WE'VE MOVED

Find our blog at http://blacktypegroup.com/category/blog/

Is face to face marketing value for money?

This week I’m in Cologne, Germany & unusually for me I’m away from the computer for most of the day. Twice a year the European equestrian industry gathers at the Spoga Horse trade fair to shop like only horsey women can!

The cost of this kind of marketing activity is high. Many of the companies here have spent 30,000 euros plus on their stand, then there is freight, travel, staffing, accommodation & of course beer to pay for on top.

It seems a bit strange that will all the modern internet technologies available to us, that companies & buyers still travel across the globe to meet in over-priced exhibition venues. Perhaps I’m just grumpy at paying 8euro per hour for internet access?!

I’ve been busy videoing away with my new flip HD cam & the project this year is to integrate more video into the marketing strategy of the equestrian wholesale company I also run alongside Blacktype. It’s a very traditional industry (launching an e-commerce website for trade customers was seen as revolutionary 18 months ago!!) so it will be interesting to see how it goes.

On the subject of the flipcam, I’m delighted with it so far although I’m not sure what everyone in the office thinks as they are being filmed for inclusion on the website.

Thanks to Anna Bruce for the photo. Check out her site at http://www.annabruce.co.uk/ if you would like to find out more about her superstar journalism & copywriting skills.

Customising Your Social Sites

I'm in the middle of a website rebuild for www.blacktypegroup.com at the moment, transferring it all over to wordpress & doing a big content overhaul. It's a fun if somewhat frustrating job at times.

I'm also taking the opportunity to review my overall personal branding strategy & be a bit better at presenting myself. It's very easy to get bogged down in client work & neglect your own!

I'm coming across lots of great articles on the web to do with customising & I will try to add some of the best to this post as I go along.

Creating custom backgrounds for twitter, youtube, myspace

Managing a wordpress website

Essential Word Press Plug-ins

Vitamin Water & Facebook - a lesson to be learnt

This week Vitamin Water announced the winner of their facebook contest to develop a new flavour (see the techcrunch article here for all the details).

The new flavour, "connect", has a facebook inspired name & carries facebook branding on the bottle. Whilst it is interesting & unusual (at least so far) to see a physical product tied up with facebook that's not what I want to focus on in this post.

My first reaction on reading the techcrunch article was to open up facebook & search for the vitamin water page to see what was going on with the brand. (I'm more of a strong coffee kind of girl personally). I used the search button in the top right hand corner of my facebook home page & this is the first result that was returned. On first glance it looks like an official page, but it was set up by a US high school pupil.

The official page is http://www.facebook.com/vitaminwater which doesn't appear anywhere in the search results. As Vitamin Water are spending lots money to promote their facebook page by running the URL in their TV ads etc. this seems like a big oversight.

Does the internet really connect people?

Sadly the man who delivers straw for me is spending Christmas ill in hospital. He delivers for Betty, a fabulous lady farmer who still manages her farm alone & is well into her seventies. A straw delivery arrived today thanks to one of her neighbours, who is in fact in direct competition with her, as he also sells hay & straw to the local equine fraternity. However, in farming circles there has always been a culture of helping each other out, whether that be by loaning machinery or offering a spare pair of hands at shearing or harvest. Today I went to settle my bill & Betty & I were chatting about her generous neighbour. She remarked that he was a lovely lad & that she knew his parents & their parents & no doubt their parents too.

So what has the above got to do with web 2.0? In this always connected 24/7 culture, interaction has never been so easy. We can connect & communicate on a global scale but are these relationships of real value? How many of our online associates would be prepared to go out of their way to help us out? Fleeting interactions & business networking does not a community make. Saying that, I've met some fabulous genuine friends as a result of the net but it's all to easy to slip into the habit of tweeting & facebooking instead of meeting face to face. So my 2010 resolution is to treasure real friends & spend more time offline with them!

Rage against the machine

So the power of a well orchestrated facebook campaign & the subsequent picking up of the story by mainstream media has beaten the Simon Cowell X factor junket to number 1. Time for the music industry to learn some lessons in 2010 perhaps?!

Gary Vaynerchuk in London

(photo pinched from @IanSanders - thanks!)

Last week I grabbed the opportunity to see the irrepresible Gary Vaynerchuk speak in London about his new book Crush-it.

There's been some great coverage of the event by other attendees so I won't replicate!

