So what is The Best Of? The Best Of champions the best businesses from across the United Kingdom based on region. It aims to engage with local people and provide them with a voice to let communities know what they think of the local businesses in their area. The very nature or The Best Of business model promotes the spread of social information, ideas and opinions. It’s openness and transparency, combined with a great network of websites and franchisees has led to widespread success and acclaim.

In the UK alone The Best Of has over 350 franchises and promotes over 65’000 of the best “local” businesses in the United Kingdom, as well as Guernsey of course! The business was originally setup by renowned entrepreneur Nigel Botterill who has led many businesses to national success.

When we were invited to fly over from Guernsey to provide a master class in social media and search engine optimisation to a large group of it’s franchisees we jumped at the chance. The day allowed the franchisees to benefit from a broad overview of disciplines; each area of the presentation was designed to equip franchisees with the necessary knowledge and framework to set out an effective social media and SEO strategy for their business.

The day was intended to emphasise that having a solid framework and systematic process in place for planning social media strategies is of the upmost importance. It is common for businesses to focus on the tools of the trade, such as Facebook and Twitter, more so than the concepts that lead to success within these systems. Getting back to the core issues and providing practical case studies and other examples was used to demonstrate the value in prior planning.

The day was well received and we have since received many kind words from those who attended. Testimonials can be found on The Best of Guernsey; your resource for determining the best and most trusted businesses in the island.

“I recently attended a social media training course run by Simon and found it very beneficial. The whole day was informative and was directed at a pace that was understandable to all levels within the room. I came back eager to put what was learned into action and now have a better understanding of many tools that are available within social media. I would recommend one of Simon’s courses to anyone wishing to learn more about growing their business through social media!”

Three core areas were covered during the day long social media and search engine optimisation workshop:

Website and Social Media Content Planning:

• Why content planning is essential and effective.
• What people are searching for in your local area?
• When are people searching for your content?
• How are they searching for content, what tools do they use and why?
• How to identify keywords for use in effective copywriting.
• How does Google look at all of this?

Route to Market and Content Distribution:

• How should I distribute my content?
• Where should I distribute it to?
• Where should I distribute it from?
• When and how often should I distribute my content?
• Why should I vary my content types?
• What tools can I use to make my life easier?
• What are the benefits of linking systems? A search engine optimisation guide.

Interaction within Social Systems such as Facebook and Twitter:

• Best practice when interacting with audiences in social media environments.
• How should I present my content and information?
• How can I make changes to improve and diversify these social systems?
• How to promote your social space?
• How can I identify the positives and negatives of my activities?
• How can I make use of web based analytics to determine future online marketing direction?

With more than 25 years experience in the home and garden retail industry, Nick is renowned for his good taste and eye for the unusual. This meant that Nick had a discerning eye for design and was in search of a website that was unique and visually striking.

Guernsey Web Design specialists:

Purple Coffee’s design of the new Avant Garden website really reflects the vibrancy of Avant Garden’s shop at Sausmarez Manor, Guernsey. The innumerable interior and exterior offerings on offer at Avant Garden provided much inspiration for the new design. The shop is a sensual treat; filled with beautiful textures, bright colours and amazing smells, couple this together with its tranquil setting at Sausmarez Manor and you’ll be hard pushed to find a more stimulating shopping experience in Guernsey.

Social Media Marketing:

Further to designing Avant Garden’s new website, Purple Coffee will be co-ordinating a Social Media Marketing campaign to allow Avant Garden to interact with new and existing clients in numerous interactive settings such as Facebook and Twitter. Much of the marketing data gathered from this interaction will be used to continually re-define the way Avant Garden communicate and offer their products to their Guernsey customers.

Print Media and Advertising:

To complement Avant Garden’s online marketing campaign Purple Coffee have designed a Bus Advert to be featured throughout the year on the back of one lucky Guernsey Bus! A combination of targeted traditional advertising and comprehensive online marketing strategy will ensure that Avant Garden is effectively advertised to the Guernsey community both online and offline.

“Si and Gareth have completely redesigned the Outdoor Guernsey website with a great understanding of my personal and business needs. Their care and attention to detail is hugely impressive and their customer service is awesome. The CMS was designed around my needs and to all my requests and preferences but the guys still make sure that efficiency, usability and effectiveness are paramount and I now accept their advice (almost) without question. Complementary skills, great value and personability round off a superb package. We are now working on an exciting social networking package for my business, with the most important thing for me the ‘WE’.” – Ant Ford Parker, Outdoor Guernsey.

