17 May 2013 at 09:49
The Gloucestershire Business Awards are now open for entries. Do you think you’ve got what it takes to be a winner this year?
These awards really are catered to businesses of all shapes and sizes. Young, Family and Small Business categories ensure it isn’t just big, well-established firms that take the limelight. With other categories ranging from Export to Corporate Social Responsibility to Best Business Website there are lots opportunities for recognition.
It is free to enter, so you’ve got nothing to lose by having a go. There were some surprise winners last year from niche businesses – this year it could be you!
Gloucestershire Business Awards
Here is the full list of Gloucestershire Business Awards categories and sponsors:
· Business of the Year (sponsor: Randall & Payne)
· Small Business of the Year (sponsor: Gloucestershire Chamber of Commerce)
· Family Business of the Year (sponsor: Harrison Clark Rickerbys)
· Young Business of the Year (sponsor: Creed Foodservice)
· Young Business Person of the Year (sponsor: Renishaw)
· Export Award (sponsor: Santander)
· Business Innovation (sponsor: University of Gloucestershire)
· Communicator of the Year (sponsor: Leisure Ride Group)
· Best Place to Work Award (sponsor: Expectations! Recruitment Services)
· Rising Star of the Year (sponsor: Gloucestershire College)
· Corporate Social Responsibility Award (sponsor: Gloucester Quays)
· Best Employee Award (sponsor: The Warranty Group)
· Best Business Website (sponsor: Colour Connection)
· Environmental Business of the Year (sponsor: SWEA - Severn Wye Energy Agency)
You can register for the awards here. And if you want help crafting an entry – you know who to call!
Tags: Randall & Payne | Gloucestershire Chamber of Commerce | Harrison Clark Rickerbys | Creed Foodservice | Renishaw | Santander | University of Gloucestershire | Leisure Ride Group | Expectations! Recruitment Services | Severn Wye Energy Agency | Gloucester Quays
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10 May 2013 at 09:11
It was great to read about plans for two of the area’s decommissioned red telephone boxes in Stroud Life and Stroud News and Journal this week.
When Sheepscombe village looked set to lose their iconic booth, a community group bought it from BT for £1. Now they are planning to renovate it over the summer, and are asking locals to suggest how it might be used.
Ideas proposed so far include using it as a village library, but other suggestions are welcome. Sheepscombe Society is also hoping local businesses might sponsor the renovation project in return for adverts inside the box.
A second red phone box on Summer Street in Stroud is now being managed by Summer Street Area Community Association – with the help of a grant from Stroud Town Council. Children in the area are clamouring for it to become a pop-up sweet shop, but apparently consultations are ongoing!
We love all the quirks associated with town and village life in Gloucestershire. From the annual cheese rolling on Coopers Hill, to Art Couture Painswick, to smaller initiatives like the phone box renovations. What do you most love about living in the West Country? Please share…
Tags: Stroud Town Council | Sheepscombe Society | Summer Street Area Community Association | Stroud Life | Stroud News and Journal
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25 April 2013 at 12:27
We love initiatives that help the local business community, so it was a pleasure to take part in Leigh Young Solicitors' Stroud Commercial Task Team event last week.
The informal working lunch, hosted by MRG Systems on Upper Mills Estate, was attended by 30 local business owners and managers.
It involved quick-fire business advice from a collective of seven business leaders - including yours truly (Sabrina!). Each speaker took just five minutes to give attendees one or two nuggets of useful advice to help them run their operations more profitably and smoothly. Apart from struggling to keep to my own five minute limit, I thought the event was great - and hope we see more of the same in the future.
Margaret Young, Solicitor and Director at Leigh Young, came up with the idea for a Commercial Task Team. She says the event gave Stroud businesses an opportunity to access a wide range of valuable insights quickly and easily.
In Margaret's own words:
“Time is precious for owners and managers, but they also like to be aware of opportunities and potential pitfalls as their businesses grow and develop. We set up the Commercial Task Team to enable people to access useful advice without obligation, all within their lunch hour. The launch event was dynamic and feedback was very positive. By giving each speaker a five minute time limit, they had to get straight to the point. This meant delegates received clear, useful advice. If they wanted more detail on a given area, they had the opportunity to chat with the speakers over lunch.”
In addition to Leigh Young Solicitors, MRG Systems and us, speakers included representatives from LloydsTSB, chartered accountants Randall & Payne, Intranet Future and IFS Cotswold Planning. Topics ranged from the importance of taking care with Terms & Conditions to business promotion and financial advice.
