It’s my birthday today.  Hooray!  Birthday flowers, birthday balloons, birthday greetings cards all round!  Oh, and I’ll have some “healthy” chocolate too - I am getting old after all. Right - that’s the search engine optimisation bit out of the way.  I’m 33 today. Ouch!  11 years til my next symmetrical birthday.  Best enjoy this one while I can.  Apparently I share the date with Britney Spears.  Hmmm.  Hardly Albert Einstein or William Shakespeare, but hey, beggars can’t be choosers.

The thing I like about my birthday is that it signals (to me only, obviously) that Christmas is officially on its way.  Before the 2nd December, I see the decorations go up, I hear the people moaning about the adverts on telly but it all just slides over me and doesn’t go in.  It might as well be another language.  That is until the 2nd of Dec when my birthday comes round and I start to get into the swing of it.  Maybe it’s the card that I get from my grand mother every year that kick starts the good will - 85 years old and every year a card with a £20 note appears on my doorstep like clockwork.  Doesn’t matter how old you are, you’ll always enjoy receiving a card with a £20 note in it. :)

Anyway, my unerring march towards old age gives me the opportunity to point out that our Christmas flowers range is live and kicking and bigger and better than ever.  Among last year’s most popular were the alternative Christmas Tulips, the traditional Christmas Basket and the Winter Reds Christmas cube.  Of course if you want to impress and / or upstage your siblings by sending the biggest and best, then you can’t do much better than go for the Christmas Celebration. It’s the Daddy. Or Father Christmas. Sorry. That was terrible.

So what’s with the bicycle picture?  Well, that’s back to my birthday.  Having woken up way too early I decided that rather than go back to sleep and pretend I’m still 21 I’d brave the sub zero London weather and frosty roads in a vain attempt to prove to myself that I’m not over the hill.  So I decided on a 13 mile round trip to Tower Bridge on my bike, along the Embankment.  During peak flower delivery periods it’s all hands to the pumps at Arena, and we all get out on the road delivering, typically on frosty London days like today’s.  So my early morning ride was a nice reminder of fun days past.  Hopefully when I next get the chance to take more pics like this during the Christmas rush, I’ll be in a nice warm van and not on my bicycle.

Merry Christmas shopping!

There’s no doubt that education is key in battling web spam and other forms of online fraud and Get Safe Online in particular does a fantastic job of putting out clear, moderate and easy to understand information on how to take care of oneself online.  Common sense recommendations include running regular updates for your browser and operating system, having up to date antivirus, antispyware and firewall software and not responding to unsolicited emails or giving away key personal and account information online.  Often, sites like Get Safe Online recommend third party software vendors, such as AVG or McAffee.

Understandably, reputable online businesses recognise the challenge of building trust and at Arena we work very hard to address potential trust concerns of visitors, such as payment methods and checkout integrity, site security, quality / value / freshness of product, and data protection and privacy policies.  After all, if we’re asking customers to hand over their money without ever having met us face to face, then they will need to be convinced that we are who we say we are and that we’ll deliver on our promises.  We try as much as we can to be clear and transparent about what we do (posting to our blog regularly is part of that…I hope it’s clear that this post isn’t being written by a scammer in Eastern Europe!).  The key is not to slip up as, as they say, “trust is hard to win and very easy to lose”.  Once you have it, do your very best to hold on to it.

It’s therefore incredibly frustrating when a lot of hard work is potentially undone by a company that really should know better - MessageLabs (who were, incidentally, purchased for a whopping $700m by Symantec yesterday).  To explain, last week we sent out one of our regular marketing emails to our subscriber base.  So far so good.  But soon after the send, we started receiving emails from concerned customers.  They had received the following email from their mail client, Message Labs:

Subject: WARNING. Someone tried to send you a potential virus or unauthorised code

Body of email included the following: The MessageLabs Email Security System discovered a possible virus or unauthorised code (such as a Trojan) in an email sent to you.

Possible MalWare ‘Exploit/Phishing-paypal-1054′ found in ‘7782603_2X_PM3_EMQ_MH__message.htm’. Heuristics score: 202

Now, I don’t know what you think, but if I received an email like that from my firewall supplier, I’d look very hard at any future communications from Arena and quite possibly unsubscribe immediately. After all, MessageLabs are a $700m company so they must be right, yeah?  Surely, they wouldn’t send out an email that slams a genuine business’s legitimate, opt-in marketing activity so thunderously by mistake?  Big boys like MessageLabs are bound to have complicated checks and balances in place to avoid accidentally torpedoing the legitimate marketing efforts of other organisations.  A web security firm in particular would understand the importance of online reputation and the hard work that goes into building trust.  And in any case, Arena has been sending regular marketing emails every other week for over two years, so no doubt MessageLabs would be able to use characteristics of our mail sends, such as previous send frequency, an unchanged IP address, subject lines etc etc to double check the validity of the send.

Nope.  It was a complete, 100% misdiagnosis by MessageLabs, as they subsequently confirmed.  We learnt that the reason that our email got hammered is that we put the word “PayPal” into the subject line yet we are not PayPal.  Blimey.  Sophisticated stuff.  We had PayPal in our subject line to let our customers know that they could win £10k cash if they paid for any order with PayPal during PayPal’s very generous 10th birthday promotion.

