**UPDATE: We are pleased to announce that Brenda is the winner of the Arena Flowers Mum of the Year competition**
Thank you for all the entries and for all who voted.
Happy Mother’s Day.
We have had many wonderful entries for the 2010 Arena Flowers Mum of the Year competition. We’d like to thank everyone who nominated [...]
Filed under: Customers, Matters Webby, Mega Days, Mother's Day on March 8th, 2010 | 8 Comments »
It’s a week since Valentine’s Day – a busy time for florists around the globe – and things have remained as exciting as ever at Arena Flowers.
Particularly exciting as we launched our new tool: Flowers & Fun (http://www.flowersfun.co.uk). This is a completely free (and fun!) messaging service allowing you to send messages with a virtual [...]
Filed under: General, Marketing, Matters Webby on February 22nd, 2010 | No Comments »
It was my pleasure to be at Small Business 2.0 this year; an even greater pleasure to take part in the SEO panel and SEO forum session.
There were some interesting speakers there from BT Tradespace. Ivan Croxford had sage advice and hilarious anecdotes about managing reputation via the BT Tradespace platform and social sites more [...]
Filed under: General, Marketing, Matters Webby on January 26th, 2010 | No Comments »
I was recently invited by friend of Arena, Trevor Ginn, to write a guest post for his blog eBay, eCommerce life. As well as being a blogger, Trevor runs an online baby and nursery shop, Hello Baby and an Internet consultancy, Vendlab. Naturally, being a sucker for flattery from other webby types, I was happy [...]
Filed under: General, Matters Webby on June 17th, 2009 | 1 Comment »
A quick ‘Pop Quiz’ for you: What do Jon Bon Jovi, Kate Winslet, Cameron Diaz, Steffi Graf, Jodie Foster and Tiger Woods (pictured, right) all have in common? Apart from probably having a few bob to their names, they are all reported to be famous hay fever sufferers and/or allergic to flowers.
With an estimated 20% [...]
Filed under: Customers, Floristry, Flowers, General, Matters Webby, Operations, Weddings on May 26th, 2009 | No Comments »
I like gadgets and as such love our Arena ‘toys’. As the subject for this post is centered around our latest toy I have been charged with telling the story.
Something that I think I should clarify at this juncture is the definition of a ‘toy’. We are a florist not a toy shop so by [...]
Filed under: General, Matters Webby, Mega Days on April 27th, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Following up from her previous well-received guest post, we asked Pascale, friend of Arena and online marketing guru, if there was another topic she fancied sharing her thoughts on. Sure enough, there was. So here’s a very interesting discussion of how the web and TV and other media are getting increasingly intertwined and changing the [...]
Filed under: General, Marketing, Matters Webby on January 27th, 2009 | 9 Comments »
Fancy a Twitter with Britney?
- The Sun, 10th January 2009
How boring: Celebrities sign up to Twitter to reveal the most mundane aspect of their lives
- Daily Mail, 3rd January 2009
Twitter set for its mainstream telly moment on Jonathan Ross’s comeback show
- Guardian, 7th January 2009
What started as a trickle at the end of last year [...]
Filed under: Customers, Distribution, Floristry, Marketing, Matters Webby, Setting up on January 15th, 2009 | No Comments »
Unless you’re living in a cave somewhere, you’ll know it’s Christmas very soon indeed – Google has even added holly and sweets to the ads shown for Christmas related searches. It’s very busy at Flowers HQ right now too, as well wishers send flowers home to loved ones. We’ve even sold out of Father Christmases [...]
Filed under: Christmas Flowers, Ethics & Environment, Marketing, Matters Webby, Mega Days on December 18th, 2008 | 5 Comments »
Yesterday was a busy day for anti-fraud newsflow plus some good old fashioned web fear mongering. Don’t get me wrong – web fraud happens and needs to be combated but there is often something shrill and hysterical about the reporting of online fraud, especially in the UK. “Everyone PANIC!” would seem to summarise the editorial [...]
Filed under: Big Mistakes, Ethics & Environment, Fraud, General, Marketing, Matters Webby on November 18th, 2008 | 11 Comments »
Dr. Dave Chaffey, is the Director and lead consultant for Marketing Insights Limited, an independent marketing consultancy. He is also the best selling author of Internet Marketing books used by digital marketing professionals and on many University and College Courses globally. His latest book, Internet Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice, which features Arena Flowers’ case [...]
Filed under: General, Matters Webby on November 14th, 2008 | 7 Comments »
Unless you’ve been living in a cave on a remote island, in the outer regions of civilisation with nothing more than smoke signals to communicate to your neighbouring hermits, you’ll be fully aware that today is indeed polling day over the other side of the pond, with two political heavyweights slogging it out for the [...]
Filed under: Flowers, General, Matters Webby on November 4th, 2008 | 3 Comments »
Those of you with a keen eye will have already spotted what the title of this post is alluding to. In fact we published the new template for the website several weeks ago but it was only this week that we finished the revamp by publishing a new blog theme in line with the look [...]
Filed under: General, Marketing, Matters Webby on September 14th, 2008 | 5 Comments »
We were surprised this week to receive mail from one of the leading academic publishers, Pearson Education’s Higher and Professional Education Division seeking our permission to reproduce a copy of our website image for a new edition of Chaffey et al’s book, Internet Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice. We assume that the book shows our [...]
Filed under: Marketing, Matters Webby, Setting up on September 9th, 2008 | 4 Comments »
Imitation, they say is the sincerest form of flattery. They also say success breeds imitation. Every now and then we find our competitors ordering flower arrangements from us, which makes us wonder if our bouquets are being copied and sold by other florists. We have regularly battled image and content thievery, where we have had [...]
Filed under: Ethics & Environment, Flowers, General, Marketing, Matters Webby on September 2nd, 2008 | 4 Comments »
The last 12 months have been pretty, erm, interesting for young businesses such as our own (although not as bad as the ancient Chinese curse might suggest). We now get asked almost daily “how are sales holding up?”, “are you doing better because you’re online (or worse?)?”, “are visitors converting to customers?” and so on. The [...]
Filed under: Finance & Investment, Floristry, General, Matters Webby, Mega Days, Mother's Day, Valentine's Day on July 1st, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Sam mentioned a new arrival for his family last week, and this week it’s the turn of the Arena family to welcome its own new member: our Dutch language site, ArenaBloemen.nl!
Our team spends a huge amount of time and effort securing deals direct with the best growers so that we can ensure great prices, superb [...]
Filed under: Distribution, Floristry, International Flowers, Marketing, Matters Webby, Operations, Setting up, Start up on June 4th, 2008 | 2 Comments »
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 [...]
Filed under: Guest Posts, Marketing, Matters Webby on May 6th, 2008 | 2 Comments »
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 [...]
Filed under: General, Matters Webby 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; [...]
Filed under: Big Mistakes, Ethics & Environment, Matters Webby, Setting up on March 26th, 2008 | 1 Comment »
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 [...]
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 [...]
Filed under: Customers, Marketing, Matters Webby, Mega Days, Setting up, Valentine's Day on February 8th, 2008 | 2 Comments »
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 [...]
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 [...]
Filed under: Ethics & Environment, Flowers, General, Good Causes & Charities, 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 [...]
Filed under: Big Mistakes, Customers, Ethics & Environment, Fraud, Matters Webby on August 21st, 2007 | 5 Comments »
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