On the social media front, I sent an email out about this blog at 4.30 and I’ve had 15 visits to the site. No comments yet but some of the visitors have clicked on the links to the sites I found useful.

Scarily, one person replied to my email saying “good for you” and to say they have “posted it on twitter” So tonight I will do some more research on that as well as look at linkedin to see how else I can spread the word.

I guess you could argue that his reply has been the first success of this process. He’s a partner in a succesful PR agency and therefore a potential customer, who now appears to think positively about me when, before today, he didn’t know about me at all.

Sounds like a perfectly sound excuse to go for a beer.

PS. It’s 21 visits now, but still no comments. Please, if you have any advice or questions you want to ask then just fire away. It would be great to make  this as interactive as possible. Otherwise it’s all a bit uncomfortable, like using skype by talking to your laptop. I get weird looks in motorway service stations, but it’s got to be better than one of those ridiculous bluetooth earpieces ……

Mostly what I learned is that there’s bucket loads of advice around, very little of which actually tells you what you should be doing, in what order and how to use the tools available. Which is what I was after.

The most valuable resource I have found by a country mile is http://fuelingnewbusiness.com/ This is from Michael Gass who runs a consultancy for small to mid-sized agencies in the states advising on the use of social media for new business.

Two of his blogs were particularly useful:

•   http://fuelingnewbusiness.com/2009/02/27/social-media-tips-for-ceos-develop-an-ad-agency-blog-for-new-business/     
• http://fuelingnewbusiness.com/2008/10/21/5-ways-i-use-twitter-to-help-ad-agency-new-business/

The first of these essentially lays down the process that I am now attempting to follow.

Michael also refers to a number of other resources, again the most helpful of which I found were:

•   http://www.newbusinessintel.com/read/8-first-step-goals-for-your-ad-agency-new-business-blog/#When:09:49:16Z  Interesting as the author runs a data operation but he’s not trying to promote old techniques
• http://mirren.com/index.php?mact=CGBlog,m2,default,1&m2number=4&m2pagenumber=2&m2returnid=209&page=209

So having worked my way through all of these I decided I needed to get this blog going. Michael Gass suggests wordpress so that’s where I went. A couple of tips:

• Your user name will become part of the url for your blog. May sound obvious, but I didn’t know. I put in my name but that was taken, so I put in peteb2810 and that is now in the url which I’m not that chuffed about. I have discovered that I can change it by opening up a new account and transferring the blog over but it’s work I could have done without if I’d known in advance….
• When you’re writing a blog, use the “inversion method”. This may well be familiar to any of you with formal writing training, but to those of you who are rank amateurs like me, it means that people want to decide if you are interesting as quickly as possible, therefore put the conclusion up front and work backwards from there.  

   So now I’m on my second post. I’ve messed around with the design templates a bit and got something that I think looks OK. Still needs some work but it’s the content that’s important right…?    

Tomorrow I’m going to concentrate more on techniques / advice on generating traffic to get you lot to visit this site. Otherwise I’m just writing this for myself. Which is a bit sad really. And pointless.

Showcase7

So this is going to be my story as a new business dinosaur waking up to the new world. In order to get myself in a position to advise other agencies about how to use social media as the basis of their new business programmes, I’m going to learn the lessons by applying them to my own business - www.showcase7.eu

I’ve set up google reader and subscribed to about 10 blogs that I’m interested in, and now I’m posting this. My first ever blog.

The weird thing is that people seem to take today’s extraordinary pace of change as the norm, yet I come from a generation that was doing agency new business before they invented email. We would write new business letters – things that you had to fold and put in an envelope which took three days to arrive (we used to do it in teams – one person folding, one person inserting……!).

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hanker after those days. I think what’s happening now is incredibly exciting . TS Eliot wrote “Do not let me hear of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly, their fear of fear and frenzy”. Well, he must have known what was coming.

My only slightly concerned observation would be, are humans designed to deal with the constantly instantaneous nature of the world we now operate in. Wasn’t technology supposed to take the stress out of our lives? From what I can see it has multiplied it a thousandfold.

But that’s for another day. For now, I’ve ticked the box of my first post. Next up is working out how twitter fits in to all this and what I should be doing with Facebook. Let’s not even think about Delicious or Buzz.  At my age you can only stand so much excitement in one day.