I saw my dad’s doppelgänger today.
I was standing next to the eggs, feeling frustrated that all the large free range eggs had sold out, when I looked up and saw this chap pushing his trolley towards me. Dressed in a pair of beige chinos, a navy blue jumper and light-blue collared shirt, covered up by a light brown bunny jacket (apologies if that’s spelt incorrectly – I have never had the need to actually write “bunny jacket” – and now I have my doubts as to whether it’s a real thing or not). Grey hair, small bump on the right hand side of his forehead and a sweet peaceful smile on his face. He caught my eye as he made his way towards the baguettes.
My stomach dropped into my Clarks pumps as the entire surrounding population of shoppers blurred into nothing and the world only existed for this gent and I.
You see – my dad passed away just over a year ago. And being a South African living in the UK – I have done most of my grieving from a distance while trying to balance the perception of “not being at home with Pops” against the “he’s not here anymore” comprehension.
So, as you would imagine, this split second of realisation caused my entire retaining wall, to crumble.
I pulled into the Whole Foods aisle while I tried to regain my composure. It didn’t work. So decided to go and say hello nonetheless.
I tapped him on his shoulder. He looked around at this blubbering mess and I commenced to explain that he reminded me so much of my dad and that I just wanted to say hello.
Expecting nothing less – he stood slightly frigid, but still smiling awkwardly – not quite understanding what to make of this melted pot of goo that interrupted his mission of a morning shop. Trying to make chit chat – he asked whether I was local. I said I was. I asked whether he was. He said no. I apologised for the emotion. He said that there was no need to. And at that point, I became aware of my invasion of his non-emotion with mine, and I took my leave by tapping him on the arm again and saying something ridiculously mundane like, “Thanks. It was nice to see you”.
I returned to my trolley – and power-walked my way through the brans, past the tuna and to the closest check-out counter I could find.
Hardly containing my emotion – I simply put my sunglasses on, paid my bill and left.
So – why have I shared all of this?
Well, later that evening, this little episode consumed me. Let’s play it back – quick statistical check:
I realised that my emotional outburst must have confused / annoyed / intrigued my doppelgänger dad. I wondered what he was thinking when I furiously pushed my trolley away. Did he just shake his head and associate my instability with “typical small-town country” behaviour? Or did this perplex him too. Whatever it was – I got to thinking about the exchange.
Imagine for a second that my doppelgänger dad is your brand. You merrily live your life, doing things, taking part in things, living in a world that is familiar to you. You have your ups and downs and you just go through each day facing whatever challenges and opportunities that confront you. Except – one day, you meet someone who doesn’t know your brand. They come from their own world and their own challenges, and they encounter your brand which represents a certain something to them. A certain something which you have no knowledge, or control of. And you are at once faced with an impression that you didn’t create, but one which created itself for them.
We are our own brands – and as much as we try to create an impression to represent something specific, there will almost always be a case where, as hard as you may try, your brand represents something completely different, to someone.
It either excludes. Or it includes. It either complements, or offends. And sometimes, there’s absolutely nothing you can do, but smile and ask, “are you local?”.
Need to review your brand? Let’s have a cuppa and chat about it.
This morning, while walking the Fresh Brew Hound along an old unadopted dirt track that the King once travelled from London to Cornwall by carriage, the unmistakable scent of wild garlic hit me like a pair of dirty socks that you’ve somehow managed to forget about, but instantly know it’s there.
For the past month, I’ve had the pleasure to talk to a number of small business owners and learn to understand their core restraints holding them back from developing their business into something bigger, louder, grander. (Note: I did not say “better”). From most of them came 1 consistent restraint that, if they had the means, they would invest in: more marketing.
I understand, we want to be known, and we want more business. But there is only so much we can do with the money we have available to us. So what do we do if we simply don’t have the cash to do what we need to.
Simple.
We use what we’ve got.
Back to the wild garlic metaphor. Since moving to this Green and Pleasant land 6 years ago, I’d always threatened to forage for my own wild garlic, and produce my own batch of the most beautiful wild garlic pesto that my Kenwood mixer would allow. (Other brands are available, BBC).