We are really excited to be promoting such a well regarded local business. Outdoor Guernsey have a great reputation locally and are awesome to work with, we want to help complement their marketing campaign with a social media strategy that will allow them to solidify their market position, while pushing themselves into new markets. The soon to be released Outdoor Guernsey blog will act as a central hub of the campaign, providing Outdoor Guernsey with an infrastructure that allows them to push new content to social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter with relative ease, while ensuring this benefit is felt by the website itself.

A Google Analytics package has been put in place to allow Purple Coffee and Outdoor Guernsey to monitor the effectiveness of the social media campaign and provide a measurement of return on investment. Information is key to making informed marketing decisions; using Google Analytics really provides Guernsey businesses with a way to accurately build a picture of their client’s movements to, within and from their website. Purple Coffee continue to work closely with Ant Ford Parker to ensure that the social media marketing campaign evolves smoothly and that Ant builds the skills necessary to confidently manage his Facebook pages and blog.

“I think the whole social media explosion of the last few years is extremely important to us in a number of ways. Getting information out (marketing) and receiving feedback has always been a difficult or expensive task, but necessary for a business to grow and evolve. With social networking we can to interact like never before with our customers and reach potential customers through our interactions. It enables our business ethics, direction or beliefs (branding) to become more noticeable as we interact with complementary businesses or organisations. It has enabled us to solve specific problems, such as sharing photos of customers on activities. Previously a lot of time was spent emailing clients with the files. Now we simply share on Facebook or Flickr.

Building relationships with customers and the business community has now become something you can manage from your laptop, information sharing and feedback receiving is much easier and more visible, this also means that giving quality service and maintaining a high standard is extremely important, as word soon gets around.  EBay was successful because the feedback system allowed users to be confident that they could trust the seller, the same applies in the social media network.

For Outdoor Guernsey it has been important to develop and learn about this new way of marketing in partnership with a team that not only has high technical skills, but a deep understanding of how social interaction works and its relevance to our business. It is important for us to be continually involved in social interaction so we can innovate and evolve. Purple Coffee has delivered on all counts and the promise is for more innovation and change in the future.” – Ant Ford Parker, Outdoor Guernsey.

Purple Coffee and Outdoor Guernsey have also worked with Kate Heywood from thebestofguernsey. The Best of Guernsey promote both Outdoor Guernsey and Purple Coffee through their website made up entirely of local Guernsey businesses which have been recommended by local people and have great reputations on the island. Kate really understands the value of online marketing and through The Best of Guernsey has established a variety of marketing tools to promote the member businesses including testimonials, member offers, e-newsletters, blogging, social media promotion and more recently the introduction of a very innovative product to raise brand awareness – viral gaming. Kate provides both Purple Coffee and Outdoor Guernsey with fantastic marketing support to further complement and enhance their marketing strategies.

The use of social media platforms such as Facebook provides a central way to not only advertise to, but interact with new audiences. It is this interaction that is of real value. Outdoor Guernsey are able to transparently offer their services to their audience in an interactive setting that allows their audience to provide Ant with the information he needs to refine his services into exactly what his customers want.

To find out more about Purple Coffees social media marketing services why not check out our services page or give us a shout!

Why use Social Media?

While core business websites provide audiences with information and services, they centre around sales and the promotion of core business values. Social Media systems allow businesses to develop an area, both integrated and separate to their core website, to build a framework for interaction, distribution and analysis of audiences.

Does your Brand have a Friendly Face?

Although many customers today feel comfortable communicating with businesses from behind a computer screen rather than engaging in physical interaction, many customers long for a personal and reassuring touch from businesses. Both current customers and prospective ones are increasingly looking for a real connection with brands. Often audiences favour interaction and reassurance over static information distributed via traditional business websites. Social Media systems allow businesses to develop a personal connection with clients and promote values of trust and community that would perhaps dilute the purpose of traditional business websites.

Whats the Value in been Social?

Your customers are likely searching for your business online; their search for information and their decision making process regarding the engagement with your products/services does not stop with your website. Increasingly customers base their decisions based on social information. In short, why engage with a business based on their marketing pitch or website, when you can speak with your friends or receive an impartial recommendations from people you trust? In this context SMM can be extremely powerful in that it nurtures a community around your products and services, that in turn aids the decision making process of others. People look for transparency from brands, the brands they trust are the ones that have little to hide and join the conversation.

Your Employees can do more for your business than physically provide your product or service. By utilising social media, they can further interact with your audiences to provide a personal touch to client communications. In short, their personality can also become synonymous with your brand.

Your Business Partners/Affiliates can add real value to your SMM campaign. By interacting with other relevant organisations and affiliates in a community driven environment, you are able to add credibility to your brand. For example, connecting publicly via Facebook with supporting organisations or governing bodies of standards can re-assure your onlooking audience. Social media can also provide businesses with the opportunity to connect with others offering a similar service in a different region, this can allow both businesses to expand their relative audience or potential customer base. In short don’t be afraid to “share”, it is the key principal of SMM, you only gat back what you put in.

