September 2011

Hello again from Abbeyview Towers!

There wasn't a lot of work done on the afternoon of Friday the 5th of August. Glued to online coverage, sat on the edge of my seat (living every moment with the Twittersphere) we watched a remarkable bit of show jumping in the FEI Nations Cup at Dublin. Very well done to Team GB for triumphantly securing the Aga Khan trophy - pipping the Irish at the post right at the last second.

Four days later...

The PagePlay office is on Tariff Street in the northern quarter (NQ) of Manchester's city centre. At the height of the industrial revolution the textile industry's heart was the NQ of Manchester. To this day many big fashion labels have their European headquarters in the area. For example, we share a building with online clothing retailer BooHoo.com, denim brand, Lee Jeans and Musto have an office just up the street. With this flare for creativity the NQ is buzzing with web and design agencies. Big hair and skinny jeans - a bit too cool for school for me sometimes.

Tuesday the 9th of August, for some reason saw some opportunist thugs visit the city centre with the sole intention of getting their hands on some free stuff! Our beloved little creative oasis took a bit of a battering. Thankfully Tariff Street escaped unscathed.

I have to take my hat off to Greater Manchester Police (GMP). They did a tremendous job of breaking up the groups and with a considerable number of their colleagues down in London helping to keep the peace, they did a remarkable job with their much reduced numbers. Their communications team also did a great job on Twitter during and after the riots. My favourite Tweet read: "Captured lots of criminals on CCTV - we will identify you and we will be coming for you".

Manchester is now back to its chilled-out self. Any would-be rioters can see that their opportunism has consequences, with the naming and shaming of 'Shop a Rioter' on Facebook and Twitter. GMP are urging people to send in their photos and videos of rioters to help them convict everyone involved. They even have a dedicated Flickr account for the photos. According to BBC news North West, it'll take over a year to go through all the CCTV coverage, photos and videos they've received.

After all that earlier in the month everything is now back to normal - PHEW! We're glad the distractions haven't stopped us from bringing you the September newsletter. This month we have so much for you.

First we have a piece on networking in the online world by Madeleine Jarvis. Madeleine is a doctoral researcher at Manchester Metropolitan University Business School and has written a piece for us on the next generation of networking online and how small businesses can use this to their advantage.

We then have a piece from the Pure Feed Company's Anna Pyrah. Anna is nutritional expert who's written a wonderful piece about beneficial feeding practices which can be employed over the autumn and winter months to help keep horses healthy, hydrated and at their optimum weight.

PR guru and our co-founder of the Equestrian Social Media Awards, Rhea Freeman tells us about the dos and don'ts of DIY PR. Rhea wishes to help those on a tight budget make the most of the media outlets available with her comprehensive article.

Finally we have some news from eventer Gemma Tattersall. Gemma is going for a swim, but it doesn't involve falling into a water jump, thankfully!

Hope you enjoy the read!

Liam

Madeleine Jarvis

The growth of social media is showing no signs of slowing down. According to research from Forrester1 over three-quarters of Internet surfers used some form of social media. This was a rise of nearly 20% in just one year. Users on Twitter are now sending 200 million Tweets per day2! But it’s not just for individuals - social media has many plus-points for businesses. It enables them to reach out to a wide audience and share their brand’s ideas, products, services and offers. Traditional networking has long been associated with success. Business owners who actively network reap rewards in terms of more contacts, word of mouth marketing and increased exposure – all of which can be translated into increased revenue. Social media simply enables businesses to extend their networking reach. So it is little wonder that building social media connections has become a successful strategy for many companies. In fact, 90% of marketers consider it important for their business3. In an increasingly noisy world, it generates exposure, helps drive traffic and can increase your search ranking. The figures speak for themselves – in order to be connecting to the right people you need to be into social media. However, many small businesses are still wary of committing time to these activities. Having worked with many small businesses I have heard similar stories about why they think social media isn’t for them. This article aims to tackle these head on and to get you to think about why social media is for you.