Obviously, customers of large online companies and banks, such as PayPal, can be targeted by spoof emails. However, our marketing email prior to this email also had PayPal in the subject line and email body and there was no backlash.  Also, I find it hard to understand how the word PayPal appearing in our mail can lead someone to imply we’re sending “viruses or unauthorised code”.  A virus would typically be an attachment of some kind, not a word in a subject line. I feel bad for PayPal too - we get way way more fraud from people who pay with credit cards than we do from people who pay with PayPal.  Fraud on orders paid with PayPal is virtually nil.  We much prefer people to pay with PayPal.

One of the first emails we received was in fact from a MessageLabs sales rep (who’d previously bought from Arena and who’d therefore received the MessageLabs warning email direct). His mail:

Please remove me from all your mailing list right away as you are sending viruses.
I can assist you with possible solutions however I was unable to reach your IT department.
MessageLabs Anti-virus solution has a SLA of 100% protection from all known and unknown viruses, phishing, trojans and other forms of malware.

http://www.messagelabs.co.uk/products/

Thank you

10/10 for being a pushy sales rep but frankly this mail was not terribly well received as you can imagine.  You wouldn’t want this guy consoling you if you broke up with your partner. “I’m afraid you’ve been dumped but I’m a pimp - have you considered paying for sex?”.  You’d then be even more upset when you found out that it was this guy that had caused the break up with your partner in the first place.

We also noted that, unlike the careful wording of the automated email sent by MessageLabs’ system, his email did not talk about “possible” viruses but came straight out and said “you are sending viruses” which was patently untrue. A rather terse email exchange followed, as you might expect, though not litigation as might have been the case with our American cousins (we’re too British for that).

In any case, I eventually spoke to the UK’s head of corporate sales who unsurprisingly was more reasonable and sort of / nearly / just about apologetic (although he too did suggest we bought their software, admittedly more tongue in cheek that his sales chasing colleague).  He gave me some spiel about how great MessageLabs is and how they use  complicated predictive algorithms to filter mail which all sounded good but didn’t stand up very well to “very nice, but it was just the word PayPal in the subject line that triggered this mess and you misdiagnosed it as a virus anyway”.

The frustrating thing about this is that MessageLabs has several million installed users in the UK, particularly in big, wealthy organisations, such as the government and banks etc.  These are obviously valuable potential customers and exactly the kind of people we’d love to retain.  Unfortunately we have no way of knowing how many such customers have now had their hard won trust in Arena dented or destroyed by MessageLabs’ misdiagnosis and there is no real way for us to fix this (bar writing this cathartic blog post!).  The chap at MessageLabs said “Sorry” but it’s not going to make any difference.  It’s clearly no coincidence that this email performed far worse than any other we’ve ever sent; it can realistically only be down to our MessageLabs mishap.

Maybe to add insult to injury MessageLabs will read this post and then use some of their freshly coined $700m to blast us right off the face of the earth and have done with it.  Ah well, you live and learn.  They didn’t do it on purpose but it certainly hurt.  I guess no matter how careful you are, there will always factors beyond your control, coming from any and all directions, that might disrupt your business.  The best laid plans of mice and men and all that…

Dave has been very kind in agreeing to our request for an interview for Flowers…Uncut. He shares his views on the challenges online Retailers, particularly small/startup businesses face in the online marketing environment and offers suggestions on improving website conversions to drive up sales. Read on…

Arena Flowers: Hello Dave. The Internet is a powerful channel of communication and commerce and has opened several new marketing avenues for small businesses. At the same time, it has also made possible many competitive threats and challenges. What are the main challenges online retailers face in the coming years and how should they react?

The biggest challenge for all online marketers has to be gaining and keeping attention, what the academics call “customer engagement”. Despite the Google monopoly, the search engines are still great for gaining attention for businesses that make the effort to understand the details of best practice.

SEO and Pay Per Click give a wonderful opportunity for small businesses since they level the playing field a little with more established businesses. Although the odds are still stacked in favour of the larger business because of their scale, small businesses that are more agile and follow the latest best practice in SEO and really understand the AdWords quality score can still compete online as the growth of Arena Flowers shows.

Keeping attention is a challenge due to online media fragmentation and more of us spending more time in social networks and reading blogs. Email marketing is vital as a customer retention tool, yet research by RedEye shows that around 60% of a typical permission-based list is “emotionally unsubscribed” or inactive over a 6 month period – subscribers never open or never click. To counter this you need to deploy what I call a “right-touching” contact strategy. Use the power of technology to automatically target customers with triggered email promotions and personalized web messages and where that fails offline contacts, according to their position in the lifecycle and their recent activity measured through recency, frequency and latency.

Arena Flowers: How do you see the role of search marketing and online advertising within the overall media mix, now and going forward?

With 90% of searches in the UK completed using Google according to Hitwise, we’re really talking Google marketing. It’s frightening that Google is now used to mediate almost every buying decision with most purchases starting with a search. The important point to understand is that the majority of searches which reach a retail site for a well-known brand are navigational – including <brand name> + <product name>.

So small businesses have to try to create a compelling brand experience which means that they are searched for by name at some point in the selection process. Large businesses such as Directline.com invest heavily in print and TV to establish this brand association with product, so small businesses are at a disadvantage here, but it shows the potential of tactical offline communications for small businesses. Many businesses who have analysed it have found that although online display ads have low click through rates, they do help in creating awareness and can add a brand onto the prospects consideration list.

