We are pleased to announce a new website, Wills Trust – Professional Will Writing made easy.

This website combines a standard website, Wordpress for the latest news feature and a online application for secure document storage.  This allows you to keep your Will and other important information like policy numbers online, safe in the knowledge that when the time comes all the information is easily to hand.

If you do not have a Will you should contact Wills Trust today and arrange one.

Over the next couple of months we have put aside time to help and give advice to people who are either thinking of starting, or have started, new businesses for free.

All they will need to do is book into an available slot and be able to pop over to our offices in Universal Marina for a coffee and an hour long chat on what different ways there are to market businesses online and what things you could do for yourself.

If you are interested please book in for a Free Internet Marketing Advice session.

Every now and then we like to experiment with the Internet and we created a little website to track 4Networking members using Twitter on Google Maps.

It’s rough and ready at the moment but shows a way that the various APIs can be used to link different parts of the Internet together.

Take a look at the 4Networking Twitter Tool and see who you can find!

It always seems like February is over before you expect it. Now however you can get ready for March and change your computer wallpaper to the March calender. Just click the size you want from the list below!

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There are probably 3 main social networking sites that the majority of business people use in the hope of generating leads – Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

All three of these sites use the idea of micro-blog status updates to some extent to communicate with followers, friends and contacts.

A lot of people use tools to send multiple updates to all of these invariably using Twitter as the main source, so every thought that they tweet, every comment they make, picture they take or YouTube video they favourite is automatically posted everywhere.

In my opinion this is the wrong thing to do. By treating every audience the same you will end up alienating one of them or just be ineffective to another.

I use all three – but I use them in different ways.

As @ChrisHatch on Twitter I will tweet all sorts of nonsense and I am quite happy to dip in a read, answer and look at other peoples tweets of pictures of their dog or follow their links to “interesting” websites.

I also tweet as @Zedoary and post news about the company, adverts about our services and updates on latest projects.

Any one can follow either Twitter feed and I follow people I find interesting. In a sense Twitter is an informal communication tool and because of the nature of the feed you only really read the current Tweets.

The linking of Twitter to Facebook is almost excusable and for a while I did this. However if you are an excessive Tweeter the high volume of posts in Facebook will probably annoy other, non Twitter users. Also Facebook is not just a “now” thing and people read profiles to see what happened in the past, if they see hundreds of posts of Re-Tweets and links to other sites they may not be impressed.

A better choice would be to use the “selective Twitter application” where worthwhile tweets for the Facebook audience are marked with a #fb.

The biggest mistake of all is to link Twitter to LinkedIn. I’ll say it again, IT’S A MISTAKE TO LINK TWITTER TO LINKEDIN.

In my opinion LinkedIn should be used in a completely different way – it is primarily a business tool and a way to let people know what you are doing in Business. It is not social in the same way and putting personal Tweets into it is not appropriate.

As an audience colleagues on LinkedIn are not interested in the cup of tea or the cake you baked – but the project you are working on.

You can link Twitter to it in a similar way as Facebook using a #in tag and send appropriate tweets.

Tweetdeck

Another choice is to use Tweetdeck to manage all the accounts. Using this software you can manage multiple Twitter accounts, your Facebook and LinkedIn accounts and send the appropriate message each one. (It also handles MySpace accounts too if you are young and trendy).

In Summary

It is wrong to treat all social media as the same – they are not the same audience expecting the same thing even if they are the same people.

Don’t use it as a blunt tool, shouting the same message at anyone who will listen – tailor the message to the audience, it will be more effective and less annoying.

It takes no more time, just some thought.

We’ve been busy of late and thought we would show off two of our more recent websites.

We developed the website for Fresh Therapies a few months ago using Wordpress as a CMS.  We have now extended it to include an online store to use Wordpress as an e-commerce solution.

Another website that also uses Wordpress as a CMS is for Oxfordshire based Marketing company, No Red Braces.  This site works like a traditional blog with post excerpts on the home page.

This site uses the Eventbrite plugin to allow clients to book into training courses.

On Friday February the 26th we will be running a Social Media Quick Start training session.

This course will tell you some of the ways you could use social media to help promote yourself and your business. To tell you some things that have worked for us and to give some hints and tips for getting started.

It’s been arranged to follow the 4Networking breakfast at Fareham as #zhq is only a short walk down the bank of the Hamble from the breakfast venue.

For full details and to book in follow the link to the Social Media Quick Start training session.

The first month of 2010 has already nearly passed us by.  To keep a fresh look on your background why not download a February calendar.

Just pick the appropriate size from the list:

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Part three in this little series looks at a different way you could make use of RSS.

Previously we looked at what RSS was and how you could make the best use of it as a visitor to a website. Also we considered how to better “burn” you feed to promote it.

Another use of RSS is to bring content into your website. Fresh and relevant content is key to keeping visitors interested in a website but you probably don’t have the time to keep updating your website 24 hours a day with latest news. This is where you could use a RSS feed to bring fresh content into your site.

Lets say for example you are running a website about home education and you want to keep the readers up to date with the latest relevant news. The good old BBC has a news pages dedicated to education, and that page has a RSS Feed. You could link this feed into your website keeping your visitors informed and keeping your website updated with fresh content. You should take the time to check the terms relating to the use of the feed, but generally as long long as you don’t try to take credit for it and make sure it links back to the original site all should be okay.

Now this doesn’t mean you should not create your own content and create sites entirely made of other peoples RSS feeds.

It means you could use RSS feed to add extra value to your visitors and give them that extra incentive to visit your site on a regular basis.

The Internet is a big giant communication tool. Some communication is passive, for example you might just read this article after seeing a link on Twitter or Facebook. Alternatively this communication could become active as you might leave a comment.

A lot of times businesses expect the Internet to do the magic of creating visitors and that just by having a website their job is done. The problem with that thinking is that unless you give people a pressing reason to visit a website to see new material they won’t bother.

If you look at a list of most popular websites it’s not surprising to see that search engines, social networking and news sites dominate the list. If you want people to visit your site you have to make sure that they find it in one of those popular places and follow a link.

The most direct way that you have most control over is social media – in fact chances are that is why you are reading this post right now. Once it is finished and live on the site I will create a bit.ly short url and then send a notification on Twtter, LinkedIn and Facebook to let the masses know it’s there.

There is another way to let people know about your new content, email newsletters.  Last week we sent out a newsletter for the Jubilee Sailing Trust letting all their supporters know about the latest events with links back to their website.  This ensures their supporters, who probably don’t visit the JST website on a regular basis, are kept informed and encouraged to follow the links.

The email newsletter route is great for letting people (who have expressed an interest) know about your latest news and articles.  Another big advantage is we can track who reads and clicks on the links to know that the message is getting across.

Just having a website is not enough.  To make it successful you need to use the Internet to communicate with clients and prospects.  You need to have updated information and you need to let people know it is there.