But this applies not just to PR, but to any area of business in my experience. Plans are great, but in executing those plans you need to be flexible and fast on your feet.

The power of persistence seems to be wrapped up in a beautiful Chinese quote I spotted today courtesy of the Work For You blog.

�The temptation to quit will be greatest just before you are about to succeed.�

Technorati Tags: Business Motivation, Business Success

I wonder whether he’s put the word out around Saville Row or whether this will become an example of how blogs can attract and inspire exactly the people a business is looking for?

Technorati Tags: Apprentice, English Cut, Recruitment

Why is the theory of Long Tail potentially important for small businesses? Well here’s Chris’s summary:

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-target goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

The New Yorker’s review raises an interesting but flawed criticism of Chris’s thinking. It suggests that it is only the big online names like Amazon, Ebay, and iTunes that can ‘house the long tail’ i.e. the massive array of goods and services that cater for very particular customers, tastes and passions. They are therefore wagging the long tail. In control. An online oligopoly.

Of course, these big online brands are making a bundle of money, but what about search and word of mouth. I know very few people, for example, who browse iTunes looking for podcasts on a particular subject. It’s the online word-of-mouth network combined with Google et al that is the primary guide in this space. Large aggregators of Long Tail content may be the one stop out of town megastores, but it’s the growing interaction and sharing of online communities and networks that means the internet high street is thriving in its diversity.

The Tap Room is already shaping up to be a cosy, smoke-filled haven to enjoy jokes, strange stories and a virtual tipple or two. It certainly brings the place to life, even if you’re not a local and “if you don’t like it, you can always f**k off somewhere else,” to quote Dave Coffey, an icon of a pub landlord!

One of the great things about blogs is that they can capture the thoughts, stories and characters of a place like a pub. Blogs are the pubs of the website world. Places to congregate and share, places where you feel at home.

If, as I think Paul hopes, several of the regulars start contributing, it’ll become a phenomenal record and meeting place for regulars old and new for years to come. Imagine looking back on the blog in 5, 10 or 20 years time. All those stories, half-remembered in pub legend over the years, will be there to be enjoyed by generations to come.

I think sometimes people forget, you don’t have to be blogging to the world for a blog to be successful. Having said that, which pub will you make a point of visiting when you’re next up Pendle way?

The nub of that particular debate concerns what hard-nosed business reasons could/should motivate a business to start blogging. In responding, Scoble draws attention to the benefits of blogging to a small coffee shop in Pittsburgh as one example.

Scoble says of the Aldo Coffee Co:

When I visited that shop myself the owner raved about what blogging had done for his business. It turned his little coffee shop into one with an international presence. Thanks to search engines like A9, Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Oh, and he said he never got written up in the press before blogging, but now that’s a regular happening.

Interesting. The Aldo Coffee shop website is built entirely around a cheap piece of blogging software, Typepad. No expensive web design required. The blog itself displays all the passion, knowledge, insight and conversational style that characterises most of my favourite blogs.

So you want to create a bit of profile beyond your local town and have it come reverberating back across the internet into the consciousness of your local media? Blogs can make strange things happen, once people start talking.

Matthew and Bernhard, the guys at Custom Communications which organised the event have done a great job of getting coverage for the conference as yesterday’s BBC story testifies. Good to see Hugh MacLeod quoted on the global microbrand and his work with Stormhoek and English Cut.

“… creating global micro-brands is cheaper and easier than ever before.”

What’s particularly interesting about both the small business blogs Hugh has been involved with, is that they’re not the techy businesses you might expect to be leading the way. Tailoring and wine-making must rank a close second and third to the world’s oldest profession.

What both these businesses have done successfully is reveal their passion for the sometimes arcane details of their craft – a level of detail and knowledge that strikes a chord with geeks everywhere. And then they’ve gone and out-geeked the geeks, SEO merchants and marketers by turning the social web to their very tangible advantage.

The rapid – albeit long-delayed – roll out of broadband is changing the face of commerce and entertainment, unleashing a wave of creative potential across the world. It is even possible to view the past seven days as the tipping point for a new era.

For small businesses, networks create opportunities. They always have done. If there is a new era, there’s an argument for saying that it’s the small guys who are going to benefit most.

The 1% who regularly listen to podcasts in the US seems like a very small number. The 20% of US households who will regularly listen to podcasts by 2010 seems like a pretty big number. The message seems to be that despite the hype, those looking to reach mass audiences through podcasting will have to wait a while. That said, a survey by BMRB suggested recently that 8 million people in the UK will be regularly listening to podcasts by September this year.

The other interesting numbers game associated with podcasting is how to measure listenership. Once a podcast is downloaded it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s being listened to. It would be good to have data around the proportion of podcasts that are listened to after download. Measurability of podcasting doesn’t, however, seem any less or more robust than measurabiity of newspaper or magazine circulations against readership. How much of a newspaper does an individual read? How often do they throw a newspaper away
without reading it? How many newspapers included on circulation figures are left in piles unread at airports? Uncertainties in this market have never stopped advertisers advertising, until perhaps now when their attention is increasingly turned towards niche audiences.

What’s interested me about media coverage of podcasting, however, is that it’s become increasingly focused on numbers – Ricky Gervais’s success being the most obvious example – equating podcasts to the metrics of mass media itself ie the volume of listeners. But podcasting, in my view, is all about the niche, not the numbers.

While big numbers are important, if you’re planning a piece of mass marketing or want to advertise on a podcast network, they really miss the point that podcasting provides a fantastic opportunity to get niche content to highly focused groups or individuals.

While big companies deliberate, small companies obliterate.

Although this primarily applies to tech companies, think what Google in its early days did to Altavista, the same could potentially be said of the disruptive potential of the likes of Skype on mainstream telecoms companies.

While I don’t subscribe to the view that the news print media are doomed in the medium term, there are already examples of small citizen-based media outlets such as Agora Vox, that could cause serious problems for readership of dead tree newspapers.

These days small and fast is so much faster thanks to broadband internet connections. Small, smart businesses really do have the chance to become global microbrands.