Arena Flowers: The ability to drive traffic to a website is only a part of the objective for online retailers. The ultimate objective is to retain customer’s interest throughout the shopping experience to ensure higher levels of conversions. However, many retailers face a challenge of converting customer visits to a sale. What are main issues an Online Retailer should address to maximise conversions?

I have written a free article called the Perfect Landing Page which gives further tips.

Arena Flowers: What are your five golden rules for online businesses?

I’m a practical person, so these are practical rules: I’m assuming the strategy is in place targeting the right product at the right customers and the cost of acquiring new and repeat customers is being carefully controlled.

First, you have to put the time into reviewing and acting on the analytics once its setup. In many large businesses, not enough time is put into this, again smaller businesses can win here.

Second, and an example of the analytics you should be reviewing, all online businesses should measure and act on bounce rates for everything – different referring sites, different AdGroups, different landing pages, different product types. Work from the bottom up to increase overall conversion.

Third, become experts at Search Engine Marketing and online PR – it’s too important to outsource everything, you need to develop the internal expertise.

Fourth, become experts at all aspects of email marketing which affect response starting with a communications and targeting strategy to deliver relevant, timely messages and then going through to more technical issues like making sure your emails are delivered and render well in the inbox even when images are blocked.

Fifth, you have to get direct customer feedback on what works and doesn’t work for them in the experience to make improvements for the future. There’s only so much you can gain from analytics tools.

Arena Flowers: Which online businesses do you particularly admire?

Many traditional businesses translate their existing offers online. I admire businesses who use the unique facilities of the web to offer more than other channels to add to the brand. I call this the Online Value Proposition.

Looking at multi-channel companies, I admire the way that Dell really use the web to listen to their customers from their Ideastorm site to various blogs and YouTube Channels. Many businesses I speak to don’t see the value of the blog and are missing out due to their fear of the unknown.

The big travel companies like Thomson (Tui) and Thomas Cook have also worked really hard to use the web to support the customer in buying online. Thomson has it’s labs section much like Google Labs and will trial ideas, but pull them if they don’t work.

Of the online pureplay companies, I admire Euroffice for the way they are building an online brand in the Office Supplies sector and the way in which they use “right touching” through email and the web to deliver personalized offers for the customers. And of course, I have to mention Arena Flowers which shows how a new company can grow rapidly and profitably if they harness the latest technology and choose the right marketing approaches.

Arena Flowers: That’s great. Thank you for your time!

If you liked this post, you might enjoy our other posts on Brand Reputation Management and Protecting Website Content.

We believe this is a very good cause and we’re very happy to help our customers lend their support, to commemorate past sacrifices and to support those still on the front line today.  Rather than waffle on, I’ll share an explanatory paragraph on the Appeal (from Wikipedia):

The charity [The Royal British Legion] organises a fund-raising drive each year during which artificial poppies, meant to be worn on clothing, are offered to the public in return for a charitable donation. Over the course of the preceding year disabled people are employed making the poppies. The idea of poppies dates back to the poem In Flanders’ Fields about the First World War, after which the Legion was founded. The idea is that the poppies are worn from November to Remembrance Day to remember the fallen of the First World War, and implicitly the dead of other wars. The Poppy Appeal has without doubt a higher profile than any other charity appeal in the UK, with the poppies ubiquitous from late October until mid-November every year and worn by the general public, politicians and other public figures and television presenters.

Useful links: The Royal British Legion | The Poppy Appeal

We’re always happy to help good causes where appropriate and feasible. Please get in touch if you feel we may be able to help your campaign.  If you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy this post on Help for Heroes, this one about Amnesty International, this one about our support of this year’s British Heart Foundation Valentine’s campaign and this one about us giving away free flowers for charity.

To be fair to her, she wasn’t really being difficult – just that she was marrying a Scot and wanted to have the traditional theme of an English rose and Scottish thistle carried through the wedding flowers - as it had been on all the wedding stationery.  Katharine was also absolutely set on white roses with a touch of pink at the tips for her bouquet and venue flowers.

Then she came in to meet Judith, our head wedding florist who designs the most amazing bouquets and arrangements, and everything changed…

Andre makes a start on a pedestal arrangement

…adding some peach roses to complete the effect

One of the church arrangements

The white roses were discarded in favour of our lovely peach roses, as they were more in keeping with her French lace wedding dress.  Judith spent hours discussing exactly what she would like with flowers, with books, drawings, scraps of material, foliage and bridal magazines littering the table. Luckily our florists’ benches are really large.

Then we discovered that thistles are not considered to be bona fide flowers by Sassenachs, but simply as weeds!  This meant that it was impossible to get the genuine thistles that she wanted for the buttonholes and table arrangements. However, we settled on sea holly – Eryngium - as being the closest we could get to a thistle, so that was one problem solved.

Judith and Pawlina make the pew ends

Then Katharine wanted balls of flowers hanging from the ceiling of the marquee – ‘No problem’, said Andre, our head florist.  Judith decided that as we were having a Ceilidh – Scottish reels – in the evening we needed a giant thistle on the stage, and so started planning the flowers she would need to create it.

This thistle made from flowers stood fully 1 metre tall

And then we needed some large arrangements to indicate the entrance to the marquee – trees made of flowers were the obvious choice – to her, at least!

