Start Up Britain

David Cameron wants you!

Lots of talk today about Start Up Britain, a new website / initiative aimed at helping start ups hit the ground running. Still has parts of the site under development which is a bit annoying but it will be interesting to see how it develops over the coming months. Main criticisms are around the fact that it seems very politically motivated and that the resources are nothing more than offers from big corporations to try and get more business.

Hoever, having been through the start up process and helping other start ups it would be great to see initiatives like these grow wings and start to benefit businesses across the UK. GOOD LUCK to them!

StartUp Britain is a new campaign by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs, launched on 28th March 2011. Designed to celebrate, inspire and accelerate enterprise in the UK, it has the full backing of the Prime Minister, the Chancellor and HM Government.

This is a response from the private sector to the Government’s call for an ‘enterprise-led’ recovery. We believe that many of the important functions and services necessary to foster and champion new enterprise can be open-sourced, instead of provided by government directly. We aim to do this by creating a living market-place online for the wide range of enterprise support that is already available.

As a private sector organisation we aim to shoulder some of this responsibility for enterprise promotion with the government, re-modelling existing cost centres, and reducing the cost to the taxpayer.

Visit the site

Chambers of Commerce

This is nothing to do with online marketing!

We recently joined up to our local Chamber of Commerce in Hounslow and although we thought it would be useful to network a bit more and to get to know local businesses we assumed it might take a bit of time (And effort) to get fully involved and to see any tangible benefits. However, gladly we were wrong as tomorrow we get the chance to run a help desk style session at a networking business lunch.

During the regular networking session business owners can spend 10 minutes talking to us about online marketing, website challenges etc. Or put another way we get 10 minutes to listen to them to see if we can help them out with anything. Thought it was worth sharing as membership fees are modest and Hounslow Chamber offers:

  • 3 free Business Networking Lunches a month
  • Other fun social/networking events
  • Quarterly newsletter
  • Seminars and Training events
  • Opportunities to advertise and market to other members
  • Member to member offers through website
  • Political lobbying

The Chamber helps business grow by providing networking and marketing opportunities and by becoming the voice of business in the area. We have close contacts with West London Business and other business groups. This allows us to lobby on local business issues. The influence of the Chamber is acknowledged by the Borough Council, which consults us on many matters that effect local businesses.

FIND YOUR LOCAL CHAMBER

5 Unique Ways to use Twitter for Business

Twitter_1

Another good article from Mashable… 5 good tips for getting the most from Twitter for business; my favourite and the simpliest:

Reward Loyalty 

Tasti D-Lite’s initiatives are defining the social media loyalty program. A huge part of their strategy is automatically rewarding customers with TreatCards when they tweet about the brand. It’s also an important part of their plan to build brand awareness so that they can open more stores across the United States. Starbucks has similar notions around loyalty and social media and is experimenting with Foursquare for that purpose.

Both companies have recognised that there is real business value every time a customer or fan shares their purchase behaviors with their friends. If you can find a way to automatically reward loyalty for Twitter-sharing, you’ll be motivating your audiences to spread your message for you. It’s a win-win for everyone, as long as you carefully consider the image of your customer and the message they push out to their followers.

See all 5 at Mashable.