WebNow Online Solutions Simplified

Earlier this year we got a brand and marketing expert on board to assist us in creating a brand and marketing strategy for WebNow.   The strategy was superbly crafted and all that needed to happen was to implement it.  Well we have been doing just that....not as quickly as I had hoped mind you but nevertheless progress is being made.

Every brand stragey includes a fairly in depth discussion around logo and tagline - of course a tagline is not that crticial but for our business we felt it was an important element - we are a young brand and many of our customers have a strong affiliation to our brand - our business values and our goals and objectives need to be translated into our brand and our customers need to have a strong affiliation with our brand.  For potential cusomers our tagline needs to spell out what we do and what we stand for in a few words.

To add a bit of fun and get the creative juices flowing our brand consultant suggested we launch a tagline competition.  So that's what we did.  The competion is aimed primarily at our customers and we are really asking them to think about WebNow and their experiences they have had in interacting with our brand.  We believe that we can elicit some incredibly important feedback from our customers and this feedback will be used during the finalisation of our tagline.  

The competition is now open so head over to our website for more information (helpful when submitting ideas for a tagline) and enter the competition online.  We will be talking a lot about this competition over the next few weeks so keep a look out for updates right here, on our website and on Facebook.  You can also follow us on Twitter.

So speaking of New Media...apart from directly communicating with our clients we have been talkng about our brand and the tagline competition on social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. 

The reach of these sites is incredible and can put you in direct contact with professionals and industry thought leaders.  On LinkedIn a small topic re our tagline that I posted on the Brand and Communications group ended up generating a lot of feedback and spawned a debate intitally around the merits of us running a tagline competition to a heated discussion aound Brand guru's doing pro-bona work.  All of the participants had never heard of WebNow before they joined the discussion....now they do.  One of the participants was none other than the Brand and Communications Director from Yahoo!  It demonstrates just how effective new media can be.

The capabilities of the online environment are being shown off in the run up to the 2009 South African election with almost all the contending political parties playing in this space. From websites and mini campaign sites to blogs, and Facebook to Twitter if your business takes anything away from these elections it should be the demonstration on how these things can work.

Not only do the political parties have websites but almost all of the news portals have dedicated election websites and many businesses and search engine optimization experts have taken advantage of the amount of online interest in the elections and have put together election content that will drive traffic to their actual offerings.

Naturally Facebook and Twitter allow users to give their thoughts, opinions and feedback, but with the advent of Web 2.0 almost all the websites and mini sites allow users to comment unlike previous political websites which only allow users to download manifestos for example.

According to World Wide Worx the DA leads the elections race on the Internet they have to name a few a primary website, volunteers website, blogs, twitter and facebook. Now that is bound to get some attention, what else do people do when they are bored at work - surf the Internet, of course!

Most of these online services are completely free so businesses have no reason not to be using them, and websites should have a complete review at least once a year so by now your web development or online marketing agency should have rolled out these services to your web presence.

If you need help with rolling out these brilliant marketing strategies to your business, contact WebNow today.

Finweek , a South African business publication that is normally quite conservative with the content it publishes, wrote a cover feature on social networking last week. I think if a magazine like this is making bold statements about adopting social networks and giving employees more freedom then every business should be listening.

It is not just Finweek that is advocating the use of these social networking tools.  The European Commission sees three drivers for use of the internet of the future - social networking, 'the internet of things' and the mobile internet.  The article titled "Businesses need to sign up to social networks" was published on ZDNet.co.uk. 

The era of Web 2.0 has matured and the future lies with businesses that adapt and effectively use it to communicate and collaborate. This change needs to be slow and various implementations need to be tried until your business finds what works, but the reality is that without it your business will be left behind.

The article mentions that large amount of people in South Africa who already access the Internet from mobile devices, whether that is purely from the mobile phones or from a 3G/HSDPA device. When your workforce is accessing e-mail while on holiday in remote locations, and others are sitting in cubicals, in order to collaborate effectively you need to offer your employees some sort of platform whether it be Sharepoint, Facebook or Twitter.

As we still in the beginning stages of 2009 why not conduct a brainstorming session involving all your employees using a social networking platform, let it run for a week – who knows you could get your next big idea out of there or find a potential leader!