Having fun playing with hootsuite!
Alex Gage is a genius!
Whilst talking to client, Sheffield optmetrist Alex Gage about blogs, I showed him this one and impressed upon him the need to update with greater regularity than me! I explained that I spend all my time updating clients’ blogs with press releases and that I never have/make time to do my own. “Why don’t you update clients’ releases to your site as your news?” He asked. Why not indeed? So here I am…
Here’s the latest from one of my longest standing clients, Wold Top Brewery – we’re into our sixth year – cheers!
Three in a row as Yorkshire’s Wold Top Brewery takes top industry award
Glasses are being raised today at an East Yorkshire micro brewery, following its triumph in the Society of Independent Brewers (SIBA) Business Awards this week (14th November).
Just weeks after its success in the Yorkshire Post Taste Awards and the SIBA Great Northern Beer Competition, Wold Newton based Wold Top Brewery has also won the Best Design Concept Award for its contemporary new look labels, pumpclips, gift packs and marketing materials.
Gill Mellor, who is responsible for marketing at the brewery, said: “This is a great result for us. With our creative partner, Carrot Juice, we worked hard on the rebranding and on the nomination for Best Design Concept and it’s fantastic to win public recognition from our peers and industry experts. The past year has been a challenging one for everyone involved in brewing and selling beer, but our new contemporary look has great on and off trade presence and has gone a long way to introducing new beer drinkers to the real ale category. This is the first stage of a rebranding exercise that we plan to roll out to our core beers early next year – so keep an eye on the website for details of the exciting new designs! ”
Julian Grocock, SIBA chief executive, said: “To succeed, small brewers have to do so much more than just brew great beer: marketing, customer service, pack design and community support are all areas in which they have to become experts, and the winners and runners up today have more than risen to this challenge.”
The SIBA Brewing Business Awards, now in their sixth year, celebrate the business development skills and entrepreneurial flair of SIBA’s 500+ members. At the Awards presentation, brewers from across the country were recognised for their achievements in number of categories including customer service, sustainability, e-business and design of bottle labels and pumpclips. For more details, visit http://siba.co.uk/businessawards/
Established in 2003, Wold Top Brewery brews traditional real ale from home and Wolds grown malting barley, the finest hops and pure, chalk-filtered Wolds water. Its range of award winning ales is available through the website www.woldtopbrewery.co.uk, independent, family owned retailers, farm shops, delis, hotels, pubs and off licences throughout Yorkshire and Lincolnshire.
Had a good Christmas – truth or pr version?
Once more I have found myself lying through my teeth. Not something that I’d teach the children to do, nor of which I am particularly proud, but there’s something about this time of year that almost makes it ok. I am referring to the loaded and infernal question that we all ask at this time of year – “Did you have a good Christmas?” Before you know what is happening, “Yes, it was lovely thank you” slips out, accompanied by a thin smile. But was it? In our house, as many throughout the land, we were afflicted by the seasonal lurgy and we had a pretty unpleasant time, but does that mean that I say “No, Christmas and New Year were rubbish?” Does it cocoa! What is it about our inherent desire to convince people that everything about Christmas is rosy? Next year, I’m going to try really hard to be honest – truth only, no pr version for me!
The proof of the blog pudding…
Is in the fact that within four hours of starting the blog post challenge, google has found my blog – clever stuff!
A New Year’s Challenge
Thanks to our kind friends at WordPress who are helping mortals like me to get into the blog groove by creating a posting challenge. The Post a Day 2011 is probably a step too far for me at the moment, so I will commit to the Post a Week 2011 challenge, so watch this space to see how it pans out!
Promoting the value of pr to women networkers
I may be doing myself out of a job here, but I’m about to share the pr hints and tips that I have amassed over the last 22 years with a group of women networkers. Why? Because I’m a pr evangelist and wish that more small businesses would embrace pr and not use ‘I can’t afford a pr professional’ as an excuse not to use it to help grow their businesses.
So next week I will spend 3 hours with members of meet Yorkshire Businesswomen’s networking group and my aim is that they will leave the workshop with a firm belief in the value of online and offline pr and the confidence to try their hand at their own press releases. Pop back soon and I’ll share some of my hints and tips with you, but I’ll leave it to the delegates to tell you whether I achieve the workshop aims or not!
I love Seth Godin!
Well, maybe not exactly love, but am extremely inspired and motivated by his sage words! One of Seth’s recent blog posts was Things to ask before you redo your website and, although websites aren’t my bag (I leave that to the super talented Katrina Thompson of katproductions who works wonders with websites that work for small businesses), many of the considerations apply equally well to any form of marketing or pr activity and serve as a very useful checklist. Many businesses (especially start ups) waste precious pounds by employing marketing techniques that are not appropriate to their business and then claim that marketing doesn’t work. Adopting the right marketing and pr tactics for the right business reasons most definitely does work.
The pr power of awards nominations and shortlists
I spend a fair amount of my time nominating my clients for awards, business and consumer, because I know from experience that the pr rewards just from being shortlisted, let alone winning, are extensive. Most clients appreciate their value, without someone to help them put what makes them special into (often a very limited number of) words, a nominations would be an onerous, non business-critical task that would never get done. When talking to new clients, I encourage them to play to their strengths and not to attempt tasks that either take them too far out of their comfort zones or cannot be exectuted cost effectively in house, or both and offer to write nominations on their behalf. I am fortunate in that I have good case studies to prove my point. Currently, two of three60‘s farm diversification clients, Wold Top Brewery and Yorvale, have reached the finals of national farming awards (Farmers Weekly and Farmers Guardian respectively) – a process that began as a few well chosen words that inspired the judges to want to take the nomination further. The pr value that each business has got even at the shortlist stage (Country Living in the case of Yorvale) has been immense and would have been difficult to achieve through paid for advertsising without significant budgets.
