South West eCommerce

The internet is a vibrant and ever changing place.  We’ve started to make sense out of it and that’s becoming our living.  In the last year or so social media has become one of the greatest drivers not only of fun and pleasure on the internet, but also of business and profit.

As this was becoming apparent, we started to work hard to get our heads around it.  We’ve played for a while and we know there’s a lot to understand.  Graeme and Dave are both too old to be digital natives, Mark is younger and seems cool and funky, but interestingly he has just as much to learn.  The only way to really understand it though, is to dive in.

About six months ago we came across a product called tweet tutor.  Not knowing what we didn’t know, we thought that a teaching course was a great place to start.  It wasn’t expensive at $99, and we dived in and started tweeting.  Twitter has been a revelation and the training was worth many times it’s price to us.  Given that, we added it to our toolbox.  We sold a few, not a lot, but we are about providing opportunity.  We have learned profit will follow when we help other people grow.

Over the weekend, we found that tweet tutor is no longer being maintained, and that the interface we had with them as merchants is defunct.  We can’t recommend them anymore and they’re out of our toolbox.

Having said that, we still recommend heartily that you get involved in Social Media.  We started by building a twitter following, and saw that deliver reach for us.  We’ve started some facebook options, and that’s working well too.  Linked in, Digg, and others are still on our drawing boards. 

Just as importantly, after we'd built numbers we began to understand that people have to get a sense that you really do care about the interaction.  That’s taken us a little while to grasp and because we haven’t lived online like, say, our kids, doing it is still work, it’s not natural to us yet.

We’re learning all the time and the big lesson has been that we can stop working sometimes and just play.  We’re going to find a great tutor for social media, and we’re going to put it back up for you.  This really is important, and as you watch our monthly reports, the benefits of being social are going to shine through.  Keep an eye on the blog though, because some of it is going to be insight drawn from living the life as much as doing the business.

By the way, Mark needs some facebook friends.  He’s Mark Utting, of Bunbury, Western Australia.  We’ve told him he needs 1000 friends and then he can be our front man.  Send him a friend request, watch him grow, and share in the wonder of it as a young man becomes a social media phenomenon.  When he’s got to his thousand, he can start to be our front man and we’ll all do the learning together.