Footnotes from Footprint

I have to say that I really do consider myself very fortunate to be doing a job that I love.  Yesterday, I was down at Kenilworth Castle to launch an Elizabethan food initiative.  I got to spend most of the day with the delightful Dr Annie Gray – one of the country’s top food historians – and try out some fantastic Elizabethan food, including a pie containing veal meatballs and dates, a real ‘mince pie’ with beef and plums, and the most delicious custard tart.  Plus, as a bonus whilst I was down there, I got to see one of my favourite re-enactors, Mark Vance, at work as a highwayman (you can see a picture of Mark on his horse in our ‘News’ section), and meet up again with the wonderful Don and Katherine Holton of Heuristic, a couple who make learning about history so much fun and effortless that you don’t realise quite how much you have learned until you stop laughing.

Henry clearly doesn't understand that this was meant to be a serious shot!

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On a sunny Sunday afternoon, when what I’d really like to be doing is relaxing in the garden, I am in the office playing with a new proximity marketing gadget.

When I was having problem accessing one of the menus, I sent off an email to the supplier asking what I was doing wrong, fully expecting to wait until Monday morning for a reply.  But no!  By return email, Quinton of TextBlue (www.textblue.co.uk) sent me back just the info I needed to do the job. 

So a big, sunny thumbs up to TextBlue – that’s customer service!

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Isn’t it great how much a headline can convey!  This sounds like it could be a headline in a newspaper, but actually describes what went on yesterday, when we had a photographic session [has the penny dropped, now?] in Selby’s beautiful Abbey for the John Cheatle Group.  Thankfully, the weather held, as did the patience of the kids from our choir, Sing @ Selby Music Centre, who were absolutely fantastic at following the direction of our photographer, Tony Speight of Carte Blanche Photography.

You’ll be able to see the results in the independent schools press over the coming months!

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We’ve become quite attached to our URL!  www.fim.org.uk feels like home for us, but when the opportunity came up to buy other domains (when the .co addresses were released, for example), we decided it was worth a few quid to buy the ones that were relevant to us.

But having sat on www.fim.co for quite some time, my reorganisation of the Footprint website gave me inspiration to make use of this URL beyond merely ‘parking’ it so it took you to our main homepage.  Now, it brings you directly here, to Footnotes, the Footprint blog.

So if you want to follow our latest musings, www.fim.co is the place to do it.  Of course, you can also subscribe to our RSS feed and have it delivered directly to you:

http://fim.co/?feed=rss2

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Last year, TV viewers were gripped by Stuart Baggs, the self-styled entrepreneur who promised to be bigger than Richard Branson, having set up a reasonably successful telecomms company on the Isle of Man.  In his introduction, he declared himself to be ‘Stuart Baggs: the brand!’ – at which point, every marketeer in the country put their head in their hands.  To be fair, he believed his own hype – which has to be a positive when no-one else does.

Enter Yorkshire’s own version of Stuart Baggs in the form of Claire Davidson-Bishop.  In this month’s Yorkshire Ridings magazine, she’s got a full page promotional feature, entitled “One in a million”, talking about her personal brand, Claire in a Million, and her ground-breaking company, CDB.  On reading the first couple of paragraphs, you’d assume she was a life coach or possibly even a Mary-Queen-of-Shops style retail guru. 

However, read on and you discover that she’s the guru behind a new beauty range.  Well, I say beauty range.  I mean nail polish.  And I don’t really mean range, I mean product.  She’s invented a new top coat that will revolutionise your life.  You will feel ‘enriched’ when you buy a bottle, apparently.

She goes on to say that her bottle of nail polish is the start of a ‘versatile portfolio of businesses’ including overseas property, wine, etc. that will change the way people shop forever.  It’s nice to dream.

Before she commited to paying for this full page of self adoration, the worst possible meaningless marketing speak and a tagline “CBD – Authentically Thought Of”, why oh why did she not ask someone else to look at her copy?  I’m not entirely sure what she is selling – I presume it is the nail polish, but of the three photographs on the page, only one actually shows the product, taking up less than 1cm square, with no label visible, and you can’t see a single fingernail on the shot.

Her sign-off is “Don’t call me Claire.  Call me Claire in a million.”

Hundred of pounds for an ad that actually says “Don’t call me.”  Which is just as well, as she forgot to include her phone number…

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Isn’t technology marvellous!  I do mean that (despite my computer crashing countless times today), but I also have to say that you really have to work hard to keep up to date.

For example, the Footprint website.  I redesigned this about 12 months ago, and it looks great!  However, as is always the case with technology and new software, if you don’t use it regularly, you forget how.  In the case of our website, it was the updating of the news section that caused me problems – not posting the news, but updating the home page with the latest stories.

For some reason, everytime I did it, something went wrong - usually compromising the layout of the whole page!  Eventually, I got wise to myself and ‘protected’ the part of the page that I kept ruining, but this in turn made updating the news section even harder.

Which brings me nicely to this week’s efforts – finding a way to update the news index and the home page at the same time, which has taken me into the highly techie world of XML and ASP.  But, at last, after goodness knows how many attempts, it is done!  Not that you’d notice a difference, I’d hope – this was supposed to be ‘invisible’ work that allows us to work more efficiently.

My next job is finding some way of linking the new auto-updates into our Facebook and Twitter accounts, in the same way that this blog auto-updates.  But I might leave that for another day…

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Just finished the 37th issue of Buzz, Beckfoot school’s newsletter!  It’s still going strong!

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Our client Clifford’s Tower was the only ‘leading attraction’ to see an increase in visitor numbers in North Yorkshire, with 122,000 visitors – 3% up on 2009.  The news was reported by BBC News North Yorkshire, on 23 February 2011, following a survey published by the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions (ALVA), who compiled the figures for members of its organisation in the county for 2009 and 2010.

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Hurray!  Our clients have rated us highly and we have achieved recommended supplier status and membership of the Recommended Agency Register.  Only agencies which have been highly rated by at least three of their clients in the last 12 months become Recommended Agencies.

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