Barking

So we fancied some delivery pizza today and thought we would try EasyPizza. They have launched in Coventry and it seems like a good deal. After duly selecting the three pizzas and pressing order we were presented with a hideous ASP error that stopped us ordering.

Now as web application developers we knew roughly what it meant - no pizza from Easy Pizza for us! So we have no transfered our business to Papa Johns and won’t be trying Easy Pizza again - Nice one Stelios you just lost a bit of business there! The reaction from everyone in the office - oh its Easy as in EasyJet, what a surprise it didn’t work!

It has finally arrived - the new Senokian website has been launched today. Please check it out and let us know what you think.

I didn’t get this to start with. But now I think it is frankly awesome.

What do you think?

So with the new re-brand we need to put together some new business cards. This photo set is a great source of inspiration!

The guys over at Fog Creek have a really interesting way of marketing their software for upcoming Mother’s Day - they are giving it away for free!

Traditionally software is not the sexiest or most loving of gifts to give your family and certainly not a piece of software to remotely connect to a computer. However by marketing the fact that you can fix your loved ones computer is an interesting twist. Making it free will hopefully get more people interested and perhaps come back in the future for a paid for pass - I hope that it works for them!

Last July we opened up an on-line forum called ‘Open Rebrand’ where we encouraged Senokian clients to give their thoughts on the current Senokian and EGS brands and make suggestions for the new ones. Already understanding how difficult it is to build an on-line community, I was a little anxious that we would get no comments…But after sending out a mail shot and spreading the word we began to get a steady stream of well thought out comments - We had some really useful suggestions, particularly about the trademarking of EGS.

At the time I was referring to this as ‘Open Source Marketing’, the idea being that we and our clients co-create the new brands. Today the technology news site, Wired is doing something similar but on a much larger scale called, Assignment Zero where they are calling for journalists / marketers / designers / industry experts etc to pull their stories together and co-create a Citizenship Newspaper…

In their words the project is “Inspired by the open-source movement, this is an attempt to bring journalists together with people in the public who can help cover a story. It’s a collaboration among NewAssignment.Net, Wired, and those who choose to participate.”

I think this is a pretty cool way of experimenting with the philosophy of collaboration and many-to-many communication channels. A blog post I submitted back in July of last year explores this idea a little further.

As part of our re-brand we are rebuilding the Senokian website and I am currently re-writing the content to bring it up to date and in keeping with our new marketing strategy; as part of this marketing effort we are very much trying to refocus our efforts on EGS and the associated services which we offer, and it this area of the site which is going to be updated the most.

Before going off and updating all the content on the website we decided to check out our web stats (currently provided by Google Analytics) and it is clear that there is a huge amount of content on the current site that we currently have to maintain, but only a small amount has a reasonable number of hits. At the last check, there are over 80 pages being visited on the Senokian site, but only 10 of them get a reasonable number of hits.

As a result we have analysed the current content and reduced the site content. A New Site Map (produced with the excellent OmniGraffle) shows how we have cut down the unused content on the site to the pages most visited.

The new site design allows us to effectively link to other sites that provide more comprehensive content (the majority of this content is regarding Open Source, and there is a huge amount of excellent content on more popular sites available), in a portal like manner - of course we will now have to manage our links to this content and make sure that we don’t have any dead links.

We will let you know when the new site goes live and will value the comments and feedback that everyone sends us. In short, it is worth reviewing your web content on a regular basis to see which areas are popular and in our case, as an upside we have been able to simplify our site navigation.

Matthew Revell makes an interesting point on his blog regarding the use of trademarks and Open Source companies after reading Patrick Finch’s blog. I find this of particular interest since we are currently in the process of filling out the trademark forms for both our company Senokian, and the GPL’d business application EGS which we write, maintain and support and happen to think that it is a good thing.

Our reasons for doing this are to protect the company name and branding by protecting the reputation of the software that we develop. As Senokian we have invested a lot of time and effort into our EGS software and are more than happy to release the code under the GPL but we need to protect our brand for the software incase people start trying to pass off as us and damage our reputation.

Trademarking is part of this process and at the end of the day, we see it as beneficial to us and the community at large. There is no point developing a great piece of software, only to be put out of business and not be able to maintain and support the software we love. As Patrick says:

Open source is not a free-for-all: it is fair-for-all, and Red Hat surely have a right to their trademark without being labelled “seeking profit at any expense”.

