Just launched a new website dedicated to Farm Tours in Ireland. Farm Tours Ireland specialises in providing bespoke, escorted, technical tours across the spectrum of Ireland’s €8billion food industry. Meet the cream of Irish dairy, beef, sheep and tillage farmers. Experience the diversity of Irish food production from small artesian producers to large state-of-the-art processors supplying global markets. Taste the difference of local produce and world famous Irish brands.

Have you seen those white squares with lots of small black squares? They are called QR codes (Quick Response Codes) and when scanned by a SMartphone that has the QR Reader installed will take you to a particular website or designated url.

It was invented by the motor industry but is now being used as a marketing tool since it provides quick and effortless access to the brand’s website or facebook page.

It can be installed on your business card, side of van, website and basically anywhere potential clients may view and be able to scan the image.

On March 21, 2006, Jack Dorsey tweeted the first ever tweet on Twitter, “just setting up my twttr”
Twttr was renamed Twitter and has grown enormously since then with over 500 million users, it is the largest one-to-many open communication platform on the web.

I personally don’t use it that much and not sure how useful it is for my type of business. I am not sure how to communicate something useful in 140 characters !

San Antonio-based market-research firm Pear Analytics analyzed 2,000 tweets (originating from the US and in English) over a two-week period in August 2009 from 11:00 AM to 5:00 PM (CST) and separated them into six categories:

Pointless babble – 40%
Conversational – 38%
Pass-along value – 9%
Self-promotion – 6%
Spam – 4%
News – 4%
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter

You will have to decide for yourself whether it is of use to your business.

Just launched a new “Brochure” website for Precision Nutrition. The company specialises in soil and crop nutrition.
The website incorporates WordPress as the Content Management System and following some training the owners are able to edit the website themselves.

The Graphic Design artwork was designed by BamMedia also based in County Louth. This ensures the brand is consistent throughout.

Not sure how many of you are using Google Plus (Google+). It already has an estimated 65 million users
I set up an account today and am interested to see how I can use it to promote my businesses.
Here is the link to my Google+ Profile https://plus.google.com/u/0/

You can add the +1 Google feature to your website which ids similar to Facebook Like, this allows people to click on it to show they like your site. This will help you in the ratings.

So I would advise you to create and complete your profile and spend time daily or at least weekly on your Google+ page.

I created a video on Youtube on 30th Aug 2006 called Danny Boy (it’s not me singing it’s an Irish guy called Michael Londra whom I met in USA)
I always look forward to the month of March to see how many views the video will get.
It shows you how powerful Youtube can be to a business. I promote my own website www.lookaroundireland.com through the video, I sell ads on the video and I also have a hard link to the website which helps with my SEO.

Today is 6th March 2012 and the video has had 5,330,726 views it will be interesting to see how many views the video has at the end of March 2012, watch this space…
Today is 10th April 2012 and the video has had 5,485,305 views. That is 150,000 views in 1 month, so as you can see it is a great way to promote a product (Michael Londra’s DVD is advertised on the video) and the link to my website under the video also brings traffic to my website.

Still trying to figure out how to work with the new layout imposed on us by Facebook.
We seem to lose our Landing Page which prompted people to “Like” our page.
Checked the forums and lots of people unhappy with the new layout.

FYI you have to upload a new image called “Cover”. This is like your Facebook Header image.

The dimensions are Width=851px Height=315px