This year has been a real roller coaster at Arena already. The first three months of the year for any florist are consumed by Valentine’s day and Mother’s day, with all florists living in mortal terror of getting it wrong and losing a lot of money. In order to get through such mega days, Valentine’s day in particular, the whole business has to be reorganised and made to operate totally differently from normal. That’s a subject for another post and another day. After the all consuming mega day adventures of the start of the year, our focus shifted to areas of the business that we’d been neglecting. One area to which we were able to give more attention was the conundrum of how to escape the clutches of Google. We spend a lot of money with Google, for clicks, and we’d really rather not. So we dived head first into ideas for getting people to our website without paying for clicks. Consequently, the last few months have been an education for us all in the lesser spotted (and less measurable) tactics of web marketing, including blogging, social bookmarking and, more recently, the internet’s latest hot topic, social networking (mainly Facebook - move over myspace/youtube/eBay, your time in the PR hotseat is over!).