Now we are not Red Hat, but as a company supplying Open Source software we differentiate ourselves from other projects that are not commercially supported by our services and our trademarks are part of this. This brand gives consumers and buyers confidence that the application is professionally developed and supported and that is the value which we sell to our customers.

Two years ago we attended our first trade event as an exhibitor, and our lack of preparation in planning the event inevitably resulted in a poor experience for us - in fact quite a few of these trade show exhibiting mistakes ring true of our first event!

However two years on, we have sensibly used the experience as part of our exhibiting learning curve and are now in the process of researching and meticulously planning our first ‘real’ trade event!

Unlike the first time round, we have sourced loads of information about ‘how to plan your trade show’ and downloaded some great exhibitor top tips - in fact the great site businessballs has proved to be an invaluable research tool.

As the old saying goes ‘its not rocket science’ - what we have learned is common sense rules - such as having a clear focus on why we want to exhibit and what we ultimately want to get out of the event. Asking these questions helped to channel our thoughts and set specific targets – we have even been using the SMART model (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time frame) to set out some meaningful objectives.

So having managed to absorb snippets of exhibiting tips, here are the Senokian Exhibitor Planning Top Tips:

• Perhaps most obviously, agree your reasons for exhibiting at a show, decide on a budget and start researching the right show for your business
• Set a realistic time frame in which to complete all pre-show tasks (EGS/projects is great for planning this!)
• Confirm your specific goals for attending the show - for example it could be to generate 50 potential qualified new sales leads, to give 25 demo’s of your product, to make 5 direct sales, to generate media coverage, to invite 5 key journalists to your stand or to position yourself as a market leader – I’m sure you get the picture!
• Decide on a theme for your event – how are you going to entice visitors to your stand? What give-aways are you going to offer and where shall you source them from? Top tip – whenever I visit a trade event I find the most useful give-away to be a carrier bag to put all the free pens in! (Make sure you get your logo and web address prominently displayed on both sides of the bags!)
• Make sure you have sufficient and relevant marketing literature to hand out at the show – but once at the show make sure you only display say 10 brochures and give-aways at a time - this means your stand wont look cluttered – but remember to replenish your stock!
• Write a press kit and send it to relevant journalists in preparation for your pre-show PR, include a brief company fact sheet, biographies of key employees, client testimonials, a case study snippet, your company logo, some screen shots and a few examples of any previous press releases – oh and of course include contact details of your press/marketing officer
• Train your staff – its sounds really obvious but its important that all staff members feel confident and sufficient product knowledge to allow them to sell!
• Pre-show PR – invite your clients to visit your stand, inform the local papers and contact specialist trade publication – they’re always on the look out for worthy, relevant news. Be sure to get a list of pre-registrants and send out an e-mail or postal mail shot inviting them to your stand. Even invite key journalists to come and visit your stand – but remember to entice them beforehand with your Company press-kit. And of course its always the simple things…display the details of the event on your company homepage.
• After-show preparation: never underestimate the importance of following up on your contacts and of course sending a simple email to say thank you visiting our stand!

This is by no means an exhausted list of top tips but we’re sure there are plenty of handy hints in there to help you plan your best exhibition EVER!

As many of you will be aware from the recent ‘Open Rebrand’ campaign that we launched, Senokian Solutions have been undertaking a re-brand of the main ‘Senokian’ and ‘EGS’ brands.

The re-brand process has been an interesting one, it took a while to come up with a new brand - including the unenviable task of having to change design agencies part way through the process - but we are happy with the results after a few hick ups and are now working on a new website for Senokian Solutions and the Open Source website for EGS.

One of the main changes that we have undertaking is to sub-brand several versions of EGS as Senokian products and incorporate different websites for these - obviously pulling all of this design together is a challenging task and the results will be available soon. The other big change we have undertaken on the back of this is to change the company name slightly.

Obviously changing the company name is a big decision for any organisation, and several people suggested that we change the name from Senokian Solutions. After an extensive consultation period we decided to simply drop the ‘Solutions’ part of the company and become ‘Senokian’. Our reasoning for this was due to the fact that we operate in several different areas within our industry and gives us more flexibility - for example Senokian Internet will soon be launched offering many of our ISP services in a more accessible form to people and the hosted Zimbra platform.

The new ‘Senokian’ brand will come online next month with the new website and marketing material available at http://www.senokian.com. For those of you who cannot wait, here is a sneak preview of the new logo: