Guest post by Alex Hearn, The Big A.

How do you instruct a designer in order to create an effective brand that works for your company?

To instruct your designer effectively give them useful information but also allow them to do their job freely, or you won’t get the best out of them.

How do you allow them to utlilise their expertise while ensuring you get what you want?

Express yourself clearly but in general terms. Too much detail and you’ll be telling them what to design, which is what you’re paying them for and is something they’re better at than you! For example, instead of specifying a particular shade of blue, try to identify the feeling or values you are trying to communicate, such as ‘conservative and stable’. continue

IT often gets categorised into two areas within a business, ‘urgent and not important’ or ‘important but not urgent’. The former gets done when things are going wrong and the latter is constantly put on the back burner for another day.

For those of you who have read Mr Stephen Covey’s work (The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People) you will know about these categories and their impact on business.
In summary, the categories are:
1) Urgent and important – must do now and can make a big positive impact
2) Urgent but not important – a fire fighting category (where IT is often placed)
3) Important and not urgent – strategic changes that can make a huge positive difference
4) Not important and not urgent – stay away as much as possible!

The ‘important but not urgent’ is where value add is as this is where all strategic and long term thinking lies.

One of the big issues that small businesses face is that they get trapped in the fire fighting scenario which can stifle growth and progression. Stephen Covey’s example is that of a team of soldiers hacking successfully through a forest and one soldier says “we are in the wrong forest” and the head soldier says “who cares! We are making progress”!

Likewise a business without long term strategic thinking can leave you working very hard but not always smart.

Working smart is figuring out how to save time and money in all operational areas, including IT so that every bit of effort you make is leveraged. Business coaches say this when advising business owners to get in staff so they can leverage their time. Similarly, getting IT to maximum efficiency is like having another staff member because the IT is working harder so you don’t have to! What you are left with is time to gear your business in the direction of your choice- or perhaps to spend an extra half hour a day reading the paper if you choose to!

This is why the ‘important but not urgent’ category is really the ‘urgent and important’ in disguise!

About The PC Support Group
The PC Support Group specialises in providing high quality, cost effective IT support to small businesses and home users throughout the UK. Whether it’s a one-off IT issue or you require on-going maintenance, we can help. Our sole aim is to remove all of our clients’ worries and concerns about their computers and anything that connects to them.
Rita Hemraj, Regional Director
www.pcsupportgroup.com

Guest blog by Simon Wittenberg, V12 PR.

It’s not all about the spin or cashing in on the celebrity divorces, public relations, also referred to as PR or media relations, it’s a great way to promote your business at a time when the UK is feeling a little sensitive, and recovering from negative growth. There is no one true definition of PR, but it is essentially communicating key corporate messages using the media as the channel to do so. It also spans from a single press release to a product launch or awards ceremony, and from a regional newspaper to a national TV or radio campaign.

Before seeking any PR assistance, it is worth defining your objectives, key messages, and the target audience which you would like your business to reach, as this will play a large role in determining the direction of your PR programme, and the most effective media channels. This includes the use of social networking, which is now being used as a source of factual information by journalists. Twitter (www.twitter.com) is useful as a website traffic driver and for making connections with businesses in the same industry, or with the members of the media themselves. It is a peer to peer networking site, whereas Facebook (www.facebook.com) is divided into interest groups, but relies on members approving others before seeing their profile, which is not the case with Twitter where anyone is free to follow any other member.

Relative to the fee, a good and experienced PR consultancy should be able to achieve a higher equivalent advertising spend if the same amount of column inches had been purchased by the client. PR is an essential part of any marketing strategy, but it is an animal that can soon get out of control if not handled correctly. This is where expert advice and assistance can prove invaluable before anything goes ‘public’.

Simon Wittenberg is Managing Director of V12 PR Ltd, a freelance media relations consultancy. Simon can be contacted at simon@v12pr.com.

Here are our simple 7 steps on how to get your business to stand out from the rest:

1. Get yourself noticed – use testimonials, press releases and case studies to showcase our value and professionalism. Websites like LinkedIn or the bestof help to make all testimonials look genuine rather than something written on your website.
2. Create a niche for yourself – focus on one area of the market and become the ultimate sought-after professional for those in this niche. Your marketing costs will go down while the referrals will increase.
3. Underpromise and overdeliver – ensure that you are able to deliver before the deadline.
4. Have expert knowledge – whether it’s a specific set of skills (like Facebook landing pages design) or knowledge (virtual assistant coaching) it will make you more valuable to your clients.
5. Know your strengths and weaknesses – we can’t be equally good at everything. Capitalise on your strengths and find someone else to do what’s your weakness.
6. Ask questions – you’ll demonstrate your interest in the client and their business and may uncover additional opportunities: issues the client didn’t realise you can help with.
7. Follow up regularly – it’s a lot cheaper to keep your current customers rather than constantly look for new business. Make a habit of customer service excellency, follow up all leads, check the status of current projects, gather feedback, ask for repeat orders. And before you know it – your past customers will come back.

Every time you attend a networking event you will collect between 5 and 20 business cards. Over a few months it can become more than 100. Over 100 little cards with names of people you’ve once met. They can be your potential customers, suppliers, referrers – or they can just stay as cards. It’s what you do with cards that makes all the difference.

You need to have a system in place where you can add new contacts, follow up, diarise actions, record information you obtained via calls and meetings. A system that is easy to use and that can be synchronised with your email and mobile device. After each event you attend you need to schedule time to add new contacts to the system and schedule your first action – call to arrange a meeting or send an email with the information you’ve agreed to send.

Sounds easy and obvious but are you actually doing this?

Now if you look at your pile of business cards on the desk and in various drawers – you may feel like giving up. But don’t despair – our help is always at hand. We can help you choose the right system, set it up and enter details from cards you have already. We will then train you to use it and move forward. Why?

So that you can start collecting people (and building relationships) rather than collecting cards.