Everybody wins!

You can “engage” with us via the routes you would expect:

Blog Feed, Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook.

Ask us questions, give us a hard time – whatever you like except for a shed load of spam obviously!

We look forward to hearing from you!

On the subject of RSS, more and more people are no longer visiting the actual site where news is posted – they are viewing it in a reader and then going there if they want to. It is highly likely that any story is just one of many in a news reader so do try and write a catchy, attention gathering headline!

This post is really a link and also a plug for the people I am sending you to. Hubspot is a great company and it’s founders have also written a great book called Inbound Marketing. I would recommend you think about buying their book and you should also subscribe to their site – it has loads of excellent material.

The link to their article headlined above is http://bit.ly/bEMLwe

Let me know if you think it is worthwhile. We are always on the look out for new sources of info so do let us know if you have anything good we should be looking at too.

Who could it be? The clue was in the debate Chris had last Friday about problems with the window blinds with Moira Stuart. Bob, being the helpful chap he is naturally contacted the show … and next thing you know he is on the radio grabbing his 3 minutes of fame.

We actually missed the show and have not yet found the clip in the podcast, but will post it up if it appears.

Well done Bob – and he really is great value for all types of blinds from venetian blinds to roller blinds so do check him out!.

For those of you who have no idea what I am talking about, whilst all the Web 2.0 stuff is great for consumer comments, those comments can be both good and bad. When you look at Tripadvisor, it is highly unlikely that all the comments are 100% positive … if there is a negative comment though, how have the hotel dealt with it – did they just ignore it, or comment back and explain the issues?

How did you react in that scenario – personally, if the hotel ignores the bad comment I would consider that a bad comment on the hotel itself – if it can’t be bothered to reply then how will they be at looking after me?!!

These days of course, there are multiple routes available for people to praise your service, or slag you off too. Either way you should be checking what people are saying about you.

This all came to the fore yesterday when a client of mine showed me his own experience. I think it would be safe to say that when this chap became a client he was less than convinced by my evangelism on the benefits of social media! How he has changed! Not only is he now blogging and tweeting away like a good un, he is now going to add Facebook, Linkedin and YouTube to the mix too … and part of the sources for his articles etc will come from what he reads via the alerts he has set up in Google Reader (personally I use Feedly as I think it is more user friendly).

One of his alerts is his company name of course, so when a particular client started something of a rant in a forum, he was alerted to the comments and was able to go back and respond. He may not be able to stop her saying things, but at least he can balance the view.

I would therefore suggest you go do three things right now if you have not done so already.

• Set up Google Reader
• Set up Google Alerts
• Set up Feedly

Of course you may want to add your competitors to your alert list so you can see what they are up to aswell!!

If you have had any experiences yourself, please let me know, or if you use any other tools I’d like to hear about them too please.