If I were able to go back to the 80’s and give myself a couple of things to make life easier and to revolutionize my world, the first would be hair strengtheners, the second would be all the social media toys I now have at my disposal.

Back in the 80’s when I used to work in the world of newspapers I would promise the world and charge the earth. My sales targets were massive, a full page at rate card would cost the same as a small house and what actually could we do? Put a picture on a page. I remember a meeting with Direct line. They were the first company to come up with the jingle logo. I had an idea, what if we could put a tiny player into the paper so when the page was turned the logo would play. Everyone was very excited, looked into it and costed it out. When the figures came back it was shown that not only was it too expensive but also a lot of trouble and hassle, for just one day, especially when there were other mediums, ie TV & Radio, who though more expensive could do the job. The client settles for the normal ½ page and that’s that.

Fast forward 20 years and it’s all possible. Not within the paper pages but certainly on apps. It’s a one off cost to produce and then capable of spreading around all platforms.

The most revolutionary difference is that all mediums can and do speak to each other, collaborate to make things happen. Back in the 80’s not only did we not speak to the competition, we rarely spoke to other departments within our own brand. Bonkers!

Social media brings it all together; the only limitation is imagination and effort. And as for the hair strengtheners my follicles thank me now.

Lots of people ask what is Social Networking, and I do spend lots of my time talking to companies about how they can utilise it in to their business.

If you want me to speak about that for about 4 minutes it will take me about a dayto produce the content, If you want me to speak on that subject for half an hour it will take me around 4 hours to produce b if you want me to talk to you about it for an hour or so, well I can start straight away.

There is so much to tell, blogging, tweeting, facebooking, creating conversations, getting return of investment, changing your lifestyle, how’s its all changing the world. But.. I want you to get it, appreciate it and start to do it for your business because I genuinely believe the more people that take part the richer it becomes for all of us.

This You tube video brilliantly portrays what would take me an awful long time to produce.
Enjoy!

Foursquare is a social media platform where users can find places to go, to eat, to  relax etc. It’s like your own ‘time out’ or ‘The best of’ in your pocket. Reviews or ‘tips’ can be uploaded to specific venues in a few moments so passing trade can get real advice from real people about where to go on their doorstep. Think of it like a huge neon sign outside your establishment saying what peope really think about you. You as a business owner can’t own it, can’t advertise on it. It is entirely driven by the word of mouth of your customers. The happy ones and the not so happy ones.

Are you interested now?

It’s best used on a mobile device, how many of those are on Xmas lists this year?

For any cafe owner, restauraunter, shop owner. In fact any one with a customer facing profile it can be your best friend or your worst enemy and a huge business headache.

I recently visited a restauraunt, not one with a swish fancy London address a country pub in an insignificant West Country village on a chilly November afternoon. I was playing around with Foursquare, trying to get a mayorship. (yep you can ‘own’ the place and be Mayor if you visit it enough!!) and didn’t believe that this pub where my 90 year old granny brings her family for sunday lunch was into social media.

On closer inspection, the owners of the pub were not involved in social media, they thought it was a load of rubbish and only for young Facebookers and stupid twitterers. It was for ”people with too much time on their hands”, it was not for them, this”new fangled”‘ clap trap (or words to that effect! Ahem!) Oh how the amassed owners and managers laughed self satisfyingly as they dismissed social media with a toss of their blinkered head.

 But their customers were!!

And here is where the problem lay. There were one or two ‘reviews’ from supporters of the establishment on Foursquare, which can be linked into Facebook, Twitter,  linked-in and about a dozen other social networks with  a swish of a finger. Locals who enjoyed a beer or two in the summer. There were also some pretty disgruntled ‘reviewers’ bemoaning the service, the loo’s and the cost of the puddings (i certainly got their point)

When I showed this to the owners , they were ashen!Not surprisingly! Suffice to say we’re in touch about helping them with their social media management.

Who is looking after your social reputation?

Social Media is pretty big right now, the opportunities are, apparently, endless. BUT who has the time to immerse themselves in a medium that is not proven and cannot give measured ROI? Big companies have the benefit of large marketing departments who have access to social media managers, but smaller companies have to be self reliant and take time out of doing the business to getting ‘their head around’ the many platforms. Add to this the ever changing nature of the medium and you have a bit of a headache for the SME. Until now!!!

The Social Media Team is driven by the desire to get you and your company social media savvy

 We appreciate that the best sort of social media is the tweets and the pokes (technical terms;)) that you do yourself but until you are aufait with it all how can you do it with aplomb, skill and confidence? Our skill is helping you devise a social media plan and then be your social media manager over a pre agreed timeframe, we then handover gradually when you are ready, can understand how it can work for you in the context of your business and you can see the many benefits that being socially connected can have.

Contracts are flexible and highly affordable. If you think that at some point in the future you will do it, don’t wait, do it now and let us help you get ‘into’ social media quickly and effectively.

It is said that if you do what you have always done you will always get what you have always had.

This can be taken 2 ways. If you are a failure in life and you keep on doing what you have always done then you will get what you have always got, namely failure.

If you are a success in life and you carry on doing what you have always done the ‘saying’ would suggest that if you keep on doing it you will continue to be successful.

I do not believe as we approach the second decade of the new millennium that this is true.

Change is happening so quickly in every part of business. I used to work in the engineering industry and in the 80’s would visit companies in heavy manufacturing that no longer exist, but at the time were the pillars of our society and had been for almost 100 years before.

The technical revolution which fast forwarded everything and started to shake things up. However the banks, law and Newspapers remained more or less the same. Until now.