“I don’t have enough time”

Keeping up to date with social media takes time – one thing many small businesses don’t have enough of. Recent research – and my own experience – suggests that business owners often stay away from sites such as Twitter because they fear it will become a time-suck4. Large businesses are able to commit members of staff purely to manage Twitter accounts or the YouTube channel. Take ASOS.com for example: their customer care Twitter account answers queries about deliveries and orders much quicker than their email address. For a company who are purely online and don’t advertise a telephone number this approach really works. However, if you are a small business you can’t commit these resources so you need to plan carefully how much you can commit to your followers. Perhaps your Twitter will be used for deal updates only. If so, tell your followers. Maybe YouTube is used after an event to share a video as a one off. Great – but tell your followers. When people choose to follow you or join a social media list they need to know what to expect. Careful planning up front can help manage their expectations, manage your to-do list and avoid unnecessary time-suck.

“There’s too much to choose from – and I don’t know where to start”

Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, FourSquare, LinkedIn, Google+, blogs, e-newsletters... and many more popping up all the time. Of course it can be daunting for any businesses to know which to choose and where to start. The key rule is to choose the right medium for your audience. You need to be active (or at least present) wherever your target group is active. Take some time to look around and see where your competitors are ‘talking’ and ask your customers which social mediums they interact with. You do need to pick carefully because each forum has a different tone and some might not fit with your brand. Social media is about communication, but not just straight selling. It is about collaboration too. Try working with suppliers or customers to trial social media sites first and see what works for your business.

“My customers don’t use social media”

There seems to be an ongoing myth amongst some business owners that only young people use social media. This might have been the case in the early Facebook days but just isn’t so now. Social media usage has nearly doubled in the past year and much of this increase has been in older audience segments. In fact, the average social media user is 38 years old5. The likelihood is that your customers will be using some form of social media – either in their work or personal life. If you aren’t engaging with them, your competitors probably are.

“I don’t want to give away our ideas”

Lots of business owners I speak to are worried about giving away too much information about their business. Of course this is understandable – you don’t want your trade secrets splashed all over Facebook! But this is rather missing the point. You wouldn’t walk into a networking event or new business meeting and bare all about your business – so neither would you in a social media arena. Social media is collaborative in that you’re asking for input from ‘followers’ but you only share as much as you want to.

“I don’t know what to say – or how to say it!”

The best players in social media seem to always have something to say (see Abbeyview for a master class!). But when you start it can be hard to think of what to talk about and share with people. There are no hard or fast rules – but some recent research from Kaplan and Haenlein6 provides five excellent tips that might help you find your voice.
Be active – whether it’s online of offline, the key to building relationships is being active. You will need to take the lead and get in contact with them – then keep it up. No one likes the friend who only gets in touch when they want something.

Be interesting – people don’t want to spend time listening to boring people! You need to be interesting in order to attract and keep followers, friends or recipients of e-shots. That means finding out what they would like to hear and what they are already talking about.

Be humble – social media exists without you. Don’t think that just because you’ve created a Twitter account people will jump on board. Take time to understand the etiquette of the specific medium. Don’t beg for followers. Never spam people. Don’t be upset if people don’t want to engage with you anymore. Instead, think about why they no longer find you interesting.

Be unprofessional – social media users are just like you. They understand that there is a human at the keyboard and sometimes things go wrong! You can lose a lot of the formality you’d use in traditional marketing activities and give yourself a little more freedom.

Be honest – make sure you stick to the rules of the game and be truthful. People will see through fake accounts, fibs about prizes or false rave reviews and it will seriously damage your business (and personal) reputation. Regarding your competition, the old adage of “if you’ve not got anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all” applies best.

Social media is here to stay. Its benefits to business are becoming more and more apparent and my betting is that these will only increase. If you are already using social media it might be time to think about which other activities you could adopt that will help engage people. If you’re not, it’s probably time you did.

