Is Small the New Large?
photo by jswieringa
Seth Godin had an interesting post on how new media, particularly blogging, is allowing the relative increase in leverage for individuals (the small), while larger companies, or brands (the large), are losing relative leverage. Leverage in this case, is attention to, or eyeballs on, a company’s marketing efforts.
His point is that more traditional marketing tactics in most cases have a significant barrier to entry – a budget. In other words, you needed cash to play in the big leagues.
With new marketing, or blogging in this case, this barrier has been largely removed. And as a result, individuals have been empowered to get their message out, whatever that may be, brand related or otherwise.
He makes the case that this has made it relatively more difficult for big brands to garner eyeballs in the online arena.
Maybe. But I would add that while there certainly has been an increase in leverage for individuals, it doesn’t necessarily have to be at the expense of larger companies.
A great example of this is Scott Monty and Ford. Take a look at his Social Media Marketing blog and you’ll see what I mean. Ford, in recognition of Godin’s point, has Scott heading up their Social Media efforts. In other words, they’ve found a way for the power of the individual in the blogosphere to create value for their (large) company. And guess what – I’d be willing to bet there is a fairly significant budget behind it.
Individuals can, and often do have greater clout than companies when it comes to blogging and social media. This is one of the aspects of new marketing that sets it apart from many of the traditional tactics that Godin mentions are inherently budget driven and therefore skewed towards larger companies. But using the power of the individual, as long as the integrity of that bloggers posts is maintained through honest and frank relatively unfiltered content, can be a powerful tool that large companies can incorporate into their new media strategy.
As blogging becomes more of a business (and yes, don’t kid yourself, it is), corporations that understand the nature of what is valued online and have the budgets to allow a Scott Monty to head up their efforts, can turn the trend of small competing with large to their advantage.
This is not to say that blogging will ever resemble television advertising with expensive budget barriers. But as thought leaders such as David Meerman Scott, Brian Clark and Seth Godin get their new marketing messages through, and large companies begin to incorporate those strategies more and more into their marketing efforts, small may not be the new large anymore.
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