Awareness Post Card

This morning we sent out a press release for our long time client Rainforest Rescue to help generate media attention for the Save the Cassowary Campaign. Our mission was to get a press release to all the major and regional print, radio and tv outlets across Australia. A big job was made easy and cost effective by using a long time bit of bush magic through AAPT’s medianet service. In just over an hour the release below was emailed to 500 journalists across Australia. Here is a link to the release on AAPTs site. http://www.aapmedianet.com.au/MNJ/Release.aspx?R=660900&K=8639255

MEDIA RELEASE for immediate release: June 23rd, 2010
Going Going Gone?
National Save the Cassowary Campaign Launch

The Rainforest Information Centre officially launches their new nationwide campaign, Save the Cassowary, on Wednesday, June 23rd. The endangered Southern Cassowary (Australia) perches on the edge of extinction with perhaps as few as 1000 remaining in the tropical rainforests of Far North Queensland.
“The Cassowary, third largest bird in the world, is a keystone species, crucial for the preservation of rainforest diversity” says Ruth Rosenhek, director of the Rainforest Information Centre. “If they go, so too will many of the rainforest trees that depend on them for their survival. The ancient Wet Tropics in Far North Queensland rely on these flightless birds to disperse and germinate seeds of at least 80 rainforest trees and another 70 plants. “The primary threats to the Cassowary are loss of habitat and road kill associated with development. The increase of traffic through Cassowary habitat has resulted in 4 adult cassowaries being killed on roads near Mission Beach in the last 7 months.
Dog attack and obstacles to free movement in the landscape such as fences are also major threats being introduced by residential development. “At Mission Beach, subdivisions are creating more than 1000 new residential blocks and in the Daintree, 185 rainforest properties are zoned for development,” says Rosenhek. “Clearing and development of these properties would cut off essential wildlife corridors and severely fragment prime Cassowary habitat. “In 2008, Peter Garrett halted an inappropriate development at Mission Beach, now known as ‘Garrett’s Corridor’. “The Minister found the development proposal to be clearly unacceptable under the EPBC Act because of the impact it would have on the endangered Cassowary. “This was a positive step in the right direction, however there’s a lot more work to do to save this species in Australia. We’re urging Environment Minister Peter Garrett to commit $60 million for a final buyback of prime Cassowary habitat land in the Daintree and for buyback, landowner incentives and management of Cassowary habitat in Mission Beach.” The campaign also asks Queensland state government to reinstate the Daintree Ferry Levy to create an ongoing source of funds for land purchase in the Daintree.

The campaign invites supporters to sign postcards and to take cyber action on their website at www.savethecassowary.org.au. Already the Australian public have signed 2500 submissions asking Minister Garrett to take action on this very important issue and a growing list of organisations have endorsed the campaign including Friends of the Earth, Australians for Animals, the Humane Society International, The Community for Coastal and Cassowary Conservation (C4), Kuranda EnviroCare Inc. and Zoos Victoria. “Cassowaries have a reputation for being dangerous to people and domestic animals.” says Rosenhek. “However, it is us humans who are imperilling this beautiful bird and their forest homes; the fate of the Southern Cassowary in Far North Queensland rests in our hands.”

ENDS:

For more information, visit www.savethecassowary.org.au, email: enquiries@savethecassowary.org.au or phone (02) 6689 7519.

CONTACTS:
Ruth Rosenhek (Director, Rainforest Information Centre)
PH: (02) 6689 7519 e: rainforestinfo@ozemail.com.au

Mike Berwick, (Terrain, Far North Queensland)
PH: 0419 022 629, e: mikeb@terrain.org.au

To finish off the blog I want to brag about my mother. Here is a picture of Mum the last time we were all on her farm with her and Thor. We all proudly put up a Century Farm sign that had long faded away and that Mum had brought back to life.

Eleanor Milton proudly in front of 'new' old farm sign.

It’s amazing to have an opportunity to capture over 150 years of family history and create something that the next generations can access, understand and be a part of. Long live family farms and social media.

Great Press for Ivan from Ivanity Shave

Well done Ivan and I am looking forward to coaching Anthony Wardrop your Sales & Marketing Manager. This product is very much deserving of way more earned media.

As much as I enjoy working on other peoples brands and businesses it just does not compare to the freedom and excitement of working on an in-house project. Our latest in-house project even has the word house in it: House Cow. Last week I was working hard at the urging of our farm consultant Peter Learn from Nogo Farms in Restoule Ontario to come up with a plan for marketing and selling cows for the Four Girl Dexter Stud (another in-house project). It came to me that the real special thing about our cows is that that they are perfect “house cows”. I have only recently become familiar with the term house cow which has come up whenever I talk to people about our cows and how we milk them by hand an my wife Alison then processes our whole milk for our family and friends. Many people recall growing up doing the exact same thing on their family farms and they referred to the cow they milked as their house cow; as compared to the other cows on their farm that were there for meat and even milking on a larger scale.

When I come up with ideas for a business my mind goes into start up mode, and having started over a dozen businesses, it has had allot of practice. The first thing that usually comes to my mind in this digital age is a domain name linked to my idea. If you can’t own a place on the web for your idea your idea does not have much of a chance to come to fruition. As soon as house cow came to me I checked to see if it was available. Darn housecow.com gone. With the Gold gone I checked for the silver and bronze was able to register housecow.com.au and I have just registered housecow.ca.

