Dirty Secret

Here's my dirty secret, but you have to promise not to tell...

This is my first blog.

Maybe you're disappointed, perhaps you were hoping for something a bit juicier, but that's it.

I've been working on, and with, the web for 14 years now in various roles but have never quite gotten around to writing a blog. I could fill many screens with my reasons for not blogging before but that would be too self indulgent (even for a blog). What I will share is why I'm writing one now.

My company is embracing social media, we're on Facebook and Twitter, have a FlickR account and have also started to use QR codes on some of our printed material.

Our CEO blogs, as does the Communications Director but I never felt I had anything really worth blogging about (arguably I still don't - time will tell on that one).

So I thought I would, in a somewhat random and disorganised way, blog about how we are trying to make social media work for us.

We are about to launch a major brand awareness campaign in the area local to our lettings office. As well as getting the logo everywhere we are also going to be encouraging people to "fan" us on Facebook. The problem is we haven't quite nailed down what we're going to do to keep people's interest on Facebook once we get them there.

I figure that at any point in time no more than 10% of people are going to be actively looking for an estate/letting agent. So we have to find a way to keep that other 90% interested until they are looking. We have some ideas and a long lead time for the campaign to hit so I'm hopeful we'll think of something (I'll keep you updated on that).

We are also looking to revamp, refresh and coordinate our online presence. This is going to be quite a huge task, and one that I'm very excited about. I've worked for this company for 2 years and have been trying to convince them to let me sort out a consistent online approach for the whole time, now I've got the go ahead so yay!

I'm also going to create mobile friendly versions of our sites and integrate as much social media as I can shoe-horn in.  Should be fun.

Well, wish me luck.

My next post is going to be about deciding on a back-end for the sites, 'till then...

cya