So, as the breeze gently whispered this morning, I knew that today was the day. Off I headed with Pup, lead, poo bags, and an extra supermarket-special carrier bag. Wild garlic grows abundantly in Dorset – and the rest of Europe. Also known as “Bear’s Garlic”, this particular ‘weed’ as Mr Fresh Brew calls it, is loved by wild boar and other animals that furiously dig up the bulbs. (Scene straight out of Asterix & Obelix).
Anyway – back to the garlic. It didn’t take long before I was armed with a bag full of deliciously stinking garlic leaves.
The pesto turned out beautifully – after adding some lemon juice, glugs of olive oil, salt and pepper, parmesan cheese and roasted pine nuts – perfectly delivering 2 and a half jars full of wonderfully fresh garlic pesto.
And as I sat at the kitchen counter, chewing on my morning toast and wild garlic pesto – I realised. Sometimes, you don’t have to have what the Jones’ have. Sometimes you don’t need the massive budget because someone tells you that you do – sometimes, all you need to do is look at what you’ve got and find a way to make THAT work for you.
Need a little help to look at what you’ve got, and how to use it? Then give me a call. As long as you put the kettle on, of course.
“You give away too many of your secrets”, was what my husband told me this week.
And, he’s probably right.
Introduction of next lesson to learn. Where’s the fine line between simply “being friendly”, and “running a business”.
Case in point – people often ask me for “tips” to improve their social media followers, or for some thoughts on how to drive more traffic to their website.
The old Katy (and current one, in fact, that I’m trying to train out of my brain) would probably without a second breath, have launched into tips, ideas, suggestions – and even offering to do it all for them – spending countless evening hours studying, analysing, interrogating – coming out with a raft of ideas and suggestions – that most marketing companies would charge a small fortune for.
But that’s not what I’m going to do.
What I am going to do is train you how to do all of this yourself. And THAT I will charge for.
So, I’m pleased to introduce a new string to my cello, blossom to my bouquet and dribble to my wine glass (ok, that last one didn’t make sense).
If you’re looking to understand more about social media: How it works, how to use it, how to get more followers, how to be more effective etc etc etc – then why not book my time for a couple of hours, and I’ll share all that I know, with you.
“But everyone offers this… what’s the point?” – I’ll tell you what the point is… they probably don’t spend any time doing their homework on your business, on your position within the Social atmosphere – they probably read off of a sheet of crib notes and generic To Dos. I aim to personalise. I will look at what you need, what you want to achieve – and then form a training package around what you need.
Besides – there’s absolutely NOTHING to be scared of. We’ll figure it out together – and find a solution that suits your business, and more importantly, your personality, perfectly.
Sound good?
Great!
Book me. I’d love to have a cup of tea with you and twitter!
Look. I’m going to be honest with you. Social Media marketing is not hard. In fact, it’s actually quite simple. And if the amount of followers and fans keep growing, and you are not quite sure why – well, then chances are…. you’re doing it right.
I recently had a twitter chat with Alan K’necht – author of The Last Original Idea and general all-round cool digital guy, about the tools that he found useful for Social Media analytics and management. His response to me got me thinking. “What… other than the one between our ears?”, he said.
He’s right. Social Media is not about having the best tools, or the biggest budget to do cool things. Social media is about knowing what to say, and knowing who you want to say it to. It’s about having something to say that people will find interesting and will want to listen to.
So, yes, Alan. It most certainly is about using your brain.
Case in point: One of my clients who is just starting out her business – not a lot of marketing experience, but figuring it out as she goes along – and has developed such a great following already, just in the few weeks of going “live” – that it dawned on me. We can ALL social – if we just know what we’re trying to say.
Social Media is no different to a cocktail party. Picture it – you arrive, and you start to chat to a couple of people in the joint. Some are well-known, some not so much. Some have interesting things to say, and some just keep repeating the same garbled nonsense over and over again. What do you naturally want to do? You levitate towards those who have something interseting to say, that you are into – and you start to hide from those who want to flood you with too much self-promotion, too much nonsense. They pretend they know everything and want to show you how much you know. In fact, they start to make you feel completely insecure by the amount that they (apparently) know.