Social Networking Websites

Such examples include Facebook (Social), LinkedIn (Business). There primary relevance been interaction with clients, building connections, monitoring audiences wants/needs. Often such tools can be customised to match business branding.

Social Bookmarking Websites

Social bookmarking sites allow users to save, share and search web pages. Such examples include Digg and Stumbleupon. There primary relevance been link building and SEO. Submitting content to websites such as these often leads to content been indexed by search engines faster due to there relative SEO authority.

Micro-Blogging

Such examples include Twitter and Tumblr. These platforms provide another SEO efficient platform to contribute to link building and SEO strategy. They are predominately real-time in nature, in that the immediacy and timing of publishing content to platforms like Twitter can have great effect. Search engines are beginning to index real-time content from such systems to further aid users in finding up to date and relevant content.

Video & Photo Sharing

Such examples include YouTube for Video and Flickr for Photo’s. These platforms provide a great way to share multimedia content with users, without the hassle of hosting them on your own servers. YouTube video’s embed easily into Wordpress driven blogs and allow businesses to easily share video and multimedia content on their websites.

Content is King

Communicating with audiences is one thing, but without strong content to support business message, products or services, communication could not only be ineffective but ultimately damaging to business reputation and market credibility. Before considering the distribution of content it should be carefully vetted and optimised. Take blogging as an example, optimisation of copywriting in the form of keyword inclusion can increase the visibility of products and services to consumers. To this avail creating content for the web is an art in itself and a constant search engine optimisation (SEO) battle. As well as the obvious SEO advantages of well written content, also consider what it exemplifies to audiences. Content for contents sake is never a good thing, it will bore and frustrate your audience and in the long run compromise business image. Content should provide a clear message about a product or service, or perhaps be used to lay the foundations for interaction between audiences.

Content Distribution

So the content is ready to go! Now you need to deliver it to your audience. The list of social networking platforms for web based content distribution is endless. So how can businesses deduce which social platforms are most valuable to them? Considering the product or service to be communicated is the first step; next is to consider which platforms your consumers currently occupy, or are most likely to make use of if they don’t currently. Incentivising the use of such platforms can be a good way to encourage audiences to make use of platforms such as Facebook if they don’t currently. If users are given little reason to populate such social networks, they are unlikely to use them if they don’t currently. However, as the use of social information systems becomes increasingly common place, it is likely that audiences may already reside on such systems, Facebook and Twitter’s increasing user numbers are supportive in this context. The challenge then for business is learning how to tap into these existing user bases. Content distribution can be very time consuming to businesses if they plan to target numerous social platforms, maximising the ease of which distribution takes place is thus key to online marketing success. Thankfully the use of API’s on popular social platforms is enhancing the interoperability of such systems. Automation of content distribution is now very realisable. If the automation of distribution is to be utilised however, content quality becomes even more consequential and so too does the need to clearly map and identify where content is coming from and where it is going to. While the viral nature of social media can be effective in easing distribution workload for businesses, this scenario can create new problems; tracking where your information ends up and maintaining full control over information becomes increasingly difficult. Businesses must be aware of the threats this poses to their long lasting corporate image. Content is very difficult to erase online and is inherently mutable. In short, what businesses put out, may not be what comes back in.

Audience Interaction

Marketing principles have always evolved around communicating clear messages to audiences; social media adds something to this scenario by allowing audiences to communicate their message back to businesses and brands. Grasping the value of interaction is essential; while audiences have always been able to communicate back to businesses in a traditional sense; social media makes interaction far more accessible to audiences. So why should businesses communicate with their audiences? There are numerous reasons why, some more obvious than others. Social consumer relations management (CRM) can provide businesses with an approachable appearance. This not only encourages interaction, which can be monitored, but also engenders trust and confidence in brands. Social networking platforms also facilitate voyeuristic behaviour, allowing businesses to sit back and monitor the conversations about their products or services. This “listening” can also reveal gaps in the market and often drives further product innovation. Take Google as an example; Google often release close to finished products, but continue to pay close attention to users wants and needs before implementing further changes.

Analytics and Return on Investment (ROI)

So good content is in place, a cohesive distributions network has laid the framework for contextualised conversation with audiences, so what next? Conversations are great, but in a physical marketing context, it can be very difficult to have more than one conversation at any one time. Social media facilitates numerous conversations and forms of interaction across multiple networks, while casting aside the restrictions of space and time. This is great I hear you say! However it can be very easy to lose yourself in all that noise. For business’s to further quantify the value of their interaction, they need data to facilitate further analysis of their marketing tactics, thus benefiting from this additional knowledge. Market knowledge allows businesses to make informed decisions about what to talk about next and where to talk about it. Marketing has always relied on tactical content placement, but with online media analysing the success of content placement becomes far more precise.

