them informed of the results. You don’t have to do this yourself. If someone comes in saying “Someone should do something about…” call their bluff. Give them a platform and the tools to use it. (Again, make this about the wider community – don’t be campaigning about business taxes!)
10. Be an enabler. You’re busy running the business so you don’t want to be spending hours on the blog each day. Think about how you manage the tables. You keep them clean and the environment secure and occasionally join in but you don’t involve yourself in every discussion. You’re a host who enables people to come together. Apply these skills to the blog.
11. Do an offline publication. Once a week gather together the best bits of the blog, paste them into Word and print out a newsletter. A single folded sheet will suffice. Hand it out with every sit-down purchase. Give people something to read that’s directly related to where they’re sitting. Make sure it plugs the blog, obviously.
12. Connect with other local blogs. Find out who else is blogging in your area. Let them know what you’re doing and ask them if they’d fancy a chat. Most bloggers can’t resist talking about blogging so make the most of the free consultancy! Most importantly you’ll get on their radar meaning they’ll link to you when appropriate sending traffic to your blog and boosting your Google rankings.
13. Further to this, provide some free wifi. If you already have Internet coming into the building buy a cheap-ish wifi router and open it up. Bloggers love free wifi like bears love honey.
14. Above all, start small. Don’t try and run a local media outlet from the outset. Gradually build to being a local media outlet as you add more people to the team. If you just have 5 or 10 posts a week that’ll be fine. Once people know there’s a venue for their news they’ll bring it to you.

As always I could go on but a lot of this will depend on the circumstances of the business and the community it serves. What I hope is clear is that social spaces online are not that different to social spaces offline. At the end of the day they’re about enabling people to communicate and share. If you’re already in the conversation enabling business using those skills to provide and nurture an online space should be relatively painless. And by associating your business with that sort of activity, the few hours a week you feed into the blog should come back to the business many-fold.

If you’re running a cafe or similar business in Birmingham and this sounds like something you’d like to try please get in touch as I’d love to get involved in actualizing something like this. As for the rest of you, how do you think this could be applied to other local businesses? Could a hardware store have a social media strategy? I’d be interested in your thoughts.