Madeleine Jarvis is a doctoral researcher at Manchester Metropolitan University Business School. Her research interests are employment relationships in start-ups and small business growth strategies. Madeleine’s passion is supporting businesses though start-up and into flourishing, value-driven enterprises. Alongside her research, Madeleine trains and coaches entrepreneurs and owner mangers - helping them create great business cultures and sustainable strategic activities. Madeleine also teaches on a number of enterprise units at undergraduate degree level. You can follow Madeleine on Twitter @MaddieJarvis.

1. Forrester Research, cited in Kaplan & Haenlein (2010)
2. Twitter Blog June 30, 2011 http://blog.twitter.com/
3. The 2001 Social Media Marketing Industry Report from http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/
_4. DeBaise, C (2011) Foodies: Twitter a “Time Suck” but valuable, The Wall Street Journal, Jul 14 2001
5. Hampton et al (2011) Social networking sites and our lives, Pew Research Centre, http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/Technology-and-social-networks/Summary.aspx
6. Kaplan, A.M. & Haenlein, M., (2010) Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media. Business Horizons, 53(1), pp.59-68.

Pure Feed's sponsored rider, Laura Collett

Ensuring condition is maintained over the cold winter months can sometimes be a daunting task, especially with an older horse, or one that is a poor doer. With winter fast approaching, Abbeyview Equine spoke to Anna Pyrah of The Pure Feed Company about the beneficial feeding practices which can be employed over the autumn and winter months to help keep horses healthy, hydrated and at their optimum weight.

Fibre Power

Fibre is crucially important to every horse’s diet. It is the core dietary substance that horses have evolved to eat over thousands of years and owners should always be aware that the fibre level in their horses’ or ponies’ diets should never fall below 50%.

There are many reasons why feeding a horse fibre is beneficial. The horse’s digestive system has evolved to be sustained by a diet packed full of tough fibre and horses with limited access to grazing or that don’t receive hay on a trickle basis are far more likely to develop gastric ulcers, colic and dental problems. Insufficient dietary fibre will also restrict the ability of the digestive tract to retain water, predisposing the horse to dehydration, not to mention the fact that the ensuing boredom can lead to serious behavioural issues such as windsucking, box walking or crib biting.

Hot Stuff

When looking specifically at the winter diet, fibre plays an even more significant role than throughout the rest of the year as the digestion of forage yields a special bonus which is extremely beneficial.

The horse has a very specialised mechanism for tough fibre digestion through the large microbial population in the hind gut and this fermentation process produces a significant amount of heat. In the colder months, when precious fat reserves and energy is lost through keeping warm, fibre provides a kind of “central heating for horses”. This is particularly important to horses that are known to lose condition over the winter, as they will be able to conserve more of their pre stored reserves if they have a natural source of warming energy coming from their bellies – and you can pretty much count on the fact that if a horse has cold ears the rest of him is cold too, so any extra warmth is a bonus! As a general rule of thumb, aim to feed 1.5-2% bodyweight in hay, while taking into account that there may be 25% wastage - unless you have a horse that hoovers everything up!

Planning the amount of hay you will use over winter should ideally be done at the time of year when the hay is abundant. If a suitable dry storage area is available, stocking up on plenty of bales whilst you can will do wonders for helping your horse to maintain a healthy fibre intake through winter.

Water Works

An average sized horse will drink about 10-12 gallons per day in cool weather and it’s as important to ensure your horse remains fully hydrated over the winter months as it is in summer.

A good way of testing whether your horse is dehydrated is to use the capillary refill test – press your finger over the jugular vein in the neck and release, the time it should take to refill should be around 1 second. Any longer than this and it is likely that your horse is lacking water.

Over the winter and particularly in frosty and snowy conditions, water buckets and troughs must be checked on a regular basis. Some owners may think that horses can get their moisture from snow; however, 6 x the amount of snow must be eaten to obtain the same volume of water as drinking. Relying on your horse ingesting snow is not a good idea for a number of reasons: 1) it is not an effective way to guarantee water intake, 2) it will cause a reduction in body temperature and can give a cold shock to the digestive system and 3) frosty grass has high levels of fructans and when ingested these sugars can dramatically increase the risk of laminitis.

