We’re both visual people, so the new kid on the block (not that new been going since 2010), Pinterest,  is really grabbing our attention at the moment. We think there’s a lot of mileage in this one as an amazing and fun way to be sociable for business. We’re investigating right now and will let you know much more about it very soon.

And if you’re looking for a way in to being more sociable for business, do drop us a line at hollyandjan@gmail.com. We’ll get straight back to you

We were bowled over this week with our latest client testimonial. Here at Holly and Jan we work hard to make sure our clients get the absolute best for their business, whether that business is a local sole trader or an international financial and professional services firm as in this case:

“This is the first time working with Holly & Jan and I have to say that it has been a real pleasure.  From the word go our communications were comprehensive and good humoured.  The work requested was carried out with minimal fuss and to an excellent standard.  This team come highly recommended and I would have no hesitation in working with them in the future.” Tracy Thomas, Communications Manager, Springfields Outlet Shopping & Festival Gardens, Jones Lang LaSalle Ltd

If you’d like to see how we can add value to your business, just drop us a line at  hollyandjan@gmail.com and we’ll get straight back to you.

We’re continually amazed/shocked by the number of businesses which are still using Facebook Personal Profiles! We wrote about why it’s a really bad idea last year and now we want to make a couple more points – including one about how you are running the risk of losing your supporters.

First of all, something commonsensical about using a business page: the whole point of social media (we think) is the conversation – the sharing, the chat, the recommendations… the INTERACTION. Now, if you’re using your personal profile you can, it’s true, go and ‘like’ legitimate business pages, and comment on them too. But they can’t reciprocate! How can they ‘like’ your page? They can’t. They can’t befriend you either. Which decidedly limits the whole ‘interaction’ thing. By using a personal profile for your business you are missing a brilliant opportunity.

But that’s not all…

We’re guessing you don’t want to see your hard won ‘friends’ disappear thus losing you a huge chunk of  your loyal fanbase at a stroke?

So, here’s the rub. Aside from anything else, using personal profiles as marketing tools violates Facebook’s terms and conditions. You’re not supposed to use these accounts for personal gain. The word on the street is that they can and do close such accounts without warning. This is what Facebook says:

Maintaining a personal account for anything other than an individual person is a violation of Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. If you don’t convert your noncompliant account to a Page, you risk permanently losing access to the account and all of its content. Facebook.com

The good news is that there’s a (relatively) easy fix. E.g. we’re currently helping a major retail outlet transfer their thousands of ‘friends’ to a Facebook Business Page – with careful planning it really is straightforward.

We really don’t want to scaremonger, but…you get our drift?

So, if you’re keen to make that changeover and really don’t know where to start, drop us an email. We’re here to help!

We’ve been planning and plotting for the coming new year – and as part of that we’ve slightly amended our strapline, from Holly and Jan – social media for creatives, to Holly and Jan – creative social media.  Fascinating I hear you cry!

Well we wanted to be clear that although we do work with artists and photographers, which is wonderful, we also work for a whole wider range of clients who run their own businesses.  They are all highly creative in an enterprising way and work with us because they want to get things moving with their social media marketing to progress their busy business and other interests.

Effective and integrated use of social media marketing tools will give your business a massive boost in terms of its presence and visibility, increasing your profile and ability to engage with current and potential customers and clients.

Social media forms part of a wider business strategy and marketing campaign for any business and one of the keys to making social media work in a business setting is consistency and quality of communication.

Social media tools are fantastically powerful, quick and easy ways to build your profile, reach out to current and potential clients and customers, and increase opportunities to sell your work and your services.

Why not book a Kickstarter Session with us and really get things moving for your business in 2012!

It’s THAT time of year again. The whole New Year resolutions schtick is oozing out of every magazine. And if you’re a small business owner, if you’re an artist, a photographer, an alternative practitioner, well, making resolutions about your business growth can be a bit dispiriting given the current economic climate.