@jas filmed the talk which you can view here http://www.thewebpitch.com/videos/gary-vaynerchuks-talk-the-water-poet-london/

Here's Phil Legetter's take on the real time element of the talk http://blog.caplin.com/2009/12/09/how-real-time-does-real-time-have-to-be/

Ian Sanders talks about the importance of word of mouth here http://scrambledup.blogspot.com/2009/12/word-of-mouth-is-on-steroids.html

For me personally seeing Gary speak with so much passion helped to ram home the concept behind his book (& brand full stop). I eventually made it home to Bristol at 2am & last thing I did was tweet about the talk. Within 2 minutes I had a DM from Gary who was still hustling despite a long day & a 5 hour time difference to adapt to as well. A simple thing but I was impressed! This is one man that really walks the walk.

Please whilst in Europe....

..drop the American lingo. The use of "fireside chat" at a tech conference just sounds ridiculous, although perhaps it's meant to be ironic as the Le Web conference 08 was apparently akin to sitting in an icebox.

Gah, can you tell I'm envious of those going, anyone with a spare ticket feel free to throw it my way!

Thank goodness for blogs

I read an interesting article about Silvio Berlusconi in Time magazine this weekend "How Silvio Berlusconi Uses Women on TV" Leaving aside the feminist outrage at the content of Italian TV these days, what struck me was the fact that Silvio controls 90% of the Italian television market. So in a European democratic nation, the Prime Minister controls the majority of the TV news coverage (the article states that 80% of Italians get their news from television). Scary stuff eh?!

Thank goodness for blogs & the internet in general to help even out the transmission of news that isn't dictated by the government.

Putting it out there

Increasingly I'm being asked to write articles & opinion pieces for online publication & a piece that was published this weekend raises a dilemma! I wrote a controversial piece on a dressage training technique (read it here http://www.horsehero.com/editorial/?feat=35093) which is being actively discussed on horse forums world wide.

The dilemma is whether to wade in & engage with the detractors, especially when they are directing bile) or to sit on my hands & stay away from the keyboard?! I still haven't made up my mind on this.

p.s. I don't just write on horse topics, I also enjoy covering motorsports & business in general but with a particular emphasis on web 2.0 & social media so feel free to hire me! Contact details on the website --------------------------->

The Dark Side of Social Gaming

I've never been a big PC game player & so social media gaming hasn't posed much of an interest either but I can't avoid games like Farmville & Mafia Wars as a result of friends playing them & the games spamming my facebook feed as a result. So apart from time wasting fun & spamming my feeds, what's wrong with social media gaming? Nothing if you are a successful developer as there are vast sums of money to be made. But there is a darker side of social gaming & some seriously unethical behavior.

Michael Arrington of Techcrunch explains it far better than I could so if you want to find out more head on over & read his article here http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/31/scamville-the-social-gaming-ecosystem-of-hell/

Even the Vatican is using social media

If anyone still doubts the relevance of social media then perhaps they should take notice of this article where Pope Benedict discusses how the Vatican is embracing social media to bring the gospel to the masses.

Pope Benedict said "The content of the Gospel message remains unchanged but the church must learn how to transmit that message to new generations and must do so by taking advantage of the new technology and new attitudes toward communications."

A neat analogy for most of us in business, the message we are trying to convey to customers hasn't changed but we do need to change how we communicate it.

A significant step in UK politics

(Note: It's only fair to disclose before you read this post that I am a paid up member of the Conservative party)

Yesterday saw the public launch of http://www.myconservatives.com/

According to the site itself: MyConservatives is a new online network that gives you the tools to campaign for the candidates you support, and issues that you care about.

Here are some of the things you can do:

* Take part in campaign activities and social action
* Donate directly to individual campaigns
* Ring voters from the comfort of your home
* Set up fundraising events with online ticketing

And you can learn more about the site by watching the video on the right.

In essence, the conservative party has built a campaign machine based on that of Barack Obama, which was so influential in him winning the election. Allowing people to engage, fund raise & campaign at a local level is a very smart move. The how to you tube videos are a nice feature too. The site is still in BETA & there a few niggles to iron out but it will be very interesting to watch it grow & I hope many of you will get involved too!

For one night only....

I'm giving a talk for the South Glos Branch of the Federation of Small Businesses tomorrow night, 26th August, (non-members are welcome to attend as well). It's at the Aztec Hotel, just off the M4/M5 interchange in Bristol, networking at 7pm, talk starts at 7.30pm & promises a gallop through social media marketing & how it can help your business. (flyer with more info here)

Hope to see you there.
Christina

Social Media Tames The Dragons

Lat week's Dragon's Den episode featured Carol Savage & her recipe sharing website www.mydish.co.uk. For the first time ever in the history of Dragon's Den, she was offered twice the investment she came in for, in the end settling for a £100k investment in return for 15% of the business.

