Garden Center Magazine published by Branch Smith Publishing bills itself as a place for “Smart Ideas for Independent Retailers.” We receive the magazine as well as most professionals in the nursery business and related fields. Generally I have found it to be one of the better of the many trade magazines we receive.

The latest issue has arrived and they are talking about blogging! They have a regular section titled “Market Smart: In Depth” This months article is entitled “Retail blogs tap into younger demographic.” Author Sarah Martinez say’s “Blogs, also known as Web logs or journals, are the latest medium vying for attention in an already crowded market. Chances are a good portion of your customer base is at least familiar with bolgs and are probably blogging themselves.”

To the credit of Sarah and Garden Center Magazine I believe this is the first article dealing with blogs for the garden center industry. The article is positive in tone and interviews Anita Campbell, editor of the blog Small Business Trends, and your’s truly. This is the interview that we talked about way back in June. That’s where we found out that most nursery consultants feel that blogs have no relevance for garden centers. I posted about that here.

If you would like to read the interview it is in the June link above. This is great news for the idea of garden center blogs. This is a publication that gets lots of attention in the garden center trade. We’ll see what comes of it.

I hope that if you do decide to use a blog at your garden center you'll follow this advice from the article. ‘“…garden centers should only start a blog if someone on staff will enjoy doing it’, Pitsenberger said. ‘If it’s considered a chore, it won’t get updated and it won’t generate feedback from customers.'” You want feedback! I get feedback from all over the world form my “customers”. They may not actually shop at my physical location, but they shop at garden centers all over and are more than willing to dispense their thoughts and ideas about my business. The suggestions and ideas I have heard don’t always get implemented, but some do, and that’s important. It also broadens our outlook to see how people in other parts of the country and world are relating to gardening, garden centers, competition from box stores, etc.

So hats off to Garden Center Magazine for broaching the subject and realizing that the nursery consultants are wrong and blogging for garden centers is, as the column in the magazine is titled, “Market Smart”.