If you’re like lots of folks we know you probably have time rather than dosh to throw at your marketing. And that’s where social media is SO brilliant. Once you’ve learned how, you just need to spend some time (not money – hurray!) and start to make the contacts that have brought our clients orders from across the globe,  international exhibitions, recognition and respect from fellow professionals and potential future clients, increases in customer numbers, a buzz about town and valuable feedback on new products before they launch.

“…things have definitely moved up a notch since working with Holly and Jan!” – click here to read the rest of this testimonial

We hold your hand through the process of getting your social media (that’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogging and heaps more) up and running, and pass on our skills and knowledge so you can go it alone, spend that excess of time doing something guaranteed to get you noticed.

Our Kickstarter sessions are enormously popular and may be just what you need to get things moving in 2012. It all starts with one simple step: drop us a line at hollyandjan@gmail.com and we’ll be back in touch before you can say ‘auld lang syne’.

So, you’re stuck for what to get your partner/other loved one for Christmas? What you’d really like to give feels unattainable – their heart’s desire is for their creative micro-business to become better known: to sell more art, more photographs, more beautifully crafted ceramics. They’d like more clients. But we’re in an economic mess and it has worked its way through to we self-employed creative businesses. So a few CDs will have to be the answer. Again.

OR, you could give the gift of knowledge and understanding. Let’s not get too philosophical here – we’re talking social media – how to use Facebook, Twitter, blogging perhaps, to get known, to get seen. To create a new, global and local community which is genuinely interested in what you do.

And (guess what!) we can help with that. We can give you a beautiful token to be exchanged for a Kickstarter session in the New Year. For £60 (saving you £20) your loved one gets the undivided attention of both Holly and Jan for an hour which will leave them super-excited about what they can do with social media and tooled up with the basic information they need to get cracking. (And of course  you could always treat yourself, or drop a big hint to your friends and family.)

I wouldn’t hesitate recommending [Holly and Jan] to any creative who needs some help getting out in the public domain.” Sandra Jordan photographer

Interested? Drop us an email at Santa’s Grotto hollyandjan@gmail.com Who needs Christmas elves when we’re around!

A while ago we wrote about Posterous, a great (and free!) blogging platform. There’s another one we love, one which we’ve used recently for clients and for our own creative project – it’s called Tumblr. Again, it’s free. There  many discussions online about Posterous vs Tumblr: which is best, easiest to use, most customiseable etc. We like them both, but as we’ve already talked about Posterous, we thought we’d spread the word about Tumblr too.

The back-end, the administrative interface, is reasonably intuitive, it took us a few goes, and a few wrong clicks until we’d got it. And in fact you never need go to the site as you can set it up to receive emails which it will post for you.

What’s great about these platforms is the number of themes (i.e. styling packages) that are available. Many of them have lots of style options and those are the ones we like because they mean we stand a good chance of giving the blog a similar look and feel to any exisiting website. Jan built one recently for professional photographer, Andrew Montgomery, who is in the process of having his main website redesigned. She was able to use his new logo and the colours/fonts he’d chosen for the site and create exactly the simple blog he was after, which will sit very comfortably beside his new site when it’s done.

We also built one for our own creative project. We’re both photographers and have been saying for ages that it would be fun to do some kind of project togther. Then, over coffee one day, we came up with Seeing Double – a game of visual pingpong. (In brief, we started off with one of us posting an image, the other then posted one inspired by some aspect of the first and so on.) Finding the right Theme, and then customising it to do what we wanted, took a while, but there is lots of information available about Tumblr and Google was Jan’s best friend as she worked away to deliver our fairly specific brief.

Jan’s going to write a post soon about her favourite blogging platform – WordPress – and why she recommends it to all her web clients these days. But if you already have a site and fancy a blog, or you’d like to start a blog, and maybe one day you’ll grow it into a site, check out Tumblr.

And if you’d like some help with setting up a blog using Posterous or Tumblr, drop us a line at hollyandjan@gmail.com and we’ll get straight back to you.

We absolutely love our work so how wonderful to get this sort of fantastic positive feedback from our clients! A huge thank you from our amazing client Sandra Jordan Photography.