Leigh Young Solicitors plans to take the Stroud Commercial Task Team to other local industrial estates over the coming months. If you would like to be notified of the next event, contact Margaret on mpy@leighyoung.co.uk or follow @LYSolicitors on Twitter.
Tags: Leigh Young Solicitors | MRG Systems | IFS Cotswold Planning | LloydsTSB | Randall & Payne | Intranet Future
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19 April 2013 at 12:37
With half the UK population now using Facebook, it is naturally the first destination for many brands seeking to boost their social media presence. Whether Facebook is the best platform for your brand is another story, and before beginning any social media activity it is worth auditing the different platforms to see where your customers are most active and responsive.
But once you have decided to create a corporate Facebook profile, how do you keep your fan-base engaged beyond their initial ‘like’? Fans can be fickle, and will quickly ‘unlike’ you if you invade their Facebook space with irrelevant or boring content.
Here are five quick tips to help ensure you keep your fans onside for the long term:
1. Talk to your fans – don’t sell to them
If you constantly try to sell to your fans, they will very quickly get annoyed and probably ditch you. Facebook provides an opportunity for you to get to know each other better, and for you to keep your brand front of mind. Show an interest in what your fans are doing and posting, rather than only posting your own business-focused content. Share content that is genuinely interesting – but keep it short.
2. Use images
The Facebook timeline is a great platform for sharing visual content. It may be tempting to fill your profile with product shots – but they really should be kept to a minimum. Think about ‘behind the scenes’ images that give insights into how your business operates, and the type of people who work for you. If you pride yourself on corporate social responsibility, include pics of some of the initiatives you’re involved with. If most of your customers deal with you via phone or email, introduce some of the people who they might be dealing with.
3. Run competitions, exclusive Facebook fan offers
Everyone loves to get something for nothing, and a great way to keep your fans engaged is to offer good deals and competitions via Facebook. They can provide a powerful incentive for your fans to recommend you to their own friend-base too.
4. Be original
Whilst it’s fine to share relevant images or news stories that you have sourced elsewhere on the web, don’t get lazy about it! It can be really refreshing to see a brand actively communicating in an original way, rather than simply regurgitating the same content as everyone else. Wouldn’t you rather talk with someone who speaks their own mind, rather than always telling you what other people think?
5. Call to action
Don’t just sit back and hope your fans will respond to your content – actively invite them to comment and join the conversation. If you have a good stock of images, a regular ‘caption this photo’ slot can be a fun way to get people involved – although you may need to moderate if any of the captions get a bit risqué!
Tags: Facebook
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05 April 2013 at 13:09
Did you see Eddie Mair’s interview with Boris Johnson on the Andrew Marr show last week? Once you stopped cringing, you might have decided it was time to rethink your business’ approach to media interviews.
It’s unlikely that your CEO or subject experts will ever be hauled over the coals in quite the way Boris was. But even kindly interviewers can leave the interviewee exposed and floundering if they are poorly prepared.
Here are five tips to help you freewheel through media interviews:
1. Never think you can wing it. Everybody needs to prepare for interviews to get the most out of them. Even if you are the business founder it is useful to have a stock response for simple questions like ‘so, what do you do?’. The journalist, or people listening or watching, will soon switch off if you bumble through a lengthy, overly technical or jargon-heavy description of your business. If you work in a complex industry, try to think of simple ways to talk about concepts that might baffle laypeople – without being patronising.
2. Set goals for the interview – be clear about what you want to get out of the situation. That doesn’t mean plugging your company name into every sentence. But you should decide on two or three messages that you want to convey, and find ways to work them naturally into your responses. Practice saying key phrases or statements out loud beforehand – it will help ensure they flow well and you don’t trip over the words when it comes to the crunch.
3. Think about your body language. If you are being interviewed for TV or video, make sure you are comfortable and relaxed. Try not to fidget and make sure you arrive in good time, so you don’t feel hurried and tense. Stay calm – and remember to breathe! It will help you to feel in control.
4. Take your time. Let the interviewer finish their questions, and pause before you answer. Repeat the question back to them if you want to clarify what they are after, or if you need to buy time to think.
5. Remember that nothing is ever ‘off the record’. Even if the journalist has put their notepad away and you think the cameras have stopped rolling, keep quiet about anything you wouldn’t want attributed to you in the media.
Have you ever had a nightmare interview? Feel free to share, and tell us what you learned…
Tags: Boris Johnson | Andrew Marr | Eddie Mair
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22 March 2013 at 14:28
The Drum magazine held its Digital Convergence event in London this week – and we rather liked this overview of Dr Martens’ attitude towards social media and ROI.