It started with the MP’s expenses. We are now seeing the big banks about to reduce bonuses across all companies and the newspaper reading public is falling and so are there profits as ad revenues filter to more immediate forms of communication.

These industries had seen success doing things a certain way for generations and as a means of survival are going to have to change. They have a huge challenge on their hands but I have no doubt the best will come out stronger and be able to continue to serve us for years to come.

We live in uncomfortable times and whilst we change there will be painful transitions which will impact on us culturally as well as personally.

In the last 6 months I have many conversations with clients who are going through times of change and their business leadership skills are being tested to the max. Advertising is taking more time and effort and gaining less results, the target marget is becoming more diverse, the client base more fickle and the paremeters of business are now not so clear cut.

Social media may well be the way out of this situation. It will be uncomfortbale at first as you don’t know what to do, it’s a new thing and you may well be an early adopter in your group or market so will not get the support from your usual sources.

One of the questions I get asked all the time is, does social media really work? Can it bring me new customers and more business?

The answer, for the majority of businesses in the UK (there will always be a few exceptions!) is undoubtedly YES!

However, I heard a great story just the other day which really highlights the potential and power of social media. This particular anecdote concerns Twitter.

There’s a very successful UK entrepreneur called Nigel Botterill. Nigel has built five separate million pound plus businesses in the last five years so, he knows a lot about what it takes to build businesses fast. He was one of the first business people to properly understand the potential and power of social media and he has driven literally hundreds of thousands of people to his websites and generated tens of thousands of pounds of revenue directly through social media over the last few months.

However, the story I heard last week is very powerful. Nigel was running a Boot Camp to train potential franchisors, i.e. people that wanted to franchise their business. He was running a Boot Camp over two days at his head offices in Solihull. Tickets cost over £2,000 and the event was fully booked.

On the Sunday evening before the event, Nigel put a Tweet out on Twitter that said, “Really looking forward to my Franchisors Boot Camp tomorrow – off for an early night to make sure I’m on top form (hopefully)”.

Now, this is not one of the most insightful Tweets you will ever see(!) but, what happened next is fascinating and illustrates really well the power of Twitter. One “follower” of Nigel is a guy called Jat Mann who runs a business called PC Pal. Jat has recently franchised his business out and when he saw this Tweet from Nigel (at 9.00pm on a Sunday evening don’t forget) it was the first he knew about Nigel’s Boot Camp. He was very keen to get a place so he tweeted back to Nigel asking for more information. Unfortunately, Nigel had gone offline so Jat jumped on the internet and started filling in every email form he could find on all of Nigel’s websites. One of those emails got picked up by one of Nigel’s colleagues who called Nigel at home at 10.15pm on a Sunday evening to ask whether he would accept another person on his Franchisors Boot Camp.

Long story short, Jat turned up at Nigel’s offices on the Monday morning at 8.30am, paid his two grand plus on credit card and joined the Boot Camp.

The point of this story is to illustrate the ability that Twitter has to generate business and, what’s great about this particular anecdote is that it is completely ring fenced, nothing else was at play here – just Twitter.

Now, it would be easy to dismiss this story as an isolated incident – “Oh, Nigel got lucky!” However, that would be to overlook the platform that had been built over the previous months. Nigel has a large number of followers on Twitter and Jat was one of those people. Nigel engages with his audience on Twitter all the time. Consequently, he is seen as being interesting and interested and, so relationships are forged.

When Nigel launches new products or has new initiatives he is able to let his followers know about these things in the right way, at the right time and a heck of a lot of business gets done as a result.

This kind of platform and access to this community is available to you too – IF you use social media properly.

If you need any help in this regard…..then you know where to come!

For sixty years after the Second World War if you were a local business there were only really three things you had to do to market yourself effectively. Life was very straightforward. You took the biggest ad you could afford in Yellow Pages, relied a lot on word of mouth and, if you were very ambitious or a little bit flash(!), then you took an ad out in the local newspaper.

That was pretty much all you had to worry about as far as marketing was concerned.

Oh how times have changed.

Yellow Pages are dying now. They are getting thinner every year, fewer and fewer people are using them and, within the next five to ten years the old printed yellow books will have disappeared altogether.

Right across the country local newspapers are seeing circulation fall and, each month, different titles are shutting down the presses and going out of business.

And, of course, society has become much more transient and mobile than it ever was in the ‘good old days’. Neighbourhood communities are now a real rarity for most people.

For businesses right across the country this has forced a seismic shift in the way they market and promote themselves. New, all encompassing, marketing services like thebestof have come from nowhere to provide a myriad of different services to businesses. The internet is now an integral part of the fabric of modern life and, within that, social media has emerged to fulfil the role of 21^st Century word of mouth.

If you think about it, that’s all social media is, word of mouth.

People sharing with other people (some whom they know and others who they don’t know) what they think about things and places, what they’re doing right now and what they are planning to do.

The fact is, that wherever you live in the country, within a few miles of where you are right now there will be thousands of people online, right this minute, on social media sites. Whether it’s Twitter, Facebook or Linked-In, the reality is that these people, in your area, are using social media today. It’s where the people are. And that’s why, if you are a business then you have to be in this space as well and you can’t do it just by buying an ad or writing a cheque.

You have to engage and get involved.

You have to continually update and input.

It’s not difficult and, when you do it right, it can be even more powerful than word of mouth was in the old days because social media allows everybody to communicate with everybody else – and people do.

You don’t really have a choice as to whether you get involved with social media or not – only when. It’s beginning to transform the way people do business in the UK and the opportunities for those businesses sharp enough to see that and adapt to it is immense.

If you would like help with your social media strategy then we’d be delighted to oblige. We understand this stuff, we’re good at it and we love to make it happen. Happy to have a chat……….