A Very Yeti Blog

Let me be clear from the start, this ain’t going to teach you nothing, it is more of an observation and a call to arms.

We live in a World where, As Dizzee puts it, “everyone wants to be famous” and the yoof of tomorrow allegedly don’t want to experience the cut and thrust of the 9-5, or the 6am to 11pm as some SME’s may know it.

I am here to redress that balance though, to point out how much it grates on me and my fellow SME’s whenever we hear an X-Factors Got Talent contestant utter the immortal line “I could never go and work in an office and do the whole 9-5”.

Now come on, there is nothing wrong with working in an office, and more importantly, there is nothing wrong with actually wanting to work in an office.

If you are anything like me, someone who maybe had a slightly rocky start to trying to find a “career” then you will know where I am coming from when I say that I really wanted an office job, ideally with a future.

Let me just start by saying something at the outset, 10 Yetis is an SME and proud!

10 Yetis has just reached its fifth birthday, I know, Jilly and I cannot believe it either but encouraging you to send us cakes to celebrate is not the point of this blog.

Over the years we have gone from being hugely disorganised to not as disorganised as we once were (no matter what our brilliant accountant says). We have processes and policies in place to ensure that our growth is managed sensibly and our team knows what bit fits where etc.

One of the areas where we have gotten brilliant is tracking and managing leads (one of the wonderful aded value areas of KashFlow that I said for years they should make more of*) and this takes me ever so smoothly on to the purpose of todays blog, the need for us SME's to plan our marketing and PR campaigns a bit more, something that has lept out at me when reviewing leads from the previous 12 months.

If you are like me and fed up of reading those Top 10 lists (see my last blog post, I had a Top Eleven I will have you know), then this blog is aimed at you.

We all know these Top 10 lists are just linkbait (Linkbait = ways to get people to link to your site - or the place where you write the Top 10 List) and so I thought I would do my very own "Top 6 and a Half" guide to writing great linkbait - although not to our own site, something has gone wrong there!

1. Say Something Controversial - Controversy creates debate, not always good, but rarely that bad in the long term, especially if the debate contains links to your site from multiple places. A good example would be: "I cannot understand how social media agency WeAreSocial has 32k followers on Twitter when they rarely engage with followers? Have they used a Twitter-Follower-Bot and if so, what does that say about their soshal meeja thang?". Just an example... :-)

Hey there BZ blog readers... another little blog post on the wonderful world of media and public relations.

When I started out in public relations, and well before I sold my soul and become a "consumer" PR Agency person I actually worked, in-house, in Crisis Communications.

This involved trying to protect the reputation of the company's I worked for when things went bad. Considering I did this in three seperate roles; a large multi-national utility company, a transport company and a FMCG (Fast moving Consumer Goods) company I got to see my fair share of sh*t hitting the preverbial fan.

I still keep my hand in when it comes to crisis comm's, mainly privately and not via 10 Yetis, for instance I gave media advice to the family affected by probably the biggest business related tragedy of 2008/2009 (not saying who, thank you very much).

I thought it may be worth passing on the top 11 tips (everyone does Top 10's, so 2009!) I have learned over the years for managing a situation when something has not gone to plan, business wise, and you have the media knocking at your door.

I was tidying up our website this week and I came across a load of our old newsletters... as I reminisced about the days when we first started out and it was just Jilly and I, I also thought how bloody good some of our old freebies were :-)

So, today's quick blog post is to give you one of these freebies... a free marketing guide from 10 Yetis PR Agency that you can print out and stick on your wall.

Now, ignore the fact it is pretty basic looking and keep in mind that the reason we did it is that we are all sometimes guilty of concentrating on the one marketing area that we know will deliver and forget what else we could be doing.

If you pop this on the wall by your desk you can always glance up and maybe try a new activity each week.

Alternatively, you could fold it into a paper aeroplane and lob it at an unsuspecting colleague.

The choice is yours!

Andy, from a Consumer PR Agency