Plus ca change, plus la meme chose.

Says Steve Downes, MD, Juice Digital

“First of all please excuse my dodgy O’level French!

Back in 1997 when Dougal and I started Paver Downes (PD) we had pretty rapid growth in our first and second years. The point I wanted to make is that we didn’t do any classic ‘new business development’. No mailers, follow-up phone calls, cold calling etc. Now I’m not recommending this, just telling it like it was.

What we did do is PR, events, networking and win awards. You couldn’t open the Liverpool Echo or Daily Post, Insider or Adline without reading about Paver Downes. And if there was a booze up in Liverpool you could bet PD was at the heart of it. Dougal, of course, was (and still is) famous for going to the opening of an envelope. Then we entered some awards. Some we won – Business Post, IPR effectiveness and some Cream awards I seem to remember – and some we didn’t. But we were always there in the reviews, nominations, shortlists or at the ceremonies. We created awareness about the agency.

Now here we are at Juice Digital in 2009 and the world’s changed. Or has it? Corporate hospitality has declined, it’s coffee in place of lunch, conspicuous events are frowned upon, information channels for our potential clients have evolved and proliferated so Digital PR is a very different beast now.

So what do we do now? The same. We ‘social network’ on LinkedIn, Ecademy, Facebook and Twitter to name a few. We blog and get picked up by online media as thought leaders. We engage in as many online discussions as we can. And we enter awards. We’re in this year’s Big Chip awards. No idea if we’ll win, but we’ll get noticed and meet some new contacts along the way. It’s now called creating a buzz about Juice Digital.

Must admit though, we still take clients for a pint.”

Steve Downes

www.juicedigital.co.uk