“I have been seriously into photography since 2007 but was never very good at getting my work out there so I decided this year was the year to rectify that.

I contacted Holly and Jan not really knowing anything about social media marketing or how it could help me. They were extremely helpful and very friendly right from the start but it was their enthusiasm that made me want to give it a go.

Four months on and I have a Facebook photography page, 184 followers on Twitter (I was excited when I had 6!) and my own blog, all of which they set up for me and which they continue to monitor and market.

I have since been shortlisted for a competition, won another, am exhibiting at an Artist Fair in London and had a gallery in Lisbon contact me about exhibiting my work, so things have definitely moved up a notch since working with Holly and Jan! Whether this is directly through their marketing or my own work who knows but definitely through them a lot more people know about me and my work now and they have given me the confidence to put myself out there as well.

Any time I have a question I know I can email them and get a quick informative response, I am really enjoying working with them and wouldn’t hesitate recommending them to any creative who needs some help getting out in the public domain. ”

If you’d like to get your social media kickstarted then do get in touch with us at hollyandjan@gmail.com and we’ll get straight back to you.

We’ve been enjoying working with an amazing mix of clients and we’ve developed an introductory session that works perfectly. We’re calling this the Kickstarter Session – it does what it says on the tin!

The Kickstarter Sessions are an hour long meeting with us both. We have overlapping, but also very different, areas of expertise and experience, so you’ll go away from the Kickstarter Session enthused and with lots of ideas about what you can do, and can then consider exactly what you may like to have some help with armed with lots of information and advice on what’s possible and best for your business from the session.

So these sessions with the two of us work as either a one off session or as the starting point for us to put a proposal together for you on how we might work together on your social media. It may be that you’ll feel empowered to do it by yourself (we love it when that happens, it’s really exciting!) or you may need more of a helping hand to crank things up. Some folks even like us to run the social media side of things for them.  A lot depends on the level to which you are already au fait with using social media, and how much you want to be able to do yourself. Some people just need a steadying hand when they start, others want us to do the whole thing. So the package we’d create would take into account your own experience and time constraints.

Our normal fees are £45 per woman, per hour. But with the Kickstarter Sessions we operate a special deal whereby you get both of us for an hour for only £70 (a saving of over 20%)

We’re getting consistently great feedback from our clients – if you’d like to get your social media kickstarted then do get in touch with us at hollyandjan@gmail.com and we’ll get straight back to you.

Blogging is a brilliant way to increase your visibility online, and allows you to communicate more about who you are and what you do. These days, that’s what people want to know. It allows you to regularly post on one subject or across a whole range, useful for those of us with portfolio careers and multiple interests. We use various different blogging platforms in different ways and we’d love to help you do the same! You may already have heard of WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, Posterous but perhaps are unsure how to get started or are daunted by the prospect of coming up with content? We can help.

By the way, the #1 question we’re asked is ‘what is a blog and how is it different from a website’.

A bit of history first: websites used to be static – you’d get a designer, send them some text and some images, they’d build your site, make it look nice and then upload it to your webspace. The end. Very often literally so, as so many people never touched their sites again. That was the old-fashioned way of doing things. And it drove people mad as they couldn’t make their own amendments, they were utterly reliant on their web designer to do that. And not all designers are as quick to take action as Jan is, and people got very frustrated.

Then, during the last decade some savvy people started creating blogs as well, as an extra, with possibly (though not always) links from their static site. They’d use their blog as a kind of journal. They were in control of part of their web presence. It was a step in the right direction.

Nowadays though things have moved on again and increasingly people are using powerful blogging platforms for all those informative static pages, plus their blog. All in the one place. Like this site. And the most liberating thing is that now you can do your own text amendments, add in your own images. Be in control of your on-line shop front, your presence.

So the answer is, there is no real difference. A blog can be a website and a website can be a blog. Or not. You get to choose what you want it to be, what you want it to do.

And by the way, Google loves blogs. Just saying.

Click here to read articles about blogging