After some quite detailed discussions, all was finalised and Judith and Andre made enormously long lists of flowers that they needed from Holland and we sat back to let it all happen.

Table Arrangements: Before and After the Arena Touch

Judith and Andre started work on the Thursday before the wedding on Saturday and made all the large church arrangements, pew ends and table arrangements in advance. Early on Friday morning, two Arena vans pitched up and disgorged huge amounts of flowers into the marquee.

Judith then started work on her own -  making bouquets, buttonholes, wonderful arrangements for the marquee, flower balls, flower trees, and cake decorations – so many flowers it was quite overwhelming!

Arrangements all ready on the tables and flower trees in place

In the afternoon all the church flowers were taken to the church to set them up and then it was back to the marquee for an evening’s work. Judith was then later joined by Andre and they worked into the early hours of the morning, transforming the marquee and creating the most fantastic wedding flowers.  When we got up in the morning, everything was ready and looking simply stunning.

All that remained was for the weather to change. It had rained and rained and rained and… at about half past ten the sun broke through and the day got better and better until, by the time of the wedding the sun was shining brightly, the sky was a clear bright blue and it was the most perfect English summer day to celebrate our only daughter’s wedding.

As one of my sons remarked to me (and I think he spoke for all of us), it was the happiest day of his life.

To see more great pictures from the wedding - and pictures of weddings of some of our non family clients -  visit our Real Wedding Photos & Feedback gallery. If you would like Arena Weddings to create perfect wedding flowers for your special day, you can contact me direct on 020 8896 8693 or email weddings@arenaflowers.com with your requirements.

There’s been more analysis you can shake a Big Mac at, with this being a hotly contested battle of personalities, star-charts, image consultants, focus groups and popularity surveys. Both were in the news back in September when even the manner of laying roses at the 9/11 memorial (pictured, above) was scrutinised right down to the rootball. But what about the flowers? Which floral families represent the two most talked about men on Polling Day, 4 November 2008?

Relying on his reputation as a POW survivor to prop-up his aged presidential campaign, John McCain has been resilient, dependable and tough - even prickly - in the face of adversity. But when the chips are down, even some Republicans can come up smelling of roses, so McCain is our Grand Prix Rose - a symbol of courage and respect as well as love.

Red as a Republican, reliable and long lasting - even the odd smear campaign over the past few months (including accusations of a ‘Rose Garden Strategy‘!) hasn’t knocked his determination for the top job at the White House.

But, every rose has it’s thorn, and with her recent toe-curling gaffs and exploits, it remains to be seen whether Sarah Palin could be the thorn at McCain’s side.

Born in Hawaii and brought up in Indonesia, Barack Obama is easily the more attractive candidate with his youthful exuberance and funky, web 2.0 savvy, social media widgets on his side. Obama is honest to the point that he admitted to enjoying (but later regretting) recreational drugs, but wise enough to utilise the PR machine to full effect. And thanks to young Barack we have new additions to the modern English vocabulary such as “obamafy” and  “obamanomics” - just don’t ask me what they mean!

There’s even a florist in Seattle doubling up as a shrine to the Democrats’ favourite son - “obamamania” personified.

All this, and by the way he courted the press by flinging that rose on 11 September, signifies that Obama is a typical Leo - a fire sign craving to be the centre of attention.

Obama’s birth flower, sunflowers depict feelings of warmth and happiness and are associated with adoration and longevity. And at 6′1″, we think the sunflower just about sums up that lofty stature too.

So, if he rises above and beyond in the presidential race tonight as the polls predict, he’ll be in sunny disposition by tomorrow…

You might have noticed that I have been quite conspicuous by my absence from the Arena Flowers Blog for the last month or so. No, I’m not planning a wedding myself (!!) but have been beavering away with our all-new Arena Weddings microsite which, in itself, has become quite a labour of love!

If you’re lucky enough to be getting married this coming spring, then October is traditionally the month to begin planning your special day - so you can get on with enjoying the Christmas party season.  So, you’ve set a date for the ceremony; booked the venues; arranged the photographer; procrastinated over the fluctuating guest list and perhaps even chosen a planner to coordinate it all – but don’t neglect to plan your wedding flowers!

With years of experience of creating the perfect wedding flowers, our florists have an unbeatable reputation for creating stunning, contemporary designs and traditional arrangements to suit even the tightest of wedding budget. They are also ethically sourced wherever possible, too!

With this experience and social responsibility, we have naturally accumulated a burgeoning visual history and portfolio of our bespoke wedding flowers, created specifically to the requirements of our brides.

Over the next week or so, we will be bringing you a wealth of wedding-themed blog posts to help you through the planning stages of your special day – from tips and hints, through to our own experiences of planning beautiful, fresh wedding flowers the Arena way.

In the meantime, take a browse through our extensive portfolio of bespoke and designer wedding flowers and simply give us a call on 0800 0350 581 to discuss your wedding flowers requirements, email weddings@arenaflowers.com or use our new enquiry form for a totally personalised service and quote - and our wedding team will delighted to help…

The reason I chose to write this post up is because a good example came up where a bit of driver training saved us £10k on a claim that was about to be paid out by the insurance company.  A while back one of our drivers, “Little Mariusz”, had a small knock on the left wing of his van from a car that pulled into his lane.  There was no damage to our van and only very minor damage to the other car (see below).  The police came and said there was nothing to report and, as our van wasn’t damaged, we had no issue.  The lady driving the other car was fine and walking about for the 20 mins it took to resolve.  So far so good.

