Darryl King’s blog ireckon

Strange phrase good meaning! Basically at ireckon it is a process we try to live by. We are an information services company, with a goal of utilising business information profitably using technology and keeping the internet simple. So it is pretty important we actually live by that rather than just sell it.

What does it all mean though. Well if every dog food company made its staff eat it’s own dog food, you can bet they would have the best and most humanly edible dog food around. What we do and try to make sure our staff do is to eat our own dog food. This month there is a message about blogs, and what they mean. For many of you that is pretty ho hum, you already have your own blog, or are suffering from blog info overload. What we do know is there are plenty of you who hear about it but still are totally unsure what and how you could use a blog. We make our staff have a go, even if they don’t really fit into the typical mold of bloggers. We have blogs about one of our staffs stages of being pregnant, technology highlights, music… loads of things.

Importantly it helps us in keeping up with what we help you do. We use e-newsletters (ezines) ourselves, we use dynamic data tools to run our business. Many of you may not know but about 75% of our business runs on web based tools we have written in house and have been using for 6 years.

We run our own PPC (Pay per click) campaigns on search engines, our SEO works for us, we show up all over search engines for what we do, we load news onto our site every week (well mostly every week) etc.

Many companies don’t live what they do. Since I started ireckon I have tried to make sure we always try and develop from our own experiences, as well as what is current and new. It also means we learn what does and doesn’t work and hopefully helps us realise how many different ways there are to use web tools and web sites, and it helps to keep us out of just the theory and into the practical realities of running an online site. Most days we feel we get it about right, some days like you in your businesses we find things that can be improved or done differently. One thing i can guarantee we live by is a quote i have in my office:

“There is always a better way of doing something. Either you or your competitor will find out how to do it”.

To us this is a reminder that if we can digest our own dog food there is a fairly good chance it will have a pretty good taste for our customers and future customers. We also realise that some tastes don’t suit everyone so we need to have some flexibility in what we do to help get it right for our end users.

Yum! Dog food!