We aim to bring the North East up to speed
Dec 9 2009 By The Journal
Paul King Managing Director, WSI
A GREAT deal has happened since WSI set up our latest office on Northumberland Business Park back in May this year.
Swine flu pandemic swept the globe; Woolworths, a household name that we all grew up with, collapsed; and Dubai became the latest casualty of the supposed “global financial crisis”.
On a more positive note Newcastle was named the greenest city in Britain, Woolworths has been re-established by previous staff members and JD Wetherspoon plans to open 250 new pubs and create 10,000 jobs. (Someone forgot to tell them about the “global financial crisis”).
In the internet industry Google has launched Wave, changed itsalgorithm a number of times and has now begun to roll out the new Google Caffeine search engine.
Twitter has exploded with a reported 1382% growth rate while Facebook has continued to grow steadily, adding half a million users per day.
E-commerce site Amazon reported sales up by 25% on last year while online advertising overtakes television to become the biggest advertising sector in the UK.
2009 has indeed been a year of highs and lows for most people and businesses with lending at an all time low. Companies who have not adapted and evolved have disappeared or are in serious trouble now.
For those who have adapted, however, 2009 has been a great year and they have grown more, taken more market share than in previous years and are now positioned very well as the markets begin to recover.
JD Wetherspoon, for example, embraced the internet with a new interactive website and over 7,000 active members on their recently established (just over a month ago) Facebook fan page.
The Twitter page established at the same time only has about 30 followers. However, this has the potential to go much further considering their name was mentioned on Twitter more than 45 times in one day recently.
What have we been doing in 2009?
WSI setup its North East office in May this year and spent the first few months getting our name out there, educating local businesses, researching the local markets, designing websites and implementing strategic online marketing plans for companies from Berwick to Bradford.
Due to the high demand in North and West Yorkshire we have taken on an internet business analyst based in Bradford. This has given our Newcastle office more time to concentrate on companies in the North East.
With some fantastic projects for both established and new companies such as Siemens STDL (formerly the iconic Reyrolle) and Northern Growth Academy (the newly established e-learning supplier) in the pipeline 2009 has ended on a high for us. As the demand for our services is at an all time high our business plan has been revised and accelerated somewhat since October.
We have developed and become known for our “full service approach” to the internet. This means that we do not want to just design you a website or carry out search engine optimisation (SEO) on your current site.
Many companies will be happy to just design a website or carry out a 12-month SEO contract, take the money, and move on to the next job. Not WSI. We want to work with you to develop your business online, reduce your costs, and maximise your profits because we aim to stay with our clients as a valued partner for life.
Our success in 2009 has been down to our full service approach and consistent delivery of positive ROI for our clients and we expect to go from strength to strength in 2010 and make full use of the availability of skills in the region to build our development, online marketing and project management teams.
What do we have planned for 2010?
We are looking forward to getting involved in One North East’s digital strategy early next year and continuing our work with both current and future clients.
We have plans to build a highly skilled team in the North East over the next two years and begin to offer educational seminars to businesses of all sizes in the region. Our goal for 2010 is to bring businesses in the North East up to speed with this digital age and help them position themselves favourably coming out of the recession.
