“Britain is open for business” and apparently the government have the funds and support you need to get started.

This week The Business Hub teamed up with UKTI in a show entirely dedicated to export and investment.

David Hurley of Anglia Business Solutions shared his experience of how UK Trade and Investment is helping him to expand his software business to reach new US markets.

Nick Tait of Syrris Ltd. told us all about his businesses global trade and export strategy and what you would need to do to follow his example.

Martin Keepfer of UKTI shared a case study of how a small family business is breaking into foreign export markets, and how they have begun by exporting their products to Australia.

Vic Annals, the UKTI Trade and Investment Director told us how “Britain is Open For Business”, and even through the coalition cuts, how his Government Department is finding the cash and support that are needed to do business abroad. He also explained about the lengths the UKTI is going to in order to help UK businesses gain the investment they need, and what UK businesses need to do to gain the funding and support necessary begin exporting their products and services.

Finally, at the end of this specially extended podcast, Stephen Cook of UK Trade & Investment gave us some great examples and case studies of how businesses are expanding abroad, and what the UKTI is doing to go out of their way to help them.

Listen to UKTI Export Special Podcast online here:
http://www.markandian.com/businesshub/2010/09/the-business-hub-show-podcast-12-september-2010/
(Scroll to the bottom of the page to play the podcast –  follow the show notes and links on the page)

What are your experiences of breaking into foreign markets, are you getting the help, support and financing you need?

This guest article kindly submitted to me by Ann Hawkins ( @AnnHawkins) who attended the recent Travelling Geeks visit to Cambridge where they discussed how small business and corporates are beginning to utilise social networking and social media to properly engage with their clients. Unfortunately I was unable to make that meeting, however I was lucky enough to meet the Travelling Geeks at the Fitzwilliam College in Cambridge the following day (picture below) where we discussed how corporates are gradually realising that social networking allows them to connect with their market in ways that have never been possible before. If you want to learn how it’s done, and wish to have your business realise the true benefit that social networking will bring your organisation then I suggest you read on, there are some great lessons to be learned here…

At a recent meeting with some of the world experts in social media and business it became apparent from the number of examples quoted that businesses not engaged in social networks are missing out.

Every business owner has three choices:

1. You can try to ban your staff from using social networks in working hours but you can’t control what they do in their own time. If your staff are not fully engaged with your business it will show.
2. You can ignore social networks but they won’t ignore you. Customers are talking about you and if you’re not there you won’t know what they’re saying.
3. You can mandate your staff to engage in their usual on-line networks and set up a tracking system that shows up every time your company is mentioned. (try using [blippr]Social Media Firehose[/blippr]). Train and reward your staff to respond appropriately and your customer service will soar through the roof.

There are hundreds of examples of companies using Twitter effectively, here are a few:

• Zappos (view CEO’s tweets) There are more than 400 Zappos workers on Twitter. Tony Hsieh, their CEO encouraged employees to Twitter as a way to build a cohesive corporate culture.
• Comcast (view tweets), with a team of 7, listens to what customers say and replies with private tweets to offer help.
• Dell (view tweets) has more than 20 Twitter channels catering to different audiences, including international ones.
• General Motors (view tweets) began Twittering at auto shows to publicize certain events, but then discovered it gained traction when it started engaging in conversations with customers.
• H&R Block (view tweets) originally thought of Twitter as a free and easy way to push messages out to people, but as time went on realized it made more sense to use Twitter to listen to people and respond
• JetBlue (view tweets) use Twitter to communicate with passengers about weather delays and field questions about things like why JetBlue charges $7 for pillows and blankets.
• Kodak (view tweets) began using Twitter as an entertainment and information tool to share personal experiences during the Olympics in China to put a personal face on the brand and build a one-on-one relationship with customers.
• Southwest (view tweets) shares the case of passenger, Christofer Hoff, whose flight was delayed two hours, and then his luggage went missing. While waiting around, he tweeted his displeasure. Southwest responded the next morning with the following Twitter message: “Sorry to hear about your flight –- weather was terrible in the NE. Hope you give us a 2nd chance to prove that Southwest = Awesomeness.” Southwest followed up to make sure his flight home was a better experience. Hoff recounted the experience in a blog post.
• Whole Foods Market Southwest (view tweets) offers $25 gift cards for the tweet of the day, one of which was ‘Stepping into Whole Foods is stepping into a sociological case study.’

Travelling Geeks at the Fitzwilliam College in Cambridge

Jim (”call me Sky”) Schuyler | Susan Bratton | Howard Rheingold | Robert Scoble

About Ann Hawkins:

Ann Hawkins likes win/win situations where everyone gets what they want by helping other people to get what they want. The most exciting evidence of this takes place in Ann’s Inspired Mastermind Groups where business owners share ideas and create new opportunities for each other – it’s brilliant!

You can read Ann’s blog HERE>>>>
You can visit Ann’s website HERE>>>
You can follow Ann on Twitter HERE>>>

Why our “SuperBlog Offer” is just SO good!

