Ken Yarmosh, Oliver Thylmann, and I have been having a nice distributed conversation about the value of the Internet and, a bit more specifically, blogging to small businesses. Cutting directly to the chase, I think Ken's central point is that Internet visibility is important to small businesses largely because Internet search drives sales. Further, Internet communication can be much more efficient. Oliver and I have countered that learning the Internet can just be too costly in time for people scrambling to make a buck, and actually Ken's original post gives us some credence. He was describing accessing some material about the Internet and small business that he had just not had time for up till then.
Let me state for the record that I pretty much agree with what I have outlined as Ken's value proposition of the Internet for small business. The real question in my mind is how to achieve it.
Most small business people do not have the time to do what it takes to build a site that will do well in organic search results. In a largely service economy, their economic engine is driven by meeting people and physically rendering service. The Internet, telephones, etc. just serve the purpose of making that happen. In other words, the Internet is ancillary, not an end in and of itself.
I suspect for many small businesses that do not deliver services over the Internet, the real answer is to build small, informative static sites and to outsource their optimization for search engines. In other words, treat the Internet like any other ancillary service. My answer becomes much more nuanced for firms that feel that there is value in direct interaction with potential customers over the Internet and for larger companies. However, even in these cases, what I have observed is that there is an imperative to make the revenue machine run. If Internet activities are not clearly and directly tied to economic activity, they will be downgraded. There is just not enough time.
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