Marketing via Social Media

Everyone and his dog are telling us that we mustn't ignore Social Media in promoting a business - everyone, that is, except a few strange people on LinkedIn who claim that it's detrimental to a venture and cite a handful of out-of-context examples (the fact that they're website designers can't have anything to do with it?) - but this feature Big Hospitality, 31st January 2011 told me precisely zilch.

Business Development Director Simon Beck, of PR Consultants Hill Balfour says, "Consumers today are able to research and digest information across a number of mediums – TV, print, online, radio and of course through social media." Erm, excuse me, but aren't social media part of online?

These purveyors of gobbledygook, with their argot of above-the-line versus below-the-line advertising, are facing testing times now that so many businesses can do their own marketing very simply and effectively. At the end of the day, after all the blue-sky thinking, pushing the envelope and going the extra mile the genie's out of the bottle and the Emperor's got no clothes.

Newcomers to the pub game

There may be fewer pubs closing now than a year ago, but to read this article in the Morning Advertiser (the daily bible of the licensed trade)  one would conclude that all those which are left all have roses growing round the door - and ex-sqauddies can deal with trouble-makers by shooting the bastards!
Morning Advertiser, 28th January 2011

Running a pub in any climate is not a walk in the park - in today's it's a very precarious existence and without proper advice too many of these hopefuls will simply p*ss their savings against the wall.

Poppies Fish & Chips, London E1

 A simple report that a Chippy is to open near Spitalfields Market - in Hanbury Street, to be precise - has taken me on an aromatic journey through time. About 50 years or more!

The Hand Book, 5th January 2011



My maternal grandparents lived in Hanbury Street (a few doors away from where Jack the Ripper's 2nd victim was found) and right behind, though with its entrance in Brick Lane, was the Trumans Brewery.

It was announced last summer that after more than two decades in mothballs, brewing is to recommence there - I can still smell that distinctive scent in my mind, which brings back the tall, narrow house in vivid detail: Grandpa Max's tailoring work-room, with its dummies which scared my 3-year-old self - during WWII he made knickers out of parachute silk! Nanna's kitchen with its black-leaded stove and scrubbed table: it was a family joke that if you shredded apple and let it go brown then you'd cooked it!

Upstairs was a room with a sloping ceiling, peeling wallpaper and a tin bath - how times have changed!

The last occasion I was down there on a nostagia trip my niece was about 14, and she's in her 30s now..........

Poppies looks worth a visit, though!
http://www.poppiesfishandchips.co.uk/