How Blogging Is Turning The Corporate World Upside Down
Why? For two reasons:
Reason no 1:
When you first think about a blog, you think about a person and their hobby. You think about “a Web page that serves as a publicly accessible personal journal for an individual”. What many people and many companies fail to see is that bloggers are actually small business owners.
They are a one-(wo)man-show, yes, but they progress and learn all the time, they grow, they have their own fan clubs, communities and they earn money from it. They sometimes have greater knowledge than companies with all the employees and teams and procedures.
They are entrepreneurs who have to learn all the time if they want to succeed. They know how to adjust the product to the end-customer, they value customer relationships, they plan their budgets, and the editorial calendar, they are social media experts, they are programmers, designers, negotiators and what not… Maybe they are not the best in everything they do, but some big(ger) companies have all the different roles and teams and they are not better for it (they are only as good as their employees).
So, how come some corporations don’t recognize bloggers as small business owners? You are a SMB if you are a web developer, a programmer or a photographer. So why not if you’re a blogger? I am not speaking about the laws and the taxes, I am speaking about recognizing a potential business partner in a blogger. Well, let’s be honest, some corporations recognize bloggers as promotion channels, that’s what some of the bloggers do for aliving, but we have to make sure we know exactly who are we speaking to, it’s not just a random channel/choice.
Reason no 2:
Blogging is the industry were men are the underdogs. I needed quite some time to make sure this was the truth, thinking about it intensely for a month and redoing this blog post in my head all the time. I heard this fact on Type-A parent conference in Atlanta back in September, and I liked it. I even found a proof in the research (thanks to Petra Slanic for the data). In the US, women represent 67,2% of bloggers in the US. Bloggers write about: fashion (15%), beauty (13%), food (12,8%) and travel (12,5%). Only after health (8,6%) and social themes (8,3%) do we have technology (7,3%) as a blog topic. And it shpuld be noted that 90,7% of bloggers earn (something) from their blogs! Apart from these stats, here is a great infographic on bloggers here:
You can also visit WendyPiersall.com for some other interesting stats on blogging here!
I am not even mentioning the importance of having a blog for your company. It pays of so much more than advertising. It’s something that stays online forever. And it’s also so much different than what the corporations usually do – it’s giving the control to somebody else to write about your business. For me, blogging is the end of the corporate world as we know it.
