Many established online businesses still rely heavily on the Internet’s gatekeeper, Google, for traffic. So much so, that whole industries have sprung up to help business mangers optimise their site to suit the world’s leading search engine. Search engine optimisation throws up some interesting new challenges and opportunities. But rather than give […]
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Filed under: Guest Posts, Marketing, Matters Webby on May 6th, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Every year we celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, commemorate religious events, honour individuals, and other equally important occasions such as the Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Christmas etc. However, April 1st stands out as a truly bizarre celebration of foolishness and stupidity. While some unsuspecting individuals go about their day in a regular manner and fall to tricks […]
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Filed under: General, Matters Webby, Uncategorized on April 1st, 2008 | No Comments »
Question: What should you expect from a blog post on a flowers blog on a flowers website?
Answer: A post about blog libel, of course!
Why?!: Arena started blogging about a year ago (to understand why we blog, please see this post). One of the great things about blogging is that it’s a two way communication process; […]
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Filed under: Big Mistakes, Ethics & Environment, Matters Webby, Setting up on March 26th, 2008 | No Comments »
After a trip to the Alps for some skiing, the obvious choice of chocolate to bring back for the team was Toblerone. So I dutifully returned on Monday bearing a giant pack, boasting no less than 150 mini Toblerones. The only question - which poor unfortunate to force to pose for a picture […]
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Filed under: General, Matters Webby, Operations on March 19th, 2008 | No Comments »
Hello, everyone. Apologies for the relative blog silence of late. We’ve been super busy at Flowers HQ - not only is Valentine’s Day looming, but we’ve also been hard at work on a top secret, world first feature for our customers - video and voice messages delivered with flowers. Heard of […]
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Filed under: Customers, Marketing, Matters Webby, Mega Days, Setting up, Valentine's Day on February 8th, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Our constant scouting for SEO related tips and articles on the Web has led us to experiment with many Widgets on our blog. People who follow our blog closely would have noticed the nonstop activity on the Widget Columns. Just like we bring flowers to customers instead of bringing customers to our flowers, we strive […]
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Filed under: General, Marketing, Matters Webby on November 23rd, 2007 | 6 Comments »
Today was a fun day at Flowers HQ. One of those days when I reflect how happy I am that our team took the risk and ventured away from our easy(ish) jobs into the uncharted (and scarier) waters of Arena, flowers and building a business for flower lovers. Hooray!
I’ve been out of the office for […]
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Filed under: Ethics & Environment, Flowers, General, Marketing, Matters Webby on October 25th, 2007 | 4 Comments »
Hot on the heels of Jackie’s post last week about a customer suing his regular florist for the princely sum of £750k (for revealing his infidelities), today we read this headline: “Interflora website ‘rips off’ customers“. For an industry that brings happiness and joy, love and best wishes, it’s certainly been a grim seven […]
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Filed under: Big Mistakes, Customers, Ethics & Environment, Fraud, Matters Webby on August 21st, 2007 | 4 Comments »
This year has been a real roller coaster at Arena already. The first three months of the year for any florist are consumed by Valentine’s day and Mother’s day, with all florists living in mortal terror of getting it wrong and losing a lot of money. In order to get through such mega […]
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Filed under: Marketing, Matters Webby on August 9th, 2007 | 7 Comments »
Last night, after an enthusiastic exchange of final amends we launched ‘Flowers & Fun’ the Arena Flowers Facebook application. As with all things Arena, Flowers & Fun had always been there in our ‘to do’ list but it wasn’t until last week that Will’s frantic text messages became too much to ignore – the application […]
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Filed under: Flowers, General, Marketing, Matters Webby on July 27th, 2007 | No Comments »
I received the email below yesterday (no idea why it was written in lurid purple!). Having had a look, I wasn’t initially convinced that Blackle is for real. Both natural and paid search results differ from those returned on conventional Google. It could be that it’s only set up for US searchers. Or […]
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Filed under: Ethics & Environment, Marketing, Matters Webby on July 25th, 2007 | 3 Comments »
Being an online retailer is not easy, especially when it’s such an interconnected world where making the right connections is the key to achieving objectives. At Arena Flowers we mull over the different online advertising channels every day, reviewing their promises to dramatically boost our visitors overnight. It would be easy if we had very […]
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Filed under: Big Mistakes, Marketing, Matters Webby on July 23rd, 2007 | 5 Comments »
A couple of weeks ago we moved our website to greener pastures; RackSpace. Moving ISPs is not something you want to do on a regular basis and is often associated with fear. The fear of losing something along the way (our website and thus livelihood, for instance!).
This time the process of migration […]
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Filed under: Ethics & Environment, Matters Webby on July 2nd, 2007 | 2 Comments »
An online florist doesn’t mean that we exist in the virtual world. Each one of us at Arena is a social animal, with a desire to share our experiences with our customers and an eagerness to grab attention. That’s how we realised the importance of blogging as a new form of communication to share our […]
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Filed under: Marketing, Matters Webby on June 12th, 2007 | 3 Comments »
We love gumtree. We’ve recruited about 20 members of our team using the site, at a fraction of the cost of using a recruitment agency. In fact, aside from people we always knew we wanted to hire, every single other recruit has come through gumtree, including drivers, florists, customer service ladies and even our […]
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Filed under: General, Marketing, Matters Webby, Setting up on June 4th, 2007 | No Comments »
…I was pretending to go to my friend Ash’s wedding in Jaipur, India, whilst actually flying to sit at the feet of web gurus in San Francisco, USA.
I had a job at the time (at eBay UK), but, having agreed in principle with Steve that we should set up Arena, I then had to work […]
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Filed under: Marketing, Matters Webby, Start up on May 27th, 2007 | 1 Comment »