We then received a letter from our insurance agent a few weeks later saying that there was a new claim for £10k and could we please respond to it.  When we realised that it was this same incident we were scratching our heads.  What was the personal injury?  Apparently whiplash.  Impressive, given it was a sideways knock at about about 5mph.  We said that this was clearly absurd, it was not our fault and pointed out that this had been agreed, orally, at the time.  Ah, but the other driver has a witness statement, was the response.  Furthermore, on the basis of this witness statement, your insurance company wants to settle in the other driver’s favour (despite the facts at the time saying something totally different). Erm, can we at least see the witness statement first please, was our reply.

When the witness statement came through, it was from an individual who was not present at the scene (he certainly didn’t speak or make himself known to the police or Mariusz during the 20 mins Mariusz was there).  And then when we read the statement, a brilliant moment - the diagram and description above form the main part of the witness statement.  The statement suggests that the witness was standing right next to our van, which he said was in the left hand lane, and that our van pulled out and hit the car, which he said was in the right hand lane.  However, the photos taken at the scene clearly show that our van was actually on the right hand side of the car, not the left hand side, because the damage is on the right hand side of the car, not the left hand side.  So effectively, the “witness”, who claimed to be standing right next to the incident, actually managed to get his story completely the wrong way round.  One would think that if you’re going to invent a witness statement to try and get a personal injury payout, you could at least get the facts in the hokey statement correct!  Mixing up left and right is pretty basic stuff.

Clearly, in most circumstances, you won’t be so lucky to have a fake claim against you be so clearly falsified.  What to do in these circumstances?  Well, given, as mentioned above, that insurance companies will typically just “settle” unless you can prove that a claim is fake, it pays to follow a few basic steps to in the event of an accident.  Here are the simple things that we ask our drivers to do in the event of any collision (on the basis of advice from our insurers and our own additions) - every driver has a sheet with these instructions in their van at all times:

• Obtain contact, vehicle and insurance details of other driver(s).
• Obtain contact details of any witnesses.  It is important to get witnesses as otherwise fake witnesses can appear at a later date.
• Take lots of photos, of vehicles, witnesses, registrations etc. Lots! Photos don’t cost money and the one you thought might suffice might be blurry.  Take lots!
• Take the name and badge number of any police officer that attends the scene.  Even the suggestion of police involvement can cause chancers to melt away, as we’ve seen before.
• Do not admit responsibility (even if it’s your fault), especially not in writing, as you could then be liable for any subsequent damage to the vehicle in totally unrelated incidents.  Admitting responsibility can be a bit like writing a blank cheque. Just stick to the facts without expressing an opinion. Insurers will determine liability and this can vary depending on circumstances.
• Do not proceed with non-urgent repairs until permission has been granted by insurers.  An inspection of damage may be needed.

Another key is not to be British and say “no harm done, off we go” and neglect to take the above simple steps as your politeness could cost you a lot afterwards.  The above is hardly rocket science but it can save a huge amount of money, for both businesses and individuals.  A small ding on someone else’s car (their fault) could have cost us £10k and very nearly did.  This is not small beer and would undoubtedly have pushed up the insurance premium for every one of our 9 vans when our policy was up for renewal. It would have cost us thousands.  Hopefully, in the unfortunate event that you’re involved in an incident, following the same steps could save you money (and hassle) too.

PS as ever, the disclaimer is that we’re not a legal firm so don’t take the above as watertight legal advice.  They’re just our internal guidelines which we thought might be of interest. :)

Similar Posts: If you liked this post you may find our other post How to Beat Illegal Car Clamping Scammers - And Save £300 and our other posts on fraud and ne’er do wells interesting.

I was kindly invited by friend of Arena and former colleague, Dan Wilson, to talk at the Small Business 2.0 conference this weekend.  So I duly roused myself at the rather sprightly time of 7am this Saturday and fired up PowerPoint for the first time in a while.  I had to finish off the last tweaks to the presentation in the back of the cab on the way to the conference but was all set fully 15 minutes before my speaking slot.  Nothing like cutting it fine!

Anyway, for those who attended and for others who might be interested, my presentation (which was a beginner’s guide for business owners on optimising for search engines) can be found here.  Obviously, PowerPoint was only one part of the presentation (with me waffling away being the other part) and Dan says that they may add vids of the various sessions to the conference’s site.  If so, I’ll update this post later so those interested can watch the spoken bit as well as read the slides.  Thanks to those that attended for all the questions.  I think they could have gone on forever but hopefully we answered a good proportion of them.

I must say I was mighty impressed that so many people were up and at it at such an early hour on the weekend.  I gather final attendance was about 400 people, which I guess shows that whilst there’ve been some bad news days for business recently (to say the least),  it’s clear there’s still a keen appetite in the entrepreneurial sector to push on and develop.  Given SMEs are a key engine of growth in the UK economy, and that they employ the majority of the UK workforce, long may such innovation and dedication continue.  Thanks again to Dan for the invite and to those who attended my session at such an early hour.

If you enjoyed this post, you may also like our other marketing posts and our posts about online business.