Consumer marketing manager Simon Wilkinson talked about the transition from the traditional ‘four Ps’ of marketing (product, place, promotion and price) to today’s ‘four Cs’: conversation, customisation, community and co-creation.
You can read The Drum’s full write-up on his session below – or see the original article here: http://www.thedrum.com/news/2013/03/22/don-t-over-complicate-social-media-and-social-roi-advises-dr-martens-consumer
Don’t over-complicate social media and social ROI, advises Dr Martens consumer marketing manager
There is too much confusion when it comes to establishing the right ROI for social media. At least that’s the opinion of Dr Martens’ consumer marketing manager Simon Wilkinson.
“The hot potato of social media is ROI. I could write books about the people who write books about social ROI, but it really shouldn’t be so complicated. We know why we do social media at Dr Martens - because it leads to sales,” he said.
In fact Dr Martens has found that its Facebook fans are four times more likely to buy than those who aren’t, according to Wilkinson. Half its fans say they have bought Dr Martens since becoming a fan and 15 per cent have bought from a post. “These are hugely significant statistics for us."
Speaking at the Drum’s Digital Convergence event in London this week Wilkinson took delegates through the journey the shoe retailer has taken, shifting from the four Ps – product, place, promotion and price, to the 4 Cs – conversation, customisation, community and co-creation.
Dr Martens realised the necessity of integrating social media into its strategy when it first picked up on the fact that tens of thousands of conversations were being had independently across media not owned by the brand, according to Wilkinson. “There were unofficial fanbases of about 40,000 fans on unofficial fan sites – that’s 40,000 strangers who had come together to talk about Dr Martens on platforms we didn’t own. We had to earn the right to be there,” he explained.
It has achieved this by stripping away back the complexity surrounding some businesses approach to social media and adopting a simple but effective content-driven strategy. “This may sound basic and I make no apology for that, because there is often a lot of confusion over what is meant by social media within Dr Martens.
“Traditional media is one-way broadcast which has led to many people believing social media is two-way – but we don’t see it like that - we define it as a network of conversations about Dr Martens with a large amount of content created by that community.”
Much of its focus is on ensuring its brand is visible in the social space via a mix of encouraging its communities to create their own content, and engaging them in conversations, all of which are it accompanies with “bursts” of paid media.
It centres all activity around a clear content strategy and framework which consists of: a defined tone of voice; standard guidelines across all regions; regular and standardised reporting, according to Wilkinson. “People can over complicate things. Some of our most engaged posts have been ones showing images we have taken ourselves in the office. “We begin every day with a product post and that can drive some of our biggest engagement and in some cases a post has been seen by 250,000 people within 24 hours and generated 9,000 Likes – that’s free reach,” he said.
It has created a break-out area on its Facebook page where people can upload their own content and has also launched an Instagram page, accruing 60,000 fans within eight months.
Tags: The Drum | Dr Martens | SImon Wilkinson
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01 March 2013 at 14:18
Flexible working is central to Trailblazer PR’s ethos, so we have been following coverage of Marissa Mayer’s decision to ban homeworking at Yahoo! with interest.
In her internal memo announcing the changes, Mayer claimed: “Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home”.
That’s not a sentiment we share, but as the week has progressed it has become clear that the real problem at Yahoo! was not homeworking per se, but some people’s abuse of it, as reported in the Huffington Post.
In our experience, homeworking offers many advantages. The benefits for working parents are just one part of the equation – it can also lead to better efficiency, fewer distractions, more flexibility in dealing with client and journalist requirements. And it doesn’t mean the team can’t get together when necessary for planning, reviewing or creative development sessions.
Insisting that people are chained to a desk in the workplace from 9-5 doesn’t make them more productive or more creative. It might prove that they are putting the hours in, but it doesn’t ensure those hours are put to good use.
At the end of the day it comes down to trust and integrity. Whether your team is home-based or office-based is irrelevant.
Tags: Yahoo! | PR
Posted in Friday Rambles | 2 Comments »
22 February 2013 at 10:07
Brands seem to have an obsession with letting people know how old they are.
This is equally true of iconic household names and smaller regional businesses.
The FT recently celebrated its 125 year anniversary with a bit of a fanfare and Diet Coke is hinting that it may bring back its classic hunk as it turns 30 this year. If you take a quick flick through your local paper’s business pages, there’s sure to be a ‘Joe Blogs enterprises celebrates xx years trading’ story.