A Superblog is very different to the free blogs that many people use. It has all the features of a web site and can actually replace a website in many instances.

A SuperBlog has special aspects that work in the background to create superb Google rankings, allows you to analyse results and enables you to create a comprehensive on-line marketing strategy. It also contains tools making it easy for other social networkers to tell others about you.

It’s a fact: One of the newest and most powerful marketing tools you can use to promote your business is fast-growing social media sites like [blippr]Facebook[/blippr], [blippr]LinkedIn[/blippr], [blippr]4Networking[/blippr] and [blippr]Twitter[/blippr]. There has never been a more cost effective way to get your message out to a huge number of potential clients - Your SuperBlog is the centrepiece…

Get connected to millions of potential clients

Cambinet, headed by Social Media Strategist Ian McKendrick, is at the cutting edge of advising business owners how to capitalise on this fast changing media. With over 30 years experience of combining IT and Marketing strategies, no-one is better placed to not only provide you with the best advice available now but to keep you updated as the media evolves. Three months ago there were only 300 or so social networking sites and applications. At the time of writing this article there are now well over 3000. Our job is to investigate all of the new options and keep you ahead of the game.

You may be a technical wizard or a technophobe.

You may have a very big business or a small one. You may like to control everything yourself or hand it over to us to manage. Because our clients are not all the same we have devised several different packages that can quickly put your business in front of millions of potential clients through key social networking sites. People who need your products and services can instantly and effortlessly connect with you. A Superblog is very different to the free blogs that many people use. It has all the features of a web site and can actually replace a website in many instances.

What is a SuperBlog?

A SuperBlog has special aspects that work in the background to create superb Google rankings, allows you to analyse results and enables you to create a comprehensive marketing strategy. It also contains tools making it easy for social networkers to tell others about you, and automates many of the processes a dedicated web-master would do for you.

• It’s quick
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• It’s bursting with benefits

FREE domain name

No need to pay for, register or transfer your existing domain name. As part of our service we advise you on the best domains to use and do everything as part of our hosting deal.

NO advertising

A SuperBlog gives you a clean, fully functional blog with full capabilities. It’s not cluttered with advertising as many free blogs are. A SuperBlog is entirely yours and you have complete control.

Installation

The world of blogging is changing at an increasingly fast pace and so we’ve done all the research and will install your Superblog with all the features for the functions you need it to do. We’ll also keep you up to date as new features are developed.

YOUR branding

A SuperBlog gives you the choice of hundreds of designs and for a small fee we’ll even customise it to match your branding. There’s no need to install, setup or configure any templates, we do all of that for you as part of our service.

FULL Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Plugins are tools that are used behind the scenes, and we’ve included several plugins that enable your blog to become search engine friendly and get you onto the front pages of popular search engines like [blippr]Google[/blippr], [blippr]Bing[/blippr] or [blippr]Yahoo[/blippr]. We install and configure the SEO plugins you need as part of our service.

COMPLETE Social Network Optimisation (SNO)

The growth of Social Networking for business is phenomenal and the real value of using a SuperBlog as part of your marketing strategy is to make it easy to link to Social Networking sites like [blippr]Twitter[/blippr], [blippr]FaceBook[/blippr], [blippr]LinkedIn[/blippr] etc. SNO is part of the service we provide that ensures visitors to your blog can quickly and easily send links to each page, each article, and even each comment on your blog.

FREE support

Our SuperBlog subscribers have exclusive access to our SuperBlog Support Centre where our team of blog and WordPress experts are waiting to solve any problems our customers encounter. There’s nothing wastes more time, or causes more frustration than trying to find answers to your problems over the Internet. Our experienced team has all the answers and are ready and waiting for your support questions. We are committed to delivering exceptional customer service which means our customers are able to spend more time reaping the benifits of their investment.

FREE training

Each SuperBlog subscriber has free access to the SuperBlog Forums where users can post questions or ask advice from our support team and other customers in our SuperBlog community. You will have full access to our SuperBlog Training Site where we have published training videos to help take the complete novice through to becoming fully competent SuperBlog expert. Our training videos are fun, short, to the point and aim to get you to where you need to be in the quickest and simplest way possible. Access to this rich, wonderful resource is completely free to all customers hosting their SuperBlogs with us.

At last, after many months of planning and hard work I am proud to announce that we have released the first module of our Social Networking training courses, the overview for the entire course. When I get more time I will tell you all about everything we’ve been up to and how we have got to where we are.

In the meantime, here are the links to the course overview, which is split into  two parts, so you can find out what to expect when we finish this project in the next few weeks.

LINK TO SOCIAL NETWORK TRAINING COURSE PART1
LINK TO SOCIAL NETWORK TRAINING COURSE PART2

During testing we had many requests from people wishing to gain access to the courses as we produced them.

Due to this popular demand we have decided to set up a pre-order special deal for those interested, so if you would like to be one of the first to be able to download the course materials – hot off the press – then please click the following link: (This has now been discontinued – September 2010)