Good Content + Distribution Networks + Audience Interaction + Analysis = Success?

So do any of you out there have any experience here? Have such principles been a great success or a complete failure for your business? Or do you find yourself somewhere in between? What tools did you use? Which Networks did you target? What problems did you have? We’d love to hear you experiences whether you’re a Guernsey business or from further afield. So please comment.

Social networking in the form of websites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and now Google’s Buzz are becoming an increasingly unavoidable factor of everyday life for many individuals, businesses and organisations. So with this social networking prevalence and its increasing accessibility in the form of apps for mobile devices, what does this mean for the way we shape our identities and how we present ourselves to others? Do we shape our identities online or do social information systems shape us? Do we pay a price for our self expression?

Social networking systems such as Facebook provide users with many ways to customise their self image, as well as providing numerable ways for users to customise the information they share and distribute amongst their connections in the form of apps or plug-ins. Users are able to customise many things within their social networking profiles that often say a lot about them, or at least demonstrate how they would like their identity to be perceived by others. In a sense it’s like choosing our clothes, or our furniture. These decisions can reveal a lot about our self perceived identity, taste and opinions in a physical and tangible context; social networking simply extends this expression into a new realm.

Take user “avatars” or profile photos as an example; virtually all social systems provide this basic convention that allows users to distinguish themselves and their profiles from other users. In a personal context this is often perceived as very important, since it is often the first point of contact for a user’s connections with their identity online. In a narcissistic sense this is extremely important to many users in projecting a certain image of themselves. This context is not dissimilar for business’s, the way in which companies present their brand to consumers in a social networking sense is just as important as the way they express these brand values via their own websites. So it would seem apparent that users are able to shape their self image or brand within social systems to a certain extent, but how far does this ability to customise go?

I would argue that although social media allows users to customise their on-line presence to a certain extent, that the very structure of social information systems such as Facebook and Twitter are often designed to be consistent from one person to the next, regardless of user’s content changes. Compare Facebook and MySpace for example, while MySpace has allowed the customisation of page layout and appearance, in contrast Facebook restricts this level of customisation and in turn creates a more consistent and usable experience for users. This is in part due to the fact that users become familiar with the page positioning and presentation conventions of certain page elements.

How does the use of conventions across user profiles affect our ability to shape self identity? Is customisation or usability more important to users? If we contrast Facebook and MySpace again we can learn insightful lessons based on their relative user groups and success over one another. While MySpace has traditionally allowed users more customisation options in terms of page layout, backgrounds, colour and other page elements, it has experienced decreasing market share to Facebook, which restricts user’s ability to make such structural changes, in favour of allowing users to amend page elements and add additional applications but preserves much of their positioning and physical attributes such as size.

In terms of effective communication and ease of networking it would seem apparent that Facebook’s more usable system has won the battle with the individual user. However MySpace’s ability to allow further customisation has found a niche in the music industry and with bands. Brands such as this relish the ability to shape identity and brand image far more than is perhaps wanted or needed by individual users. Facebook’s ability to make communication between users comparatively easy and to essentially create a system that requires no knowledge of coding languages makes it a breeze for users to customise, coupled with its ability to integrate 3^rd party applications with ease, Facebook seems to have added to our profiles numerous other ways to easily shape identities and create niche groups or places of security within a overwhelmingly large system. Facebook has in essence created a fully cohesive communications network, or could be thought of as an operating system of sorts, benefiting from its interoperability with 3^rd party applications and ability to easily interconnect user’s and their information. MySpace in contrast remains a collection of user websites that while allowing further scope for self expression hinders the ease of which users are able to communicate with one another and spread information between networks.

So what price do users pay for the usability they experience within social media information systems such as Facebook? I would argue that while communication and limited self expression are becoming increasingly accessible to users, that in effect, the way in which one user presents themselves within systems such as Facebook is not dissimilar to the next. New profile photos, new interests, new links, all however presented in a similar fashion to one another. As usability increases within such systems, in part due to developing conventions, users pay the price for this in terms of their ability to distinguish the way in which they present their content to others. There is perhaps a key reason for the emphasis on usability within such systems. The more usable a product the more users it attracts, the more users it attracts the faster it spreads, the faster it spreads the more efficiently it collates and compares our information as we become increasingly interconnected. Our collated information is the key to effective targeted advertising and hence the holy grail in terms of monetising social media products. In this respect social media is not really free; we pay for our ability to create identity and express ourselves. Google got this model right years ago by monitoring search queries, social media is simply the transcendence of this business model into a social context.