An edited version of the column appeared on Business Week, August 25th, 2010

 

By Gene Marks

Bloggers in my hometown are up in arms this week.   That’s because the City of Philadelphia is charging some of them a $300 lifetime Business Privilege tax.  The city’s position is that many of the bloggers are accepting advertising revenue and are in effect operating a business within the city limits.   How could they do this, the bloggers are yelling.  This is a violation of free speech, they yell.  It’s an outrage!  We are being persecuted! To the City of Philadelphia I say:  hip, hip hooray!  Tax those guys!  Because by doing so you’re actually helping small businesses, not hurting them.

 

Philadelphia doesn’t have a history of good government.  Growing up here I’ve witnessed brawls in the city council chambers, corruption amongst its highest officials and the firebombing of entire city blocks.  But this time it’s different.  I applaud the City of Philadelphia.  And I support this tax of bloggers.   In fact, I don’t think it’s big enough.  I think if you’re going to have a blog and use it for your small business you should pay a significantly higher tax.  This way we can rid the world of lousy bloggers.

 

 We can save small business owners a lot of the time they’re now wasting by blogging.  And those small business owners who don’t have a blog can stop feeling so guilty every time their technology guy tells them they should.  Because they shouldn’t. Why?  Well, let’s face it, most small business blogs are terrible.  People don’t know how to write, even if they did get a B in 8th grade English.  Small business bloggers who have aspirations of becoming the next online Hemingway usually produce material that’s not even up to the standards of, well, of this publication.  And that’s pretty bad don’t you think?  Many small business owners are told by their IT advisors, marketing experts and public relations gurus that they should be keeping a blog.  But the truth is they really have nothing important to say. I don’t care whether my office equipment supplier is a supporter of a free Tibet.  I just want lower prices on ink toner.  

 

The City of Philadelphia is providing us a service. They’re making us face the fact that most small business owners shouldn’t be wasting their time maintaining a blog.  They should be spending their time making sure their products work as well as they say.  Instead of writing about the state of society and whether Barack Obama is a Muslim or not (by the way, he’s NOT a Muslim for goodness sake) they should be reviewing their overhead, meeting with potential customers and helping their employees do a better job.  Not blogging. This is not to say that there aren’t good bloggers.  There are some great ones in fact.  But take a look around.

 

 There’s a trend here.  The best baseball players are the guys in the MLB (except for the guys playing for the Pittsburgh Pirates, of course), not the guys on your Sunday softball team.  The best pilots are flying on commercial airlines or military aircraft, not those idiots landing their private planes on the interstate because they forgot to check their fuel gauge.  And the best bloggers are professional bloggers – writers and journalists and pundits who blog full time and who not only have something interesting to say, but know how to say it in an interesting way.

 

 Don’t believe me?  Check out Andrew Sullivan’s Dish or Ben Poken’s Consumerist.  And by the way – these professional bloggers have staffers who help them blog too.  Just to make sure the information and research is accurate.The reality is that most small business owners I know find blogging to be too much time and money.  Sure, any bozo can start blogging for free on hundreds of tools available like Google’s Blogspot of Wordpress.  Don’t believe me?  Just check out Barbara Streisand’s latest comments on Jennifer Aniston’s photo shoot.  It just takes a lot of time.

 

 And the one thing that most small business owners do NOT have is a lot of free time.  And if you, or someone else in your company, don’t spend enough time keeping your blog up to date and interesting then no one is going to read it.  And if no one is reading your blog then the whole exercise is kind of useless, isn’t it?  Most small business owners I know who ventured into blogging learned this lesson the hard way.  And they stopped doing it.  The City of Philadelphia is doing their part to help us realize the truth!

 

But you don’t believe me, do you?  You want to have a blog for your small business, don’t you?  Look, I’m not going to stop you.  In fact I’ve got a blog for my small business too.  But here’s a few things I’ve learned about small business blogging technology that every entrepreneur should know. The smart business people I’ve met who succeed with their blogs make the investment in this  technology like any other marketing technology.   If you’re going to do it, do it right or don’t do it at all.  They commit to posting something at least once a day.  They generally pay (yes pay) one of their staffers or an outside person to do research, post content and manage comments.  For example, I pay three people in my company to post tips for using our software products throughout the month to our blog.  They each do about 10-12 posts.   I also then post links to columns (like this one) and other writings I do as well.  It’s a marketing expense.

 

 And it’s a customer service expense. Another thing small business owners who’ve succeeded with this technology do is link it to other technologies.  For example, some of my clients have accounts on LinkedIn, Twitter and FaceBook.  Then they use social media aggregator technology like Ping, Profilactic, or Strands to connect all of these sites, and other social community sites, together.  This way they can send one message and it’s posted everywhere.  Of course, these messages have character limitations like Twitter, but maybe that’s not such a bad thing either.  Maybe what you’ve got to say can be edited down to a few key phrases.  Guys, can’t we find some way to apply this theory to our wives? 

  

Do people read my blog?  Not a whole lot.  We get a few dozen comments each month.  Sometimes a random client will mention something that they saw on my blog (which always makes me wonder if that person really doesn’t have something better to do with his time).  But our blog is just one way of getting our software tips out.  The same get posted to the social community sites mentioned above and they also get regenerated in our monthly newsletter which goes to clients and others using our products.  This works well for us because our customer community has been fragmenting over the past few years.  A few idiots play Mafia Wars on Facebook.  Others participate in long-winded discussions on Linked In (“Group members:  Define your perfect customer.  Please discuss”  Barf. ).  Others like to tweet.  And still the lion’s share like to get a good old email with good old relevant information. It all starts with our blog and then disseminates from there.  For us and a few other small business owners I know, blogging is a good marketing tool that we use to communicate product information to our customers.  It makes good business sense and is worth the effort.  We would pay the $300 to the City of Philadelphia.  

 

But for the large majority of my clients and other small business owners blogging is not a worthwhile exercise and serves only to clog up the internet with nonsense and provide busy work for public relations firms and technology people.  So thank you, City of Philadelphia, for taking a stand here.  Tax those silly bloggers into oblivion.  Free them from the burden of blogging. Help these business owners realize that they should be spending their time more productively…and profitably.  Oh, and by the way….maybe with those proceeds you can afford another trash truck to come by my house a little more often?

Follow Gene on Twitter: @genemarks, and find him on Facebook: facebook.com/quickerbetterwiser