While working on the next snail mail edition of the Let’s Grow newsletter, I did some trolling for good examples of email signup boxes. They were surprisingly difficult to find. Here were three that stood out:
(Click headline for more…)
Check Out This Garden Industry Discussion Group
For a while now, I’ve been enjoying reading The Blogging Nurseryman, which Trey Pitsenberger of Golden Gecko Nursery Center in Garden Valley, CA has been writing faithfully for the last three years. Trey recently started an interesting discussion group on LinkedIn titled Garden Centers, Nurseries and New Media. While the group is geared more towards independent garden centers than the catalogers and online merchants we work with, many topics affect all of us in the gardening industry. Discussion threads include Scotts’ desire to sell Smith & Hawken, the role of big box stores, and what we can learn from Hines Nursery’s recent bankruptcy, among others.
The discussion group is just a couple months old, and membership appears to be growing rapidly. Members include a wide range of professionals, including garden center owners, catalogers, wholesalers, editors, writers and service providers. To learn more about, read Trey’s description or jump right in and join the LinkedIn group. Hats off to you, Trey, for opening the lines of communication among industry members!
A Hard Lesson Learned in Backing Up
I called a client early one morning last week, and was greeted with “I can’t talk now. We had a break-in last night and they took a load of computers.” Not surprisingly, what should have been the easiest part – restoring the data – turned out to be much harder than replacing the actual computers. Even with insurance, the cost in both time and money is pretty huge.
For some time, I’ve been using an automatic online backup system called backup.com. At midnight every night (users select the specific time), it automatically backs up whatever files I’ve specified on every computer that is running. More than once, I’ve used backup.com to recover files that I’ve inadvertently modified or deleted. And even if there’s a fire or theft, data is easily retrieved since it’s off-site.
Rates vary depending on the amount of storage required, but are quite reasonable. A friend recently recommended a similar service, Carbonite, which may be even more affordable for some users.
A Case Study in Marketing to Gen X and Y
How to attract and market to Generation X and Y is a perpetual topic of conversation among those of us in the gardening industry. So I was intrigued to learn of Patti Moreno, a.k.a. “The Garden Girl,” a Gen Xer and urban homesteader whose mission it is to introduce gardening and sustainable living to younger generations.
Take a look at her web site and it’s obvious it wasn’t created by a 50-plus-year-old. Likewise, it’s not a traditional web site with some new technology – like podcasts and message boards – tacked on after the fact. I suspect that Patti’s target audience feels right at home on the site before they’ve read more than 10 words.
Two things in particular about The Garden Girl’s home page stand out to me:(click headline for more…)
A Surprising Use for a Blog
Today, another surprising story from Naked Conversations, the best book I’ve read about blogging, about the effectiveness of this new medium. (click headline for more…)
