I attended a conference held in London last week all about social network tools. The main thrust of the conference was all about the value of Web 2.0 applications, such as blogging, wikis, online communities, instant messenger services etc for generating business results.
The speakers ranged from huge coroporates such as IBM and Oracle, to tech bloggers such as Stowe Boyd and a fascinating case study by EnglishCut – a company which has used blogging to achieve phenomenal results. All of the speakers suggested that managed well and social network tools could have a major impact on businesses, for everything from marketing to internal communications.
The conference has inspired me to look at how useful blogging is for small businesses, those that typically need low budget high impact marketing strategies. As such I am going to trial blogging using my own business as a guinea pig. I will regularly contribute to my blog and measure the impact in terms of my work load and the results it generates.
I hope that this will become a useful test case for small companies, particularly for those of you that are considering using blogging as part of your marketing mix.
Andrew
