Happy New Year from the beautiful coffee area near Pereira in Columbia.

 

Most towns have been busy celebrating the festive season with amazingly colourful processions and outdoor concerts which have everyone dancing around the square until the early hours. This week it’s the Manizales fiesta , hot on the heels of the famous Cali feria.

 

The BBC have reported[1] that the Columbian army have just completed a military operation to persuade the remaining guerrillas in the countryside to down their arms. As I mentioned in my last blog the Farc guerrillas are still holding out in certain mountainous areas but as they are likely to be suffering pretty miserable living conditions the government has decided that it might be worth trying to persuade them to down their arms and enjoy Christmas with their families. They have planted several huge Christmas trees in their main hangouts with lit messages to try and persuade them to change their ways. With the Colombian economy strengthening (according to the local press it grew by 4.3% in the last quarter of 2010) there are plenty of reasons for the guerillas to heed the messages and bring some lasting peace to the country.

 

This is a country well worth visiting and as reported last week, despite the devastating floods and landslides which have uprooted more than 2 million people, there are still ways to get around to enjoy the warm hospitality and fascinating sights of this country.

 

As I sit watching the many humming birds flit amongst the trees I was wondering what I should make as my new year’s resolution. Firstly I’ve started to take some lessons from the Columbians and have sent out some messages to reconnect with old friends and next step is to predict some social media changes for 2011. Watch this space for social media predictions and South American musings.

 

My first prediction is that more companies will be launching their New Year TV adverts via social media channels than ever before. The opportunity to find out how their advert is liked will be too tempting to ignore. My prediction is that companies will be using social media to test drive all their adverts in 2012 so that they will know how well liked they are BEFORE launch.

 

I wish you all a Happy New Year and prosperous 2011.

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For a Columbian the family is one of the most important things in life and one thing that has not changed. However having recently arrived in Bogota I am amazed how the country has really changed since I was last in Columbia more than 20 years ago.

 

Hi tech goodies are stacked high in the shops and for a mere £1.50 you can equip yourself with a local SIM card and buy a mobile phone for £10 to stay in contact with your family and friends. Competition in the telecoms sector provides plenty of consumer advantages. One of the other benefits is widespread wifi so that I can continue to send off my blogs.

 

On the other hand most of the beer consumed in Columbia is under the control of South African Breweries (SAB) and therefore there is less choice although aguadiente (a clear white fluid) and rum appear to be popular and are drunk by the bottle, but will guarantee you a sore head the following day.

 

We are now in the beautifully preserved old town of Villa de Leyva in the mountains north of Bogota, complete with cobblestones and whitewashed houses. All I can hear from our hotel balcony surrounded by the most exquisite plant display are the frogs, crickets and a few dogs barking in the night air. The place is somewhat magical and we’ve just enjoyed a beer in the main plaza watching the sun go down over the mountains. The town has under 10,000 inhabitants and seems frozen in time since 1572 when it was founded, although we are lucky arriving midweek as it’s very popular with the Bogotan weekenders.

 

What has struck me about this town is the care and attention to detail that the shopkeepers have put into their shops. Each shop has beautiful displays of local handicrafts, jewellery, leather and woolen goods and every shopkeeper greets you with a large beaming smile and a friendly greeting. The streets are squeaky clean and adorned with impressive Christmas lights. There is a pride in the town which we also found in the nearby friendly mountain town of Zipaquira. This town is famous for its enormous underground cathedral built out of a salt mine where the tour also includes the option of going into the mine, trying your hand at mining some salt and letting off some dynamite which was very exciting.

 

I am relieved to see that the headlines of the national press here are not full of murders unlike our trip to Venezuela last winter where they have over 19,000 murders a year. Instead the floods on the coast dominate the news. They have displaced almost 2 million people and left approximately 250 dead and have probably been largely unreported in the UK press.

 

Interestingly on approaching the town we passed several army tanks on alert with men inside them on duty and plenty of police. The town feels very safe and yet the country still has to show the strength of its arms to keep out the Farc guerrillas who now reside in the border areas with Venezuela, considered off limits to tourists.

 

I was somewhat surprised this year when visiting the World Travel Market (considered the biggest tourist event of the year) not to see Columbia represented. However my arrival at Bogota airport helped to explain why Columbia cannot cope with too many additional tourists until it has sorted out its airport as it took us 2 hours to get through immigration.

