twitter

Seems to be the new way of announcing projects. Just this week, we had Ian Sanders uncovering his new children's book on twitter, then today I had Riding Resource add me to their list of followed people. I'm also nosey when people do this so wandered over to look at their website http://www.ridingresource.com/ which is in pre-launch, but in the meantime you can follow them on twitter & via their facebook page to stay in touch.

I can only assume they stumbled across me from the horsey references in my tweets & profile - bit it's worked! I now know who they are & what they do. Great piece of marketing.

Finally, whilst on the subject of twitter, props to http://twitter.com/sitepointdotcom for their current initiave. I read on a tech blog about their offer - sign up to follow them & get a free PDF copy of their great book on CSS design. Well I'm always a sucker for a freebie & my CSS coding is pretty poor, so off I headed. Their offer has been so popular they almost broke twitter! Well done guys & cheers for the book.

back to basics

I ended the day today with a quick visit to a local customer of my other business, (a gift wholesale company), to drop off an order.

These customers are great :-) Always knowledgable about new products in the industry, they run an efficient & well-stocked store & I love picking their brains. Today I have been planning the gift company marketing strategy for 2009, which includes a website upgrade to improve the online ordering, better e-newsletters, a return to a traditional paper brochure as well as an increased social media presence (must practice what I preach!).

Whilst dithering over color schemes, format, printing etc. I was given a golden bit of advice in-store.

Make sure your contact details are on the front cover!

I'm assured that this is the cardinal sin of brochure design (probably not according to graphic designers & other experts....) but in a busy shop, when you grab ten minutes to place an order, there is nothing more irritating than having to hunt down contact details. Seems obvious but after digging through the store's brochure collection I was amazed to see that they were right & contact details were surprisingly hard to find on a lot of (otherwise beautifully designed) brochures.

I left with a resolve that in 2009 our customers will have so many ways to contact us using old & new methods, all clearly displayed, that they will be spoilt for choice!

Sorry, no great insight into web 2.0 marketing this evening, but sometimes I think a firm grasp of the basics before zooming ahead into new ground is worth remembering (any fellow dressage riders reading this will know exactly what I mean!!).

Facebook fan page - should your business have one?

As the big players of the equine industry begin to dip their toes in web 2.0 - should your company consider doing the same?

A very simple step to take is to set up a fan page at www.facebook.com You can see an example of an equine company doing this here http://www.facebook.com/pages/Derby-House/18595243548?ref=s (I will avoid discussing the KP topic today!).

A great article with some more do's & dont's about facebook fan pages can be found here http://www.smallwebbusiness.com/smallwebbusiness-90-20081105DontAbandonYourFacebookFanPage.html

Let me know how you get on & don't forget to include a link to your new page!