Impaction colic is also closely linked to a reduced water intake, and there are two primary factors which can inhibit water consumption in the winter. Firstly, a frozen water bucket or trough means that no water at all is available and secondly, the sheer coldness of the water means that a horse is going to be less inclined to quench its thirst if the process is uncomfortably cold! Overcoming these problems is, however, reasonably straightforward. The best thing to do is to break and remove the ice from your horse’s water source at least twice a day. However, there are other less effective measures which can be taken to increase the chance of your horse having a reliable access to water. Placing a ball in the trough or bucket can help to inhibit a layer of ice forming, or covering part of the bucket with a sheet of wood can also help. There is also the option of heated water troughs and although this is obviously more costly, they are extremely effective. Studies have shown that horses are 40% more likely to drink a considerable, healthy amount if the water is warm. Please do not try to make a DIY version of a heated trough though! It is also advisable to do your homework when purchasing a heated trough, as some poorly made ones can become faulty very quickly and consequently give your horse a shock every time it goes to drink.

Adding Calories

Keeping condition at a consistent and optimum level as the autumn and winter sets in can be especially tricky for horses that have a tendency to lose weight just at the very thought of their grass supply diminishing. For these horses, the aim is to add a small layer of fat for reserves just before the colder weather sets in, especially for older horses. Generally speaking, if you leave a diet change until after the pasture is spoilt, then you’ve missed your opportunity and adding weight to a horse that is already losing it can be a real struggle. Once a horse loses condition it is far more difficult to replace, so the old saying of prevention is far better than the cure most certainly applies.

Checking your horse’s teeth regularly throughout the year is essential, but during the winter ensuring that teeth are in good working order is particularly important as this will help to prevent the horse losing feed and precious calories through quidding.

The combination of poor pasture quality and a temperature drop can cause considerable and rapid weight loss for poor doers. If your horse or pony is also prone to laminitis, finding a way to bring extra calories to his feed without increasing the risk of this excruciating problem developing can be quite tricky. Adding large amounts of starch and sugar of any kind (including molasses) will undoubtedly increase weight, but this comes with high risks. Many problems can occur from a diet high in starch and sugar such as excitability, gastric ulcers, insulin resistance, colic, laminitis, diarrhea, destruction of micro-organisms in the large intestine, tying up and the list goes on! A much more beneficial way to introduce a more calorific diet to your horse is through the addition of fats. Vegetable oils are highly digestible, will not cause rapid fermentation in the large intestine and provide a form of slow release, ‘safe’ energy, whilst boosting coat condition too!

Assessing Condition

Being able to gauge your horse’s weight and condition and assess whether there are any weight fluctuations is a very valuable skill. During the winter, when a horse’s coat is thicker, it can become even more tricky to judge whether he is losing weight or not, as there is extra fluffy padding over the ribs, not to mention often layers of mud!
Not everyone has access to a weighbridge, which is obviously the best mechanism to measure weight loss or gain, but there are other useful tools (although not so accurate) which can be applied so you can get a rough idea of any loss of condition. Weigh tapes are a cheap but effective way of finding out if your horse could do with an increase in calories. By taking this measurement on a fortnightly basis, any fluctuations should be evident and knowing whether his weight is being maintained or reducing means that you can make any necessary adjustments to the diet before the weight drops off even more.

How Pure Feeds Can Help

There are many different ways to go about feeding your horse over winter, but at the Pure Feed Company, we specialise in high fibre, low starch, low sugar and no molasses feeds, feeding your horses in a way they have evolved to eat. Each fibre based feed contains everything your horse will need in one bag (including Pure Feed’s high specification balancer) and the energy source is provided by slow release oils, which will help to keep your horse in full health and optimum condition during the difficult colder months.

The Pure Feed Company also provides a mobile weighbridge service to its customers, so you can easily and accurately record your horses’ weight on an ongoing basis to ensure that they get all the nutrients they need for optimum health and condition.

