6 days to go to the election and so time for Part 2 of 7, creating and evolving Business in Berkshire (BinB) which was born out of being Chair of East Berkshire FSB and looking to grow my email marketing business.
In 2008 we had 5,000,000 page views 😉 Back then it was difficult to assess what those visitors were… humans or robots but either way, Google loved our site and we flew high for a while.
One of our weekly email recipients approached me, a business owner from Maidenhead, who had built a web platform and he offered us the use of it. It worked well and I encouraged others to join in…
We didn’t charge for the platform as no-one knew what it could do and fees would have been an obstacle to adoption.
It was hard enough trying to get folk to produce content. In fact, it was impossible, I had to produce most of it!
This was the early days of blogging and small businesses owners didn’t want to embarrass themselves by spelling something wrong online and feeling stupid. No-one would have noticed, most of us can’t spell or get it grammatically correct all the time but hey this was 2003/4.
Because it was so early, Google started picking up on us and flying our content high… we could command most searches if we had members with content. I recall one member saying the SEO had saved his business at the time of the credit crunch!
The email marketing drove our business revenue and having EMAP and Ogilvy Primary on board helped pay a few bills 😉
The BinB site really took off around the time of Charles & Camilla’s wedding which resulted with me being invited to be inside the Castle for the Royal wedding.
We worked with Business Link and hosted something like 80 square metres at Internet World one year. We hosted a couple of exhibitions, ran our own networking events and helped Business Link drive attendance to their events.
Writing this I am reminded of the final hurrah…
Social Media Week, a US import had just hosted a bunch of events in London and had sent out an email to thousands of attendees asking them to vote for their SMW favourites… I’ll let this young chap take up the story…
We had 5,000 recipients of our regular weekly newsletter. I figured that if 50 voted for me it could be enough given that social media people would have probably been rushing off to the next big thing and not see the email. There had been no mention of the awards during the week, it was a last minute addition, so in my head I envisaged Wembley after the match when only the cleaners were in the stadium receiving the invitation to be part of the voting process… worth a go.
Guess who landed one of the 4 prizes and became Social Media Week’s Social Media Personality of the Year in 2012! For those wondering what the other trophy is… I was also lucky enough, in the same year, to receive the “Most annoying Dad of the Year Award” from my daughter… kids eh 😉
It was fun but like all good things, the tech got old, email marketing became a commodity and our margins disappeared.
Time for a change…
When we deleted the Business in Berkshire website there were over 1500 separate accounts that had had space at one time or another over the 10 years… we still have circa 5,000 members of the Business in Berkshire LinkedIn Group.
I found most of the small business owners were naturally focused on their business and I needed a more altruistic crowd and so joined Windsor & Eton Rotary Club… more of that in Part 3…
Thank you.
Jon Davey