Nah. You levitate yourself out of that situation… swiftly.
So – why offer Social Media management services, Katy? Aren’t you just trying to commercialise something that you’ve JUST said most people can naturally do?
Sure. But the question you have to ask yourself is: Do you have the TIME to invest in keeping conversations going? By that I mean – are you a one-hit wonder who splurges all the latest social media stuff, manage to find some followers and keep them engaged for a while, and then slowly slink back into your old habits? That’s where I, and people like me, come in. We can help.
Our JOB is to keep at it. Our job is to be your voice. Sure – you can dip in and out when you want to – but we’re there for the times when you are simply just trying to run your business, pay the bills, get the job done.
See how that works?
Why not give us a call. And if we think you’re doing a great job already – we’ll tell you.
We recently had a conversation with a friend who is planning a huge finale to a great festival in our town. The gist of the conversation centered around a few tips to get their website recognised and found on search engines.
These were some of the tips we gave them
1: CONTENT CONTENT CONTENT
How SEO works is that search engines trawl the internet looking at common words that people search for. They capture the search terms, along with the URLs of the websites, of those search terms. The more content that is used from one URL, the more the search engine thinks, “ah! This URL / Site must be important if there is a lot of traffic to and from the website – ie, there are lots of people using it”. So the more it recognises the URL in a search, the more relevance it will apply, and the higher the ranking in the results.
So, to do that, you need to create content. You need to be posting relevant STUFF to the website, using a few key words that pretty much points to your website, on a regular basis and people need to be visiting the website.
There are a number of ways that you can do this:
– blog : A Blog allows you to constantly write info / updates etc onto your website and generate new content as often as you like!
– social media traffic with all references back to your website: Ensure that all your tweets and posts point back to pages within your website.
– effective Search Engine Optimisation application that sits on your website – where you are able to enter key terms that you think people would use to find your website.
2: Piggy Back off others
If you don’t have the time to spend on constantly sitting on the website and updating it with info, then another quick way to generate some traffic to your website is to piggy back off others. Have as many businesses / people as possible, share a link on their website that points back to yours. You can encourage them to put something on their website by writing a little press release or an article for them – that they can simply copy and paste onto theirs. Ensure that you are on all community websites, and blogs, and newspaper sites etc, event calendars etc. It all helps in the trawling process – giving the Search Engines bigger reason to think that your site is important.
3: SEO Search terms
Ensure that your SEO terms are mentioned in your website as often as possible. (Esp in the opening paragraphs of any articles / pages you use). Ensure that whatever web administration you use, eg Joomla! , WordPress etc – all have a plugin installed that allows you to capture the necessary Metadata (keywords, descriptions etc).
4: Social Media
Marketing is largely online – the entire community is moving online – and trends in business certainly reflect that – advertising rates are going down rapidly and advertisers often struggle to meet quota as people believe in online presence much more than printed presence for many services. So, where Social Media helps is to generate additional search hits that point back to your website. Ie: when you tweet, you include a link to your website, when you put something on Facebook, you put a link to your website. The more people clicking on the link and going through to your website, the higher the interest and therefore the higher the rankings.
I used an example of a local community website that we developed recently. Having only launched the website 3 months ago, the struggle to have it discovered by leading Search Engines was number 1 on our priority list. Our vision was to use it as a portal into the village where locals as well as visitors could find news items, business information and more. The only reason why we have moved up the chain so quickly in these 3 months, is because we are CONSTANTLY posting new news articles…. so the content on the website is being renewed on a daily basis. We’re also then telling people via Twitter and Facebook, when there is a new news article, and we post the link to the website.
The number of unique visitors to the website (daily) has gone up from 10 a day, to now an average of 62 NEW and UNIQUE users every day. So word is spreading. And that’s only because we are adding and adding and adding content to the website.
If you are thinking that you may need some help with your SEO, or your website, why not give us a call.