I thought I would keep you up to date with our progress following our successful first trade show at the Trade Only National Show at the Ricoh arena and also chat a little about our efforts and learning curve in the area of social media.

 

Firstly the show, we had a small booth in one of the outer halls, I think there were five in all, I say think because we were busy pretty much from start to finish, I never got chance to look around, That’s a result in my book in fact we had people look us up after hearing about our innovative products. We even had people coming to visit because they had personal instances of contactless bank card scanning and wanted to discuss VoyagerBlue.

 

We have been following up every lead and in fact we had e-mailed every visitor by the Tuesday following the show. We would like to thank all those who took time out to speak with us. Next year a bigger stand and more staff hopefully.

 

On to the social media side and everyone knows how important this has become. We now have quite a list of sites and links and feeds that strengthen our online presence and would say we have covered the most important ones. Having researched and taken advice we would agree that the following are vital. Facebook page it takes some time to get going but we consider it vital, Twitter more immediate than Facebook and it becomes quite a snowball effect but you can find great advice, contacts and resources if you search and use it well. We also have a BLOG here and on a separate site and also use Quora to post and interact with other likeminded individuals and businesses.

 

Google+ is possibly underestimated, given the power of Google and the threat of a new Facebook search engine it’s likely that Google+ will receive a lot of attention from its parent, ignore at your peril.

 

Pintrest and pearltrees are a little more of a catalogue and unknown quantity yet for us but we are there and we will review later in the year to see what benefit we derive. Pintrest certainly has rave reviews.

 

In addition we have YouTube which we launched our first “silent” movies on recently. It’s a start and soon we will be adding more video. Again this has been touted as a must have for business.

 

Of all the above Twitter and our own website are having the most effect so far and we are encouraged by the efforts of U-do an ethics based website and marketplace, if you are a small company or organisation maybe give them a try. They seem to be quite energetic in promoting their members.

 

Of course all the above only really cost time that means it can be expensive even if not in cash. However the rewards are there if you go after them and if you don’t someone else will. The last piece of advice is to get some social media software that allows you to post on all your sites and schedule the timings of your posts. We are trialling Virulheat at present. That does take away some of the hours you may spend posting to individual sites one after another.

 

Have a great February see you all soon, Gizmo.