Update: The audio of my talk, with an intro by Dan, is now available online here.  I speak rather fast so hopefully you can follow it!

The present global financial crisis is not something that erupted all of a sudden. It has been lingering over a period of time. There is some evidence to indicate the current turmoil was in part brought about by the executives using analytical and technical approaches poorly. Financial companies use analytical models to base their decisions and they have been very poor in their approach to financial management. For example, firms continued to make subprime loans even though the charge off rates were climbing. They assumed that real estate values would continue to rise and there would be more liquidity in the market which lead to a housing crisis in the world’s largest economy. Is there an end in sight?  Clearly, the underlying problems will take time to work through as Governments attempt to take control of the situation.

We have seen many downturns across the centuries which have taken the sheen out of economic growth. Historians have likened the origins of the current financial crisis to the great depression of the 1870s. iTulip, a leading  economic and financial news commentary site, has a great article comparing the economic crisises from two different eras. iTulip is a community of best minds in the financial sector which collectively predicts global economic patterns. Apparently, iTulip has been correctly calling economic predictions in the last decade.  Strange that iTulip takes its name from a gorgeous flower - Tulips, our favourite at Arena Flowers. There certainly must be a reason!

Tulips have for a long time been associated with Holland, ever since they were brought to Europe in the 16th century. These large, showy and solitary flowers were indigenous to parts of Central Asia before they were brought to Europe. Similar to the current economic crisis, there was a period in Dutch history in the 17th century, often referred to as the Dutch Golden Age, when prices of the tulip bulbs reached extremely high levels. At the peak of this period tulip contracts sold for as much as £4 million a bulb adjusted to present day value. Much like the present day, where owning a property is seen as a status symbol, tulips held a similar status leading to speculations about pricing. This prompted the Dutch to create a formal futures market, where contracts were bought and sold at the end of the tulips season and traders took catastrophic risks similar to present day financial executives. This led to a steep increase in prices for tulip bulbs until it collapsed completely in 1637, much like the financial firms today.

While the Governments and the financial firms fight the economic demons, we recommend our customers appease those affected in the current downturn by sending a bunch of fresh, vibrant tulips from Arena Flowers. But then we would say that, as we’re a florist!  We have an incredible selection of white, red, pink, orange & yellow tulips for you to choose from. Remember, tulips were, for sometime considered a form of currency and might just be the solution to the current financial crisis!

Similar Posts: If you liked this post you may find our other post The Sky Isn’t Falling In: Global Financial Troubles - Are They Real & How To Respond interesting!! You may also want to read about the Meaning of Tulips.

Till yesterday when Georgi brought through a mysterious brown box, marked as having been sent by “Bayer Pharmaceuticals”.  Given the sender name, I initially thought an office comedian had ordered me some Regaine on the quiet but, happily, on opening the box I realised it was the long forgotten Berocca kit.  Given this blog and Arena in general is a huge team effort, the spoils were rapidly shared out.  Click images to enlarge.

Adarsh, our search engine guru and battler, got the “Dead Fred” pen holder.

Adarsh and soon to be Dead Fred.

Georgi, our flowers purchasing and production guru, got the “Panic Button” USB toy.  Press it when your boss is coming and you’re on You Tube or skiving and it pulls up a screen grab of your choice (in Georgi’s case, a spreadsheet with all our flower stems on it).

Georgi and Panic Button Toy

Cave! The boss is coming…

Spreadsheet magically appears (or a picture of a spreadsheet, at least).

I got the smiley stress ball.

Smiley stress ball meets Arena Flowers

Stan, amongst other things our copy writing expert and weddings marketing guru - watch this space on that front ;) - got the “Bubble Wrap Key Ring“.

Bubble wrap key ring, disappointingly not wrapped in bubble wrap.

Finally, we got some Berocca goodies (pens and a glass etc) but, sadly, the one thing that was missed out of our pack was, erm, some Berocca!  So Sam had to make do with an empty glass.  Excuse blur but I think I must have been chuckling too much at Sam’s play acting.  :)

What, no Berocca?

Anyway, thanks to Berocca for the idea.  It undoubtedly brought a lot of amusement to the office and, yep, it got us to say their name on our blog, erm quite a few times so they got their marketing bods got their goal too. The Internet savvy amongst you will have noticed we nofollowed the links though.  Ah, what the heck, here’s a clean, Google friendly link to their page: Go sign up if you want some fun freebies.

Want to meet some more of the Arena Team? Check out these posts: Comedy Chocolate V - Flying Dutchmen! Medal-winning Heroes!, Dispatches from the frontline of the Arena Customer Service Team, It’s our Birthday Today! Happy Birthday Flowers for Arena Flowers!

German Researchers from the University Hospital Mannheim have found that sweet floral scents can induce pleasant dreams. Evidence has always suggested that the process of dreaming is a reflection of life and this correlates with what researchers have found. Studies on a group of 15 volunteers who were exposed to smells of rotten eggs and roses for 30 nights have indicated that smell has an effect on human emotions. Researchers exposed Volunteers in the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) stage of their sleep to smells of rotten eggs, sweet smelling roses and nothing for nearly 10 seconds. After exposing them to these smells, subjects were woken up and asked to recollect their dreams. Despite the subjects not dreaming of flowers or rotten eggs, those exposed to floral scents recorded having pleasant positive dreams and those exposed to the unpleasant smell of rotten eggs were recorded as having negative dreams.