The Pure Feed Company offer a free nutritional advice and diet plan service, so owners can be confident they are feeding exactly what their horses need. From early September Pure Feed will also be on the road with mobile weigh bridge, which will allow horses weights to be assessed easily, accurately and on an ongoing basis to ensure that they get all the nutrients they need for optimum health and condition.

For more information on The Pure Feed Company or for a free feeding plan for your horse, check out thepurefeedcompany.com, Tel: 0117 230 0027 or email info@thepurefeedcompany.com. You can also become a fan The Pure Feed Company on Facebook.

Rhea Freeman

PR and marketing are not dark arts, they are about hard work, making connections, looking laterally at issues, promoting points of difference, working within features lists and with people, to get the best for you or your client’s products.

Put it another way, the purpose of PR and marketing is to tell the world about a product, company, brand, event or business, and for the people you tell to get excited about it. This excitement should then result in increased sales leads and, ultimately sales.

Whatever size business you run, looking at PR and marketing are important. If you sell a service, or just make one product, how can you expect to sell what you do if no one knows about it? There’s no point in having the best kept secret in the world if you want to make money from it!

There are two options when it comes to PR and marketing. Firstly, you can do it yourself. This is entirely possible if you have the time to invest in seeking out the right opportunities, gathering the media packs, working with magazines on advertising and articles and so on. Many people do do this themselves, some do it very effectively but, from the research I’ve done into how this works, realistically, if you’re a smaller business, you’re also responsible for sales, accounts, finance, manufacture, purchasing, banking and everything else. This means that, quite often, PR and marketing are quite low down on the list of priorities. This is not a criticism, it’s a fact. If you don’t perfect your product, no one’s going to restock. If you don’t answer your phone/respond to sales emails, you can’t take orders, you can’t pay your suppliers, you can’t reorder. If you don’t generate invoices, no one will pay. If you don’t market yourself, you won’t expand and grow.

Option two is working with a PR and marketing agency or individual. This allows you to keep hold of the reins and get on with the day to day running of your business, safe in the knowledge that there’s someone out there with the contacts and the knowledge of the industry to get you noticed. This is the only way that I work with companies. You’ve got to, in my opinion, work WITH people. This means that, at every stage, you, as the owner of the business, know what’s going on. You’re in control of the money you’re spending and there are no nasty shocks.

As I see it, people can do their own PR, and some can do it well, but, especially when you work for yourself, you have to ask yourself, is this the best use of my time? Am I generating the best results from my activities? If the answer is no, then get in touch with a PR.

If you do decide to ‘go it alone’, here are my top tips:

• Do the research- make sure you know what magazines and websites cover which areas so that you can send relevant information. Sending irrelevant copy wastes time.

• Write about something newsworthy- if you’re sending out information to everyone you know, make sure it’s newsworthy, something that people don’t yet know about.

• Make it relevant- if you’re sending info to anyone for a specific feature, make sure the information is relevant. This can apply to adverts too.

• Put the work in- it’s not a one hit wonder, you can’t expect that one press release is going to have you set up for life. You need to work on how to get yourself ‘out there’ all the time.

• Don’t ramble- if you’re sending out information, get to the point. You’ll be dealing with busy people.

• Use spell check- do your best to make sure words are spelt correctly and your grammar and punctuation is as close to perfect as possible. We all make mistakes, and typos do creep in to everyone’s work… just try your best to keep these down to a minimum.

• Work with people- work with magazines and websites, talk to them about advertising and the deals you can get. This should help any expenditure really work for you, especially if you tie your ads in with the relevant features on your list.

• Keep your chin up- not everyone will find everything you send them interesting or relevant, but don’t be disheartened.

• BE POLITE- if you’re the face of your brand and you go about upsetting people, that is the impression that they will have of you and your brand. This could very well undo any good work you’ve done. I think that we’re all in this together, people rarely do things to deliberately spite others, mistakes happen, it’s how you deal with it that counts.

Equally, something very important is knowledge. I am often surprised that people will use non equestrian PRs to market an equestrian product. Equestrian people work at equestrian magazines, and these magazines are read by people who love horses so, if the person you’re looking to, to help you, doesn’t know their gaskin from their gullet or their Dr Bristol from their brushing boot, you might have the wrong person for the job.

