What I Learnt in 2012 - Part 1

OK - no end of year predictions (2013 - year of the mobile anyone....) but these are things i learnt this year...

1. OnlineMediaExperts is a very old, clunky name for our business - its OME now. Now if i did not fear that i may disappear up my own backside - we would probably re-brand ourselves to much better cover the full service nature of our business but i fear that most (all?) clients don't care - they just want great service from people they trust. (but the new website is on its way in Q1!)

2. Good things do come from adversity. In 2011 - we lost our first major client, It caused us (after i sulked) to re-assess what we did, concentrate more on structured biz dev and maybe...maybe...just maybe try a tiny bit harder. This has meant a great year for client acquisition and existing client growth which was made even better when the old client asked if they could come back in May.

3. There is a lag between stuff that we talk about and stuff clients want to invest in. We have known it since day 1 - but we will talk about PPC, SEO, social, mobile for ages before it becomes a profit centre for this business and an effective ROI channel for our customers. PPC became properly profitable for us in about 2009-10 and this year social became a non loss-making part of our business (i still hesitate to call it profitable given man hours that go in at this end).
And this "lag" will always be the case i think.

4. This industry is and will be for foreseeable constantly in flux and that's why we love it. It must have been so dull when attraction channels were so fixed for 20 years. We all know that job boards are under pressure from aggregators, LinkedIn etc (see previous post for why i think they will be fine), we all know that FB in some way shape or form will grow stronger as a recruitment channel, we all know that mobile comms are vital for recruiters to engage with users. But, and i think this is brilliant, none of us can say with any real certainty what it will look like in 2014 let alone beyond. We can have our expert opinions but you know what they say about opinions

Part 2 to follow next week