Flowers…uncut

Posted by: Will – Priority juggler on May 20th, 2007

Hello! Welcome to ArenaFlowers.com’s first blog. Ooooo. Exciting. Not quite sure what to say now. Hmmmm. *uncomfortable silence*
:)

Well, I guess as good a way as any to start is to explain why we’ve set this blog up. It’s actually not a straightforward question. After all, why do busy start-ups invest their time in what is effectively an online multimedia diary? Haven’t they got better things to do with their time? I have several friends who are keen personal bloggers and I understand exactly why they do it. But the question is why are we, as a business, going to spend (some of) our time blogging, rather than spend (all of) our time focusing on delivering the best possible service to our customers?

Lots of businesses (especially webby ones) do it, but that doesn’t explain why they do it. From what we’re told, we’ll get negligible SEO benefit out of blogging; there’s no magic way to drive readers here, so we don’t even know if anyone will read it. Should we do it just to follow the crowd? Erm, no - if we followed that logic, we wouldn’t have set up Arena in the first place. We know that “big business” is starting to use blogging as a pre-emptive play in the wider knowledge community – but one thing that Arena definitely isn’t is big business (much to the despair of our bank managers), so that doesn’t wash either.

It was actually an easy decision for us. We’ve got a website but no shop. We don’t do any print or TV advertising. We’re a fully online business. We occasionally talk to our customers on the phone. We also communicate with them through our copy on the website. And through email. But most people don’t really read those things and only in very unusual circumstances do they ever see one of us face to face. So it’s fair to say that our customers don’t really know much about us at all – but yet we expect them to entrust us with their money.

A lot of individuals don’t really want that stuff anyway; they just want good service (we’re delighted to provide it) and, on the basis of our website, they’re happy to trust us despite not knowing us. But some people do want to know who they’re dealing with, they do want to know how their product was sourced, they are interested in what makes the business they’re interacting with tick. For those people, we think this blog will be an opportunity for our team to be transparent and open about who we are and what we’re trying to achieve.

In our blog, we’ll talk about what we’ve done to build Arena in the twelve months since we decided to set up the business, and where we went wrong. We’ll talk about flowers, of course, but also about ethical sourcing and the daily nightmare that is Google’s natural search rankings blood bath. Basically we’ll talk about who we are as a business and things that we think people might want to understand about Arena…plus anything else that we think that web-savvy people might find interesting.

Just to finish off, one other reason we’re doing this is to stay sane…Arena isn’t just our job, it’s also our passion (sad but true). All work and no play ain’t good. Aside from being an opportunity for us to communicate more clearly with our customers, this blog is also just a bit of fun! Life shouldn’t be taken too seriously.

Anyway, that’s enough of that. Please comment, let us know what you think and, hopefully, enjoy!

Filed under: General, Setting up on May 20th, 2007