It’s also worth noting that PR and marketing doesn’t have to cost the earth. The kind of package you go for will determine the price so, if someone does everything including placing ads, artwork, website redesign and event management as well as press releases and social media (for example), it’s going to cost you more.

If you’ve read all the way down to here, well, all I can say is thank you very much, I hope you’re a little bit more positive about PR and marketing than you were at the start. Equally, I wouldn’t be much of a marketer if I didn’t include a shameless plug for my own business… so… if you’re looking for a friendly, efficient, knowledgeable and affordable PR and marketing professional to help your business flourish, check out rheafreemanpr.co.uk, email rhea@rheafreemanpr.co.uk or call 07980 757910.

Last month we told you about the new Hoof networks set up by the British Equestrian Federation to help riding schools in England grow their businesses and introduce new people to our sport. We set up the Twitter hashtag #bumsinsaddles to allow equestrian businesses of all sizes to connect and discuss ways of growing our sport. So far #bumsinsaddles has been used by riding schools, feed companies, retailers, bloggers and magazines. In the past month we've seen tweets using #bumsinsaddles from as far afield as Ohio, Toronto and Kent!

While it doesn't directly affect us as a web development agency, anything we can do increase the numbers of 'bums in saddles' will eventually be good for us all. In the past month we've found three great campaigns for introducing people to horse riding, helping to overcome the initial barrier of getting them through the gate to have a try...

RDA World's Biggest Riding Lesson

Open to riding schools across the globe, it's great way to introduce people to horse riding and raise money for an amazing charity at the same time!

The closing date for registration was the 31st of August. With the amount of global buzz around the campaign we're sure they'll be doing it again next year. Find out more...

Let's Ride

ABRS members can benefit from Horse & Rider's Let's Ride campaign. Offering free and discounted riding lessons for first timers, Let's Ride also offers a loyalty scheme - ensuring they come back for more! Find out more...

Get Set, Go Free

Nestle have a promotion whereby you register codes from Nestle products on a dedicated website gaining points to try different sports for free. There is a broad range of activities available - including horse riding.

The site has a directory of participating riding schools. If you're listed on the site it's a great opportunity to get new bums in saddles - not to mention the wonders it'll do for search rankings. The site currently has one riding school covering the whole of Northern Ireland, one for the 2.6 million people in Greater Manchester and a small handfull in the south east.

We contacted Nestle to find out how to get a listing for those not on it. They told us they would like more riding schools in the UK and Ireland to participate in the Get Set, Go Free promotion. A fantastic opportunity to introduce newbies to equestrianism! Find out more...

Make sure you tell your local riding schools about these promotions. If you find any others you'd like us to mention please do drop us a line or join the conversation on Twitter using #bumsinsaddles.

26 September 2011 London Hoof Network

17 October 2011 North West Hoof Network

19 October 2011 North East Hoof Network

26 October 2011 East Hoof Network

31 October 2011 West Midlands Hoof Network

2 November 2011 Yorkshire Hoof Network

10 November 2011 East Midlands Hoof Network

South East and South West Hoof Network dates to be confirmed

For more information on Hoof and how you can join your local Hoof network:

North West
E: sonia.birch@bef.co.uk
T: 07813 332362

Yorkshire & The Humber
E: emma.white@bef.co.uk
T: 07900 811377

West Midlands
E: sonia.birch@bef.co.uk
T: 07813 332362

East Midlands
E: gill.barham@bef.co.uk
T: 07818 252244

East
E: gill.barham@bef.co.uk
T: 07818 252244

South West
E: anne.clarke@bef.co.uk
T: 07912 387412

South East
E: anne.clarke@bef.co.uk
T: 07912 387412

North East
E: emma.white@bef.co.uk
T: 07900 811377

London
E: jodievm@aim.com
T: 07815670035

As ever, if you have any news you'd like to share, feel free to drop us a line: info@abbeyviewequine.com