Business blogger needs our help

Bloggers helping bloggers is one of the powerful uses of this medium we call blogging. By putting the global power of the internet to work, in the capable hands of the blogging community members great things can happen.

Unfortunately, we often have to use that combined power for good to help those in dire need.

My good friend business blogger Paul Chaney of Radiant Marketing Group sends along the following plea for assistance for another blogger. Paul asks not for himself, but help is requested for his friends.

Here is Paul's request for help:

I'm a man on a mission today, and I want to make a request of you. A small business blogger needs our help. Please take a moment to read the following...

The very first blog I developed was for a jeweler in my hometown of Tupelo, Mississippi, Patti Thompson, owner of Way-fil Jewelry. Patti is an expert jeweler and jewelry appraiser, as well as a wonderful writer. She was intriqued by the notion of blogging and agreed to let me design a blog for her.

On November 1st, just at the beginning of the holiday sales season (a time crucial to jewelers) her store caught fire and was literally gutted. You can only imagine how devastated she and her husband Stephen must have felt. A store she has owned for years, her livelyhood, now burned to the ground.

But, Patti and Stephen are courageous people. They have made the best of a bad situation and are reopened in a temporary location - a room in an adjacent building owned by a tire shop. In fact, before Patti moved it was a storage room for tires! The tire shop owner graciously moved the tires to another location and made it available for Patti and Steve. They have worked long and hard over the past few weeks to make it presentable and are now open.

Here's the kicker - Patti is blogging the entire story! In fact, the very day following the fire she talked about it on her blog and is keeping her readers up-to-date chronicling the rebuilding process via her blog, Diamond Diva Online. To me, this represents not only one key way blogs can be used effectively as a communications medium, but also represents the highest ideals to which we bloggers aspire, that of transparency, honesty and authenticity.



Here's my request -- help Patti tell her story. Let me ask you to write a post about what she's doing with her blog in telling her story in such an honest open way, and link to her site (www.diamonddivaonline.com).

I owe Patti and Steve a great deal. Not only was theirs the first blog I developed (I might mention they have since redeveloped the blog and gone with a more basic design.), but they gave me invaluable business advice and enormous moral support. I might not be in business today had it not been for their help and encouragement. This is just one small way I can repay their kindness.

Be sure to do what you can to help out Patti and Stephan Thompson in their hour of need.

Show everyone that bloggers care.

Tags: bloggers helping bloggers, Paul Chaney, Patti Thompson, disaster assistance.