Hello again,

I have just launched my new Wordpress website specifically designed for my local, New Zealand, market. I feel it’s important to keep in mind that there are some slight differences in the local market to, for example, the US market.

Our economy is a bit different, our business landscape features mainly small businesses and hardly any large corporates and we are the country of Kiwi ingenuity (which means, we do a lot ourselves). So, thinking of this I believe that Kiwis want to read some different things than international visitors. Please correct me if you feel that I’m wrong.

One major difference is, for example, that there are not many Virtual Assistants in New Zealand. If you do a search, you will probably find a handfull of women who call themselves Virtual Assistants, but they usually run their business under the secretarial services or secretarial support header. 

But not all Virtual Assistants are secretaries who just work out of a home office, many international Virtual Assistants add online marketing, ecommerce and social media marketing to their repertoire. This is a whole new field that New Zealand based Secretarial Services can bite their teeth into.

Marketing services is usually more brick and mortar driven here. Many local marketing consultants will focus on the offline activities while online marketing falls into the hand of webdesigners. Unfortunately, the webdesigners are often not skilled in online marketing (the psychological bits). They are amazing when it comes to the design of stunning websites, but the whole area of persuasion, customer involvement and content effectiveness seems to be something that needs some updating.

Another thing is that many Kiwis haven’t really made use of the idea of blogging yet. Many NZ websites with blogs I’ve visited so far hardly ever update their blogs. There’s usually one post made in May, another one in September and maybe one to say Merry Christmas or Happy New Year.

What is missing is the understanding that blogs can be immensely powerful. Looking at the 6 and 7 figure earning international bloggers (check out some of these blogs on my links page) the tool of blogging is highly undervalued. Ok, I understand that most of us will never earn that sort of money with our blog posts, but how about reputation management and customer relations?

Aren’t we all still stuck in the olden times when a business or service would look down on us, the little customer, and don’t ask how we like the service or products. The thing is only that people have changed. We are not that “quiet” anymore and we don’t believe in the authority of businesses anymore. And it’s not only Enron’s fault.It’s that we woke up and found our voices. We want to have a say and if we can’t have that, we just stop buying from these businesses. Easy. And the businesses don’t know why. Hmmm.

Maybe a blog could help to listen to the customer and finding out what they think or what they need. It’s well worth trying. I definitely will.