We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on brand birthdays. Do you care at all? Do you think it depends on the business size / sector / target audience? Is it more relevant for business-to-business brands whose audiences may associate longevity with industry knowledge and expertise? Or does it all come down to the objectives and the strategy of associated PR and marketing?
If you’d like to consider some more views on brand birthdays, Marketing magazine recently ran this feature on the topic:
Are brand birthdays really a cause for celebration?
Coca-Cola, VW and The Financial Times are among the growing number of brands who have invited consumers to join in their birthday celebrations. But does anyone want to join the party? John Reynolds and Ben Bold investigate.
What do the Tube, The Financial Times, Harley Davidson, Coca-Cola, Cartier, Volkswagen, Starbucks and Marmite have in common?
Answer: they have all recently trumpeted their birthdays in a bid to attract publicity, boost their brands, increase sales, and remind consumers of their heritage.
Earlier this week, the FT celebrated its 125th anniversary with a global marketing campaign spanning press, digital, experiential and outdoor, telling readers it is "Still guiding the way for global business".
Meanwhile, last month Marketing reported that, as part of its 30th anniversary, Diet Coke had unveiled a teaser ad on its Facebook page, hinting at the return of the "hunk" from its classic TV ads.
Lager brand Heineken is celebrating its 140th birthday, while Heineken UK this week announced the launch of a multimillion-pound marketing campaign for Foster's to begin a year-long celebration of the lager brand's 125th anniversary.
Meanwhile, Harley Davidson is marking its 140th anniversary, and Coca-Cola last year reproduced some of its heritage bottle designs as part of its 125-years celebrations.
But are these brands akin to the kid at school who witters on about it being his birthday, when the sad reality is that nobody cares? Or are their celebratory fanfares being heard and appreciated by the consuming public?
Marketing asked two experts – Alistair Green at media agency Mindshare UK, and David Goudge of consultancy The Brand Development Business – what they thought of this trend of self-congratulation.
Alistair Green, head of strategy, Mindshare UK
My birthday is in April and I may mark the occasion with a day off work and an evening out withfriends and family. People make a certain amount of effort when a birthday comes round: they buy presents, post cards or e-cards, send good wishes on Facebook, phone or Skype to catch up.
So, it's not surprising brands try to reap the same benefits when their birthday rolls around. Heineken is celebrating its 140th, Cartier its 155th, Coca Cola turned 125, and the youngsters Volkswagen (60), Starbucks (40), and Diet Coke (30), are out celebrating with anyone who will join in.
Since their inception, brands have always tried to position themselves as our best friend, and with a new media landscape to aid more personable interaction than ever before, brands continue to humanise their relationship with us to garner our loyalty. It's called good marketing, and brands that do it best make it a fun and rewarding experience, like any good birthday party should be.
Even though there is an ulterior motive for brands celebrating a birthday – to drive sales and ROI – it's not that different from my nine-year-old inviting both classes of boys in his year so he could get more presents.
As Hobbes explained, all acts are selfish by default. So a brand deciding to celebrate its birth date is a good strategy, as long as like any good host, it makes sure its guests have a good time and it doesn't use it as an opportunity to pontificate about its entire life story.
David Goudge, managing director, The Brand Development Business
Diet Coke is 30, Doctor Who is 50, Harley Davidson is 110; but who cares?
Certainly the brand team, and their ad and PR agencies. But what about the consumer?
In tough economic times, there is a natural tendency to look back to the past with affection and nostalgia, and as a brand, it's great to have the opportunity to reassure consumers of your longevity.
But in the hangover year following the Jubilee and Olympics, when the economic gloom looms large, should brands be using just any excuse to jump onto the bandwagon?
Some anniversaries are clearly worth celebrating: the Tube’s 150th encourages us to re-evaluate and appreciate a London icon as the pioneer that it is. Equally, the Football Association’s 150th birthday is worthy of celebration.
But as more and more brands jump onto the bandwagon, the me-toos will have to work harder to stand out – ensuring their activity adds relevancy to the narrative of their brand story.
A brilliant case in point is Marmite's celebration of the Queen’s Jubilee. They didn't trot out just another Jubilee pack – they delighted us with the humour of Ma'amite, whilst quietly upstaging the Queen by pointing out they were born in 1902.
Tags: Marketing magazine | FT | David Goudge | Alistair Green | Coca-Cola | VW
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14 February 2013 at 16:21
Over the past four weeks, the biggest food scandal to hit the UK for decades has unfolded before our eyes.