During an average of eight hours sleep, people spend two hours dreaming, which adds up to six years in a lifetime. Researchers claim that unlike other senses, brain structures involved in smelling are always awake and influence the emotional tone of sleep. While, the study will help researchers analyse the therapeutic benefits of influencing dreams of people who have nightmares, sleep aided by scented roses could be a perfect way to kick start your day, and we have a wide selection of incredibly fresh rose bouquets and arrangements to help you do just that. If in case you have already ordered flowers from us, we recommend you keep them in your bedroom while sleeping and share your dreams with us by leaving a comment.

Similar posts: If you liked this post, you may find our other posts on Mystery of the Black Rose - The Dark Side of Flowers and Roses and Floral Medicine: Flowers & Plants And Their Healing (And Fat Fighting!) Properties interesting.

The idea of redesigning the site had been high on the to-do list since we went live back on the 19th September 2006. So it seems strange to finally get around to it almost two years to the day, but we have a good excuse. In the past two years we have concentrated on making our site work better and better; having a new lick of paint is something of a luxury when you compare it to some of the other things we have been up to: Ethical Products, Photo Upload, a Facebook application, Video Upload, Gift Ideas, our Fun Page, Arena Bloemen (NL), Arena Blumen (DE) to name but a few…

However, a slight lull in my schedule allowed me to focus on a new design and I sat down to sketch out a few ideas. Designing a new template has to be one of my favourite things as it really exercises both sides of the brain, left for design and right for practicalities and, in our case, business. A successful website has to be both aesthetically pleasing and practical to use. To this end a good example of a redesign is where the user does not realise that the site has had a facelift and just navigates the site as if they are familiar with it.

As I said, we finally got around to redesigning the site once we had two years of trading under our belt, which in many ways makes it much harder to do. The worst nightmare for any successful e-commerce website is when the design team go in and mess up the sales by releasing a badly planned design. If you often buy online you may have noticed that both Amazon and Play.com have had a recent redesign. In my opinion Amazon have done a good job, but it did take months of testing to achieve this goal. The trick for any big site design is for it to easily display your wares while not confusing the user. Like Amazon, our range of products had increased and we needed improved navigation while maintaining a pleasurable user experience.

So that was the brief and to get the job done a variety of designs had to be created. We went through six different looks and various iterations in between before we settled on the final look. This is where you all laugh and say “hang on - it looks the same!”

Yes, it’s true the new look is not a million miles away from the previous design  - and that is not because I am a belligerent designer who gets in a huff unless I get my own way. Nor is it the opposite, where some radical design was picked apart in committee, ending up a shadow of its former self. The truth is we polished something that we knew to work. I hate to say it, but if it ain’t broke…

In practical terms the new design does a few key things. The shorter header brings the products further up the fold of the page, the Flash bar beneath allows for an expandable area for promotion/brand (with a funky new backend feature that easily allows me to amend it for our multilingual sites). We have a new means to manage content down the right hand side of the site, with a cleaner look to boot. And finally the colours within the framework have been refreshed to appear cleaner. In terms of navigation the back end has been updated to allow for simple insertion of new top level tabs/categories as well as a new list of associated categories that is housed within the green bar across the top of each particular category. In fact a lot of the new design is behind the scenes, backend tools that allow us to further tweak the live site as we wish.

It would be wrong for me to write this post without mentioning the adage ‘Web 2.0′ but in doing so I have invited the question “why does it not look more Web 2.0?” The answer to that is simple, we are first and foremost a shop and not a blog or website promoting a new app for the iPhone. We have a simple job to do and that is to list a lot of products as simply and easily as possible. We can’t afford to go off on a tangent of tag clouds and ajax elbow doilies just because I have a fetish for plug-ins. I would love to pile in loads of widgets and call it my experimental phase, but the truth is I would lose my job because all our traffic will have bogged off to Wikipedia to look up the meaning of the various words on our site.

So we have a simple - working - website: one that does the job of selling flowers and does so without being intrusive in the process. I love the way our site looks but the truth is we could have a gold-plated website but that would be irrelevant if we had bad customer service or our flowers were not up to standard. Our redesign is simply the icing on what I am proud to say is a very good cake.

Please feel free to share feedback on the design in the comments section about things you like or don’t like about the new design.  It’s always great to get as many views as possible.

Similar posts: If you enjoyed this post, you may also enjoy this one about the launch of Arena Bloemen, this one about our development of “Arena For Business” (our business tailored ofering) or this post where the design was in the real world, wrapping our delivery vans in Arena Flowers branding.

Although we are florists in the traditional sense, at the heart of our business model is a website which makes shopping an enjoyable experience for our customers. Arena Flowers has always prided itself in offering unique customer focused experiences and believes that technology plays a significant role in achieving this. Since its inception we have envisaged customer needs and requirements and tailored our website accordingly. We have continually sought customer feedback and worked extensively to make improvements to make ordering flowers and gifts an incredible experience for the customer. Everything from the website interface to product display, shopping cart and the checkout is an intuitive process. We have leveraged the features of Web 2.0 to make Arena Flowers website, an enjoyable experience while ensuring the highest security standards to protect our customers from Internet fraud.