What was interesting for me was seeing how the 5 different dragons reacted to the pitch. Some clearly just didn't get the concept & couldn't see the scalability of social media. Others couldn't see clear revenue streams. Deborah Meaden however was quick to latch on to the potential of the idea. Unusually for a web start-up, Carol had a number of clear potential revenue streams from the site, some of which were already up & running. When she mentioned the functionality within the site to shop fror the recipe ingredients from within the site, via Ocado & Asda, I was very very impressed. It's logical, makes a change from relying on advertising revenue & has the potential to be very lucrative for Carol & her investors. Great idea!

where did it all go wrong for friends reunited?

ITV have announced the sale of friends reunited at a price of £25 million, taking a £145 million hit from the price the paid of £170 million in 2005.

Undoubtedly facebook took a big slice of their market when it opened to the general public but friends reunited was very slow to fight back. It took them a long time to drop their subscription model, which restricted you from contacting old friends through the site unless you paid up. They were also very slow to embrace social networking functionality. Apart from your profile, there was little user generated content & certainly nothing that could be updated on a frequent basis by users. Add to that a clunky site design & it's no wonder the site began to lose ground.

I do think it's a wasted opportunity & perhaps something the new owners are going to try & rectify. The one big advantage that friends reunited has is that it anchors you geographically, to your old schools and workplaces. As a result, for the less tech-savvy, it's much easier to find people on friends reunited than it is on facebook.

Twitter Tips

Just a quick post this morning about some twitter resources

Don't forget to download my article on Top 10 Tips For Twitter In Business if you haven't already & here's a nice little video from Mark Shaw on using twitter in business



Finally, don't forget to follow me on twitter @christina_jones

A really positive impact

I read today about a really fabulous initiative called Colalife. Here's how the website explains it:

ColaLife is a campaign to get Coca-Cola to open up its distribution channels in developing countries to save lives, especially children’s lives, by carrying much needed ’social products’ such as oral rehydration salts and high-dose vitamin A tablets. For the latest on the campaign, please visit the blog. ColaLife is an independent and purely voluntary movement backed by thousands of supporters on its Facebook Group. ColaLife is not an organisation.

It was launched by Simon Berry, who had an idea while working on the British Aid programme in 1988:

What about Coca Cola using their distribution channels (which are amazing in developing countries) to distribute rehydration salts? Maybe by dedicating one compartment in every 10 crates as ‘the life saving’ compartment?

Having made no progress with the idea for 20 years, Simon decided to try once more but this time using the convening power of the internet. Since floating the idea on his blog in May 2008, he has managed to create a huge community around the campaign, through a Facebook group and appearances on Radio 4’s iPM programme. He is now in discussions with Coca-Cola and is looking to engage with an international NGO to move the project forward.

I think it's a great idea & am sad that it's taken 20 years for Simon to make an impact with it but the power of social media has finally started to make some noise. Please take a moment to visit the colalife website & join their facebook page.

Reflections

As my baby brother hits the job market as a freshly minted engineering graduate & engages in a whirl of interviews it makes me reflect on my "career" so far. Both my siblings are heading the more conventional route, gainfully employed in a corporate structure with an easily defined job title, unlike their older sister!

I'm firmly in the slash category (which is getting more common for generation Y according to this article) or as Ian Sanders would put it, a juggler.

Although it causes endless confusion at family gatherings & networking events (I have a nifty "elevator speech" but the general consensus is often that I play on facebook all day) for me it is the strength that underlies everything I do.

It means that every day is different, no danger of being bored & offers a wider take on things than normal. The fusion of a very traditional wholesale business & a new media consultancy is great. I have my own lab to test new ideas & projects on a daily basis & it also means that underneath all the fun web stuff is a need for effectiveness, increased sales & staying in business. Not very web 2.0 I know in the land of the crazy valuation but I would say more realistic for 99% of companies.

twitter - positives & negatives

Interesting article in thelondonpaper about the instant effects of twitter. The film Bruno saw a big slump in sales between the first friday of release & the saturday. Negative twitter reviews are being blamed. The real time effect of twitter & social networking in general means that they can have a very quick impact on sales, in a positive or negative way.