It’s all fine and well to have a cool domain name but how do you make money from it. Well in this instance my original goal was to use this keyword rich domain name to publish useful information about milking cows for home use and then referencing our Dexter Stud website for people who wanted to have a go. Another thing that came to me was that the site could be sponsored and supported by products, services and organisations in related fields. In particular I we want to approach this great company who use milk to make some lovely products, including udder cream–www.moogoo.com.au

There are a few more angles to my home grown plan that we will share in time. Right now I need to write Andrew the first blog so he can be ready to launch our custom wordpress site and I better get Nighean a creative brief so she can come up with a unique wordpress design. Here is a sneak peak at an image I hope helps–meet Condamine our families first house cow who we bought for Christmas in 2008 along with 3 other Dexter cows.

Morley Falling out of a Tree from Gregory Cromwell on Vimeo.

There are many reasons for this but the thing it boils down to most often is that their website/shopping cart does not generate enough visits to find consumers that are interested in what they are selling. Using a bricks and mortar metaphor if your had a store that was boarded up and had a chain on it would you expect to make many sales? No.

The same goes for selling online. You need people to come into your online shop and have a look. The way they are going to find you is most likely via search. The question is are people searching for what you have? Here is a list of the most popular shopping search words.

Chart: Top Google Ecommerce Searches

Tags:

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If you are not lucky enough to be selling shoes or boots what does this chart say? One thing that stands out is Ebay. If you want to get a sense of your selling ability online for anything then having a go at ebay is essential. It gives you a good idea of what people are willing to pay (or not) for the product you have.

Let’s hope for a better success ratio of selling things online for our clients in 2010. One of the ways we will make sure this happens is that we will ensure our clients to a thorough job at establishing and working with us to get a strong search strategy in place from the start.

One of the first things you do in the digital world is to do an internet search for people, businesses, services or whatever you need to write about. Then you can madly copy and paste them onto a document and before you  know it you have page after page of bla after bla and then you start to edit it to suit your needs. After working up a sweat you find yourself with a couple hundred plagarised words that at first read make you feel like the deed is done but when you read them again they sound like the worst re-run ever. Believe me I have done this so many times and have the gigs on my hard drive to prove it.

Today I tried something different when Andrew Bleakley reminded me that I was responsible for writing an About us, about us for our new website and other social media related activities. After cutting and pasting the best words from the best advertising and digital design sites I could find, not to mention cursing flash sites that you can’t cut and paste from it came to me. Ironically it came to me when I was writing down, yes writing and I was even using a fountain pen. These need to be my words: Fresh from my cranium and unique to our team and what we do. So without further a do, here is what I have come up with about us.

ABOUT US

Bush Branding & Marketing is an independent, full service, digital creative agency. Our team members were birthed in the 60s, 70s and 80’s so we know our ways around the traditional and digital world. We offer you our international experience in design, development and promotion. What sets us apart is our entrepreneurial spirit and work ethic. Our founder has started up and continues to manage a handful of businesses that keeps our team busy and on our toes when it comes to delivering measurable results. We are really good at coming up with ideas that will take flight like a feather. On the other hand we know how to push the back end of an elephant up a steep hill if that’s what it takes to get the job done.

Bush Marketing has not won any awards and it never will. We applaud agencies that have the time and money to enter the never ending list of award shows; however, when our days and nights are done we can think of much better ways to have fun like thinking of new ways to grow the brands in our care (especially our own).

The internet has changed all this. As it seems to do quite often. Let me put this question to you–if you are interested in buying or renting a home how would you find one? It’s not a long shot to predict that at some point in time you will be on the internet looking at real estate sites or real estate agent sites to check out prices, pictures and features of prospective dream homes.

When we first put our property on the market our agent let us know that there are 3 p’s to successfully selling property: price, promotion and presentation. Last week we took care of price with an extreme reduction and presentation (sadly we had to give our tenants notice so we could present the property vacant). This week we are doing our part with promotion.

Promotion online really comes down to pictures. Plenty of pictures to capture the key selling features of your property. Another P-get a professional photographer if you really want to let your home and land shine. We have had some professional shots done but we also wanted to show people how much hard work (and hard cash) we have spent to get our 10 acres that were formally camphor and noxious weed infested to the pretty paddocks they are now. An hour of reviewing 1000’s of pictures and I selected about 100 and have uploaded them to flickr. Living by the less is more motto Alison is helping me cull them down to a dozen of the best shots for our agent to review and use. Being impetuous I can’t wait for the selects and want to share all of my picks using flickr slideshow. Here we go. If you have sometime help us out and comment on the pictures that stand out to you.

It’s hard for me as an apple mac user and an advocate of open source everythingness to comprehend why any organisation, person and especially government would use Internet Explorer. It would be like taking the tyres off your car and replacing them with square pieces of stone to go from Firefox or my new love Chrome to Microsoft’s clunky old browser.

The digital age is well and truly upon us and people will no doubt go to panic stations about this. With any luck this will spur people on to looking at open source alternatives to expensive, easy to hack and likely to attract attack software. There is no real need to panic unless you are the sort of person who likes to send cash in the mail in an unlicked envelope. Stop using Internet Explorer and look download for free a superior alternative. Taste the goodness of open source.

Please feel free to contact Andrew Bleakley and Greg Cromwell if you have any questions about technology, the internet and life’s bigger questions (perhaps we will need to meet over a beer for this one)

Useful Links from Andrew