The horsemeat contamination issue is complex and raises questions over the integrity and traceability of the entire food chain. But it is inevitably the household brands selling contaminated products that consumers are demanding answers from.
Downing Street has criticised retailers for a reluctance to comment publicly on the situation, saying "it isn't acceptable for retailers to remain silent while customers have been misled about the content of the food they have been buying" - see this morning's BBC coverage.
The price of cutting PR
PR Week magazine has been charting media developments surrounding the crisis. Findus has been particularly lambasted for a perceived slowness of response and an unwillingness to address the issue head on.
In an article published this week, PR Week Deputy Editor Alec Mattinson suggests that the Findus brand is reaping the rewards of cost-cutting measures, which saw the senior UK comms team axed in 2011: http://www.prweek.com/uk/opinion/1170709/Findus-pays-price-cutting-costs-PR/
More light will be shed on horsemeatgate over the coming weeks. But wherever the blame lies - and whether it transpires to be a food safety issue, a fraud issue, or both - food retailers have a lot of work ahead. They need to pay due diligence to food traceability and communications strategies if they are to re-gain public trust.
Tags: PR Week | Findus | Alec Mattinson | BBC
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08 February 2013 at 12:07
Commercials aired during premier US sporting event the Super Bowl spark almost as much discussion as the game itself.
TV spots are sold at a premium, and leading brands create big budget flagship ads to maximise their exposure as most of America tunes in.
But Oreo’s Twitter activity on this year’s Super Bowl Sunday showed that a canny approach to social media can also score a touchdown.
When a power blackout disrupted play, Oreo whipped up an ad with the caption: “Power out? No problem” / “You can still dunk in the dark”. Within an hour it had been shared more than 10,000 times on Twitter, and was retweeted and favourited more than 18,000 times.
It’s a lovely example of how a partnership approach between a brand and its agency can enable intuitive, agile activity that reaps dividends.
Here’s a full write-up on the story from Brand Republic’s Gordon Macmillan:
Oreo scores big win on Super Bowl night with Twitter power-out ad
The biggest moment on Twitter during last night's Super Bowl was not during play itself, but when the lights went out at the New Orleans Superdome for 35 minutes and cookie brand Oreo scored the biggest ad win of the night.
The power went early in the third quarter, with the Baltimore Ravens leading the San Francisco 49ers 28-6.
As soon as the power went down, Oreo and its agency went to work on an ad that was quickly Tweeted. Within an hour, the Oreo ad, with the caption, "Power out? No problem", had been shared more than 10,000 times on Twitter and went on to be retweeted and favourited more than 18,000 times.
That means one of the most talked-about ads on the Super Bowl night, when TV spots were being sold by CBS for between $3.8m (£2.4m) and $4m (£2.5m), was done for free on Twitter.
It was the perfect case of being ready at the right time and taking advantage of a golden opportunity.
Oreo wasn't the only advertiser to try it. Several others did as well, including Audi, with more than 9,000 retweets and 2,800 favourites, Tide, with around 1,500 retweets and favourites, and Calvin Klein, which picked up a couple of hundred.
It was only freely posted ads. Twitter said that marketers started bidding on "power outage" as a search term just minutes after the lights went out.
Oreo however won big, as it was when the lights were out that Twitter really lit up with 231,500 – that's almost 50,000 more than when the clock expired after play had resumed, with just over 13 minutes left in the third quarter, and the game was won by the Ravens 34-31.
So how did Oreo manage to get an ad out so fast? The answer is that it was down to its agency Dentsu-owned 360i.
The agency said that the ad was "designed, captioned and approved within minutes," according to Sarah Hofstetter, president of 360i.
She said all the decisions were made in real time, as the marketers and agency members were sitting together at a "mission control" centre watching the game unfold.
"We had a mission control set up at our office with the brand and 360i, and when the blackout happened, the team looked at it as an opportunity. Because the brand team was there, it was easy to get approvals and get it up in minutes," Hofstetter told BuzzFeed.
Laurie Guzzinati, a spokeswoman for Mondelez, which owns Oreo, said: "They saw a real-time opportunity with the power outage and jumped it, doing so in a social voice true to the Oreo brand."
The agency was able to get the ad approved so quickly because members of the Oreo marketing team were on hand to sign it off.
Hofstetter said: "You need a brave brand to approve content that quickly. When all of the stakeholders come together so quickly, you've got magic."
See the original article here: http://www.brandrepublic.com/news/1169362/Oreo-scores-big-win-Super-Bowl-night-Twitter-power-out-ad
Tags: Super Bowl | Oreo | Brand Republic
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