Are we at the wrong party?
Ever walk into a party that you expected to be jumping and found the place empty? Everybody has been talking it up for weeks. The parking lot is full. And, the bass thump of the music can be felt through your shoes, as you walk to the door. When you step in and your eyes adjust to the light, you realize the joint is empty. You’re the only one there. What’s up? Where is everybody? This is how I feel about this new business blog party that’s supposed to be happening.
As an independent restaurant operator, the business blog is where our little 150 neighborhood eatery can out shine the big national chains. We can outblog Red Lobster. We can look as slick as Outback. In the blog media world, we can even match the placement budget of Olive Garden. The marketing opportuinty afforded to local restaurants by a thoughtful, authentic, inclusive blog is not to be missed. But as I look around the room, we’re the only ones who have shown up.
Before posting this evening, I checked Google for the key phrase; “restaurant blog”. Horsefeathers, that’s our place, showed up number #8.
In the entire blogosphere, an independent restaurant in North Conway, New Hampshire ranks in the top ten. Where is the rest of the restaurant world? Are we at the wrong party?
What’s true in the hospitality business has to be true in most businesses. Any local shop owner, who knows his customers, should be able to kick some national blog butt. I realize we’re early in the curve, but I just don’t see that happening very often. Where is everybody?
Back to Google. You might be interested to know the number #1 hit on those key words was to Portals & KM and their kind post about the Horsefeathers blog. Too Easy.
Filed under: BLOGthenticity, Ben, Business Blogging, General, Why Blog?
Innovators, Geniuses, Prophets, Thought Leaders have always been “at the wrong party”, my friend. Welcome to the Lone Wolf Club. Revel in your isolation, your overwhelming dominance and prevailing superiority in restaurant blogging.
In my upcoming book, tentatively titled “Secrets of the Blogging Pros”, featuring exclusive insights from Evan Williams, Matt Mullenweg, Jorn Barger, Cory Doctorow, Richard Edelman, Michael Wiley (General Motors FastLane Blog), Paul Woodhouse, Rich Marcello (HP), and many others (over 70 top bloggers), I kept hearing from them one principle:
Keep improving, writing, growing, innovating, and don’t care a fig about the sluggishness of the mainstream and slacker colleagues.
Losers tend to clump together and comfort each other, praising each other’s mediocrity, paranoia (”caution, wait and see attitude”), laziness, laxity, miserable mendacity and timidity.
They want you sir to test the waters and make mistakes and invest money and look foolish and fall flat on your face a few times and have to apologize and learn how to deal with comment spammers and flamers. Then, maybe, just maybe, they’ll get up off their bulbous asses and do something for once in their rotten little mediocre lives.
Can you tell I’m championing you?
Well, we’re glad you joined this party.
A great thing about your step into the blog world is that you have a great place to host your party. I love your restaurant after reading Horsefeathers. Wish it weren’t so far away from me.
I agree about the ‘Where is everybody?” That is one of the reasons I went in with Paul on this blog. I wanted to try and find all these business blogs that were jumping into the fray. They are slowly trickling in, it seems.
Thank you for joining us. I look forward to the dialogue.
Not only are there not as many people at the party as has been promised, but many of those who are already there gatecrashed the damn thing in the first place.
At the end of the day it’s all about quality and not quantity.
I suppose you’ll be doing the catering, Ben?