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Small Business Expo – Christchurch

Posted August 29th, 2007 by peter

For the past few days I have been in Christchurch. One major reason was to visit the Small Business Expo held in the excellent Christchurch Convention Centre venue. The other reason of course was to catch up with our Christchurch clients.  Whilst in Christchurch we stayed at Azena Motels, who is of course one of our clients. Naturally we do business with our own clients first.

Right now I am staying the night in Kaikoura at Kaikoura Gateway Lodge (yes unashamedly another client) as we head home tomorrow calling in on other Kaikoura and Marlborough clients.

Whilst the small business expo does not conclude until Friday, it was good to take time out today and meet people in Canterbury businesses. To see what some of the latest offerings are that can help us at @ web one prosper in the future and in turn provide a better service to our own clients.. Craig would not let me take the cheque book, which is just as well as I could have easy spent a few $K.

Arriving just after the opening time of 9am this morning I made my way round the ground floor where the exhibitors were displaying their wares, and spent the next 5 hours talking with and being "seduced" by the various suppliers/vendors whose products/services I was interested in.

After wining a can of Red Bull by throwing a gumboot at a couple of hanging cans and actually hitting one of them (I will take that back to work for Gareth) at the Vero stand, I meet an interesting character from a company who does similar things as us. They had a Content management system which had been created over the past few years, which he claimed had 7 million dollars spent on development. Terrance (the owner) spend some time explaining to me the benefits of the system, and why we should embrace it and be a reseller for it. It all looks very nice, but to commit our clients into a system which we have no control over, would not be a good thing for us, so I politely declined. Terrance explained to me the simplicity of the system of adding new pages etc, and said that his clients changed their sites almost on a daily basis, it was that easy. We got into quite a discussion about this, because I thought this was pretty good stuff. We all know the benefits of regular page updates, but from our experience, even though we give our clients with cms websites the ability and training to update their sites on a regular basis, only about 10% actually do it. It will depend on their product of course, their target market and the skill levels of the web site owner, but despite our reminders to those whom will obviously benefit from those daily/weekly changes, it does not happen. I asked Terrance to tell me who his clients are that do undertake regular changes so I could monitor his claims, but he politely declined.

The next great discussion was with a chap from Statistics New Zealand. I had read somewhere recently that Statistics New Zealand were about to provide free, various New Zealand stats that they had previously charged for, so I took the opportunity to question him about this. Although he was pretty uncommitted to what was going to provided free, he did say "watch our newsletters for details in the next few months" so I joined their email list. Maybe I will win a free laptop to, which could save Financial Controller Craig the distress of writing a purchase order soon. Watch this space….. for details of Statistics NZ offerings. Could be of particular interest to many of you.

As I made my way through the various stands, one thing though was very clear. There are some great businesses in New Zealand who are doing very clever things. Voice over Internet Protocol, also called VoIP is becoming BIG, with quite a few vendors offering services to help businesses reduce their communication costs, and even with (in my opinion) 3rd world broadband speeds in NZ (but that’s another story) the quality is getting pretty good.

I had the fortune to spend a little time talking with Brendon McNeill of securepaytech.com who brought me up to speed with his company’s offerings of a secure payment gateway for credit cards. I was pretty impressed with what I heard and we will follow up this with him. Most similar services we have checked out for clients in the past are TOO bloody hard and time consuming (therefor expensive for our client to implement). Lets hope that Brendon’s solution meets our expectations.

Another interesting conversation was with Bruce Wilson of Action Coach. Bruce has had a similar practical marketing background to me, and now he helps other business owners maximise their potential by offering solid practical proven advice on how  to work on their business (rather than in).

QJumpers is a company who offers what appears to be a unique way of finding suitable job applicants for businesses. Shortly we are going to be looking for another graphic artist of Gareth’s caliber, so it was quite enlightening to know what they could do to help possibly in the future.

One could dribble on for quite some time about the expo. Having a business in Nelson has its advantages (I don’t have to list them of course – we who live and work in Nelson know what they are), but there are some disadvantages too. Like having to travel such a long way to attend such an event. The other thing which I should mention is the National Bank Seminar Series which are being held over the 3 days with some pretty special speakers. Unfortunately I did not have time to attend any of the seminars, but would very much like to have.

Overall, I think the expo was a brillant opportunity to network and find out a lot about what products and services out there which can help @ web one grow. If you have time, get there now – if not, hopefully it will be done again next year.

There was only one disappointing experience I had which I explain below.

At the expo there were 3 other businesses that work in a similar internet realm as @ web one. I spoke to one person without revealing who I was. I spotted a service his company offered conducting website audits. I asked him what sort of things were done, and was immediately informed that one of the things included "keyword checking". He explained that keyword meta tags were extremely important and that they were used by search engines to identify content of the web page so that page would be placed in the search engines so people could find them. Pardon????? I told him that the major search engines took absolutely no notice of meta tag kewords, and had not done so for a number of years, and to avoid arguing the point I walked off in disgust.
This was because I was annoyed that a reasonbly well known internet marketing company were telling their potential clients such old seo myths, and obviously did not closely follow the industry at all, really got up my nose. To think that businesses were paying this particular company for such ill informed information just does not seem right. One can expect such nonsense from less experienced unprofessional businesses who claim to "know it all" but a company who represented themselves at the expo is just not on. It does our industry no favours.

Say no more….