However, that represents one dimension of our website. Like all other online businesses, it is vital for Arena Flowers to be found by customers and we rely extensively on Internet marketing to achieve this. The Internet has changed the way we interact with our stakeholders. It is a vibrant and rich advertising medium full of opportunities despite being multi-faceted. It requires a variety of strategies to be woven together to succeed. The significant aspect of Internet marketing is the ability to to deliver relevant content to consumers at the right time. On the web, marketing and communications has shifted from the one size fits all approach of traditional advertising to delivering the right information at the right time to help consumers in making a decision.

The crux of our Internet marketing strategy is marketing for search engines. Search is an intrinsically buyer-led medium, which is flexible and responsive to consumer tastes. Research indicates that Internet users rarely type website addresses into the browser bars — they locate them through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Ask or Live.  Therefore it is necessary for Arena Flowers to promote search rankings by improving our website’s structure and content. It is important for us to appear as near as possible to the top of search engine results for a set of keywords. We achieve this by investing in considerable time and resources to research and identify a number of measures including keywords, onsite content, external link partners etc while ensuring that the structure of our website is search engine friendly to warrant a listing.

Apart from search engines, we focus on other broader Internet marketing strategies to insulate our reliance on search. Online mediums such as blogs, podcasts, streaming video, etc are changing the way consumers research and buy products and services, necessitating Arena’s presence on such mediums. Furthermore, We also have a number of additional systems in place including Affiliate Marketing, Social Networking such as Facebook, Twitter, Squidoo etc, Comparison shopping, newsletters etc. We constantly evolve with the web 2.0 medium to strengthen our web presence. These initiatives help in getting prospective customers to Arena Flowers.

From the beginning, we have strived to strike the right balance between technology and design to benefit from the important and powerful marketing channel - the Internet. Through the Internet, we are committed to engage in a personal relationship with our customers to provide them value added service. We regularly measure our Internet marketing efforts internally and we feel happy to see an increase in the number of visitors to our website, conversions, sales, customer feedback etc. But We certainly feel privileged when we get appreciated by an unexpected quarter - to be cited by an academic text on Internet marketing. It highlights the success of our Internet marketing efforts and motivates us further to take it to the next level.

While we ponder on our Internet Marketing Strategy, please ensure that you pick a copy of Internet Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice to help you grow your online business!

Similar posts: If you enjoyed this post, you may find our other posts on UK Online Green Awards - Winner: Arena Flowers and Silver Gilt Award Winning Flowers at Hampton Court Flower Show 2008! Gold in 2009? interesting.

We need our ecommerce site UI to be redesigned and clone www.arenaflowers.com (ours is much simpler). This includes streamlining flows, enhancing the color scheme, and making the pages more appealing and easy for users to comprehend. Our exsiting site has been built on x- cart with Smarty applied. Candidate must have solid working knowledge in Smarty templet aplications. Samples needed. Skills in CSS and Javascript highly desirable. previous experience in Smarty is a must

We are quite proud of our efforts of setting a benchmark among online florists. To imitate a business is to pay the business a genuine, unintended compliment and we gladly accept the compliment. But we are a bit wary of content thieves showing a systematic disregard towards copyright and trademark laws.

The advent of Web 2.0 has spawned a new generation of public domain websites, where users are encouraged to post their views on a variety of online channels including blogging and social networking. The distribution of product images on these channels by content publishers does help in building brand awareness for Arena Flowers, but only when explicit references are made to the source of our fresh flower images. As long as our images or content are not being used for commercial gains we have no objections, although we would be happy if publishers source the images to our site as a polite gesture for copying. However, we get nothing when publishers benefit commercially by using our content and images.

The Intellectual Property Organisation in the UK, states that ownership of content is an automatic right and there’s no need to register for Copyright in the United Kingdom (We are registered trademark owners of our Brand Name and related associations). Secondly, all of our pages are clearly marked with the Copyright symbol. Finally, for violation of Copyright for commercial gains, criminal charges can be brought resulting in severe fines, compensation and jail for violators.  We’re not taking this too seriously, but it’s worth understanding the rules!

Such issues highlight the importance of responsible blogging and publishing in the online world. It is exceedingly important for website publishers to take notice of copyright issues while posting content and media on to their web pages. From our experience, we have realised that it is necessary to identify best practice measures for website publishing to avoid unwanted complications. Our approach:

• Never copy anything from other websites, particularly commercial sites, even if they don’t have a Copyright symbol. In the UK as with many other countries, authors have an automatic right to the content they create. If you are compelled to use an image or content from a commercial website for non-commercial reasons, always provide a link back to the main website from where the image or content was obtained.
• If your post needs a picture to convey the message, your best bet is to get the graphic from one of the royalty free image sites like Foto Search. Also, support the Creative Commons by opting to use images rated under the project. Although, Creative Commons is not the legal entity, it is a non-profit organisation working towards creating a universal copyright license.
• It is a great practice to use public domain news websites, Governmental and authority websites for your posts. If you find an interesting post or an article on another website, and wish to comment upon it on your site or blog, use a short quote and provide a link to that source before adding your thoughts and views for refining the point.

By adopting these simple measures, you should not only assure your legal rights but also help in protecting your own works.

Similar posts: If you enjoyed this post, you may find our other posts on Defamation Advice Tips for Bloggers and Protecting your brand in the Search Engines interesting.