Is it just me or has this year been flying for everyone?

Yesterday Andrew & I celebrated our 5th Wedding anniversary and are actually taking a long weekend.  I know, it's a shock to some and soon as I can't sleep, I decided to jump on (yes, we never go anywhere without a PC) and blog whilst admiring the view from our hotel suite.  Tomorrow (being Anzac Day) however, out of respect to our service men and women we will not be working, blogging or posting!

As I mentioned in my last blog, we've been busy working on some new and exciting web sites & I'm happy to announce we've added more to the list!  In between these, we've release a new version of the Our Corner Noticeboard, which is much more user friendly.  We've also added links to our front page to guide you to your destination quicker.  Other upgrades & changes are going on behind the scenes, which makes the site run alot smoother & of course new projects are always being planned.

Our biggest project has been focused on Facebook. We launched "Tell Us Tuesday" on 15th March  & in just a short period of time we have over 95 businesses participating, and we're absolutely delighted.  Our Corner is all about supporting businesses in being successful & this is just one way to increase their profiles at no cost.  It's been really exciting to see how much talent is out there. We'd love to see photos, links & customer feedback so keep those posts coming!

While Facebook is still highly successful for main stream internet users, Twitter has it's own demographic & plays a very important part of getting our brand out there.  We have FB & twitter linked, which means everything we add to our FB newsfeeds is added to our Tweets, saving alot of time.  I've also added tweet deck to my desktop allowing me to monitor FB & Twitter on one screen, which is another timesaver. Not only have alot of new entries in our directory have come from twitter, but so have a number of those "liking" on FB.

We'd like to thank Jes from Australian Certified Websites for her in-depth article in our forums Jessica’s Top 10 Business Networking Etiquette via Social Media & hope to see many more from Jes!  Also, thanks to Jenni from Sweetsediments for her introductions in our forums!

Drop in and say hello! We want to hear your suggestions for the site too!!!  If there's something you'd like to see added or enhanced, please add it to our forums!  There are way too many to welcome to our directory mention individually, but we recommend you take a look at all the businesses who have joined OC as there is some real talent out there!!  If you know a business who is not listed in our directory, give them a nudge as it won't stay free forever!!!

On a final note.....

In an interesting twist late last month, Andrew was involved in an accident that saw our car being written off.  Luckily, he and all the other drivers walked away with minor injuries (mainly bruising & whiplash)!  However, we spent the next couple of weeks with the gruesome & often painful task of purchasing another car.  Although it was something we were contemplating later this year or maybe next, we hadn't put much thought into it.  So, to add to the inconvenience of dealing with insurance companies, sharing/renting cars, etc, we then had to face car sales reps.  In this day, I can't believe that a woman can still be ignored or that a sales guy would tell a customer that their feeling or opinion is wrong!  It just reminded me how important it is to listen to our customers & not assume that we know what is best.  I know we need to make the sale, but I hope that we all take time to put ourselves in our customer's shoes often enough to keep our products current, interesting & stop to hear what they want!