Garden Center Blogger

Author Archive

Written by Susan Harris as a guest on a terrific blog about social media – Debbie Weil’s Social Media Insights Blog. Here’s Debbie’s introduction:

Kudos to my newest guest blogger Susan Harris for her post below explaining exactly why being a corporate blogger can be fun. She hits all the relevant points (how she coaxes posts out of the staff, how she finds guest authors, etc.). I love her observation that “the networking goes on in the sidebar, too” through a carefully selected blogroll. Read on for the dirt on corporate blogging. Sorry, couldn’t resist.   Susan is best known for her blogging at GardenRant and award-winning Sustainable and Urban Gardening.  She writes for corporate blogs Mahoney’s and Homestead.  Take it away, Susan:

Field Report from a Local Corporate Blogger – Where Viral Meets Local

Anybody out there losing their blogging mojo, like me? I’ve been at it five years now and have climbed to the top of the heap in my niche (gardening), but still there’s almost no money in it. So I boldly offered my “blogging services” to a local garden center, and damn if they didn’t hire me.  Then another.  So suddenly I’m a corporate blogger, no matter that the term conjures up savvy 20-somethings in the marketing departments of big national companies.

But blogging for small local businesses is as different from that corporate world as it is blogging for myself, and the shocker to me is that I love doing it, and not just for the moolah. Here’s what I do. Read the rest of this entry »

Susan’s Guest blog post for  Garden Center Magazine’s blog.

Independent garden centers – listen up! Lowes, that big box down the street, has hired reputable garden writers in eight regions of the U.S. to post weekly about their gardens. That’s right, they’re stepping up their online marketing to do what blogs do so well – create community and customer loyalty – despite their being, you know, a big box. (The Lowes blog is called Garden Grow-Along.)

The point is they’re doing what gardeners would rather see YOU doing. Real gardeners would rather get their gardening info from a local store with knowledgeable staff and plants that, you know, live.

Garden centers are blogging, but…
By now you’re all being told you MUST blog to survive, thrive, and win those new, young customers, and it’s true. (If you haven’t seen the reasons, here’s a list.) Garden center owners and staff simply don’t have the time or the blogging and social networking expertise to blog successfully, which requires several new posts a week, every week, plus ongoing promotion. I’ve surveyed all the garden-center blogs I can find, and generally found:

• Blogs full of advertising copy – an instant turn-off for every single reader. Successful corporate blogs avoid ad copy altogether in favor of offering useful and entertaining content.
• Lots of abandoned-looking blogs. To the average reader, if your most recent update was a month ago, the blog’s dormant and not worth checking in on. Successful blogs are updated at least three times a week, and five to seven times a week is ideal.
• Lots of blogs with seriously out-of-date designs.
• Too many deadly treatises about plants, sometimes with no photos.
• Visually, not enough photos and lots of bad ones, too. Too small, too dark, not displayed well.

The list could go on but the bottom line is that most are failing to win traffic or meet any business objective, like attracting customers. Read the rest of this entry »

I compiled this information for ANLA, and it’s now here in their Social Media Guide.

GOOD EXAMPLES

The most successful corporate blogs avoid marketing language and simply provide a service to their customers – great content being key.  Examples of the best include: Kodak,  Whole Foods, Fiskars’s craft blog ,  and  American Express.

Garden Centers:

Homestead Gardens – has a lively multi-author blog and identifies all its writers clearly.  There are gobs of photos, and the header is changed seasonally.  Note the sidebar shows dozens of regional links – that’s the online community we want to communicate with.  (I contribute three articles each week to this blog; other contributors include their education coordinator , a food blogger, and guest bloggers.) Read the rest of this entry »