 

All in all this trip promises to be a memorable one and first impressions are very favourable. The Columbian people are some of the friendliest I have met and they appear to really understand what tourists want. I reckon that London’s tourist industry could learn a lot from them and I totally understand why Lonely Planet put Columbia in its list of top 10 countries to visit. You should come and visit.    

If there was ever a good time to assess the benefits of home working, this week would be the perfect opportunity. I was surprised to read in Saturday’s Times[1] that a little over 690,000 employees are now working from home as I expected it to be higher. Whilst the sharing of snow stories at the coffee machine might be fun there is no doubt that home working has not yet gone mainstream. It carries a lot of benefits for those companies that have seen productivity plummet as a result of the snow, (£1billion a day lost according to The Centre for Economics and Business Research quoted by the Times.

 

There are lots of tools available online and through social networks liked Linkedin that can assist with flexible working patterns. I’ve been introducing my clients to the benefits of Google Docs which enables you to share docs via the web and to collaborate on shared project documents and costs you nothing. Go to Meeting is another great tool that can help with running remote meetings where you can view each other’s screen and dial in to join a meeting.

 

There are barriers to home working and it’s clear that it’s not for everyone as some people find that cabin fever sets in and they are climbing the walls of their spare room after a few weeks and can’t wait to get back to a “proper” office and have some company. However as a temporary set up to cope with the vagaries of the UK weather having some “cloud living” can be extremely valuable for maximising staff productivity. Basically this means putting some key documents such as your emergency procedures and key contact details on the web. Your staff can then log in to access these crucial documents from anywhere which can be invaluable in times of any natural disaster be it flooding, snow or anything else. Everyone thinks disasters won’t happen to them.

 

There are an increasing number of people that are now accessing all their documents via a “cloud”, basically a remote server that they can access from anywhere via the web. Call centres are key areas that could benefit from a web support set up even if it’s a temporary measure.

 

All those companies in the hospitality industry with Facebook pages are finding out that this is a great way to enable their customers to keep each other updated on road weather conditions as they travel to and from their properties. So my recommendation for improving productivity in these snowy times is to have a combination of social media like Facebook, a “cloud” set up and core documents on some useful web platforms to minimise your shared productivity losses. Having just battled home on a freezing cold, delayed train I am starting to think carefully about how I can convince my clients to embrace more cloud living.

 

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Sometimes you have a bit of a eureka moment where things start to come together so you can make better sense of the social media world. Believe me I’m still learning like everyone else on how one thing influences another. I think we have an interesting dynamic happening between blogging, search engine rankings and email which I’ve only just started to fully appreciate which has made me realise that companies  are really missing out on improved search engine rankings and customer acquisition opportunities if they do not blog and link their blogging strategy to their email plans.

 

Last week I sat in on Vanessa Fox’s seminar which was on the topic of improving your website for the search engines. Vanessa wrote the book called “Marketing in the age of Google” and she talked about the key importance of making sure that every page on your website is structured like a landing page as you never know where your customers are going to land. The discussion continued about the heat map below (originally from Jakob Nielson’s 2006 web user research[1]) that shows where clicks happen on a typical search results page. It shows that 99% of clicks are in the organic listings page and above the fold (the red line). This then means that you have limited scope to influence the results with just pay per click and search engine optimisation programmes as you need much more content to do this which closely matches the keywords your customers are using.

 

 Source: Jakob Nielsen 2006 F shaped pattern for reading web content

 

I did some follow up research and signed up for the white paper from Compendium[2] which helpfully explained how important blogging can be to your search engine optimisation strategy. With blogs you have a golden opportunity to optimise your rankings as you have so much more scope for creating better content which is much more aligned to the keywords. The content of a blog can also be far more recent and have higher engagement levels with it which can also help to improve your search engine rankings if you make sure you tag your blogs with the most appropriate keywords.

 

The icing on the cake is to then ensure as recommended that your blogs have an email sign up tailored to the keywords they have searched on. You also want to make sure that any email newsletters that you send to your customers are accessible to your website viewers. This will again improve your site’s rankings as the search engines will treat this as new content and rank it.

 

I have recently changed my website so that all my newsletters are accessible which then provides a link for those that have problems downloading their email as email servers can behave somewhat unpredictably. This also ensures that they can forward the link to a friend rather than forwarding the email itself which can get scrambled when it is forwarded on.

 

Anyway I would love to hear what your most important eureka moment has been on the topic of Social Media. Do share with us.

 

 

 

 

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