It's Time For Plan B...
How often have you heard that in the past year of turmoil.
Plan B have been providing tourism and hospitality consultancy, project management support, marketing and promotional planning and just plain old giving a wee hand to businesses and organisations across Scotland for a decade and a half.
Our experience in the golf and accommodation tourism sectors has expanded into offering specialist support in online marketing and business development across Scotland with increasing work with destination management organisations and indeed the public sector.
Plan B was and is a kind of ethos. In this challenging environment more than ever we all need a Plan B and fifteen years ago when the company was set up, so did I! For me it was about there always being an alternative, a different way, a solution, a way forward.
In essence it was about believing that anything was possible and that you just had to think more creatively and apply a different methododolgy to find the solution.
Plan B has followed that ethos right down the line over the past fifteen years bringing us to where we are now.
We are still supporting a wide range of tourism businesses across Scotland and indeed beyond through our own key projects
Management Consultancy: we still work on a projetc by project basis with a range of clients new and old in developing their business development and marketing strategies. In 2009 we've continued our work with Golf Tourism Scotland, launched from the ground up a development project with Scotland's West Coast Golf Links and support a range of individual businesses with their online marketing development.
Bookassist: our partnership with the Dublin based online reservations booking engine has resulted in reaching the £3 million mark for online room sales in Scotland. The technology has genuinely transformed the way some accommodation providers do business allowing them to compete in the marketplace with a world class product and online promotional strategy.
We understand that it's not only larger businesses that need to be online and our combined and unique integrated business generated content management and online reservations product "Open Rooms Scotland" provides the smallest of operators the chance to sell their rooms online.
The Edge: About four years ago we saw the need to break our web business out into a separate and dedicated e-marketing company. The Edge was formed. It now has upwards of 200 direct clients across Scotland with perhaps twice as many again using our conent management system, The Claymore Project, without them necessarily realising it.
Our web business has by necessity expanded beyond just building pretty pages and now it is essential that our clients understand and plan for the development is web 2.0 or socail media, understand the need for pro-active optimisation of their online presence and plan their online distribution. Again reiterating that their is always a need for a Plan B.
Offering full online solutions The Edge can provide off the shelf solutions for small tourism operators or full updateable bespoke solutions for large organisations.
The Claymore Project:
There's a very long and boring story behind the creation of The Claymore Project (if you type in "boring story about the creation of The Claymore Project" in the search engines you'll be able to read it!) but in short it was our strategic solution to increasing the distribution of tourism information through a bespoke content management system.
The Claymore Project allows for the distribution of Business Generated Content directly from the source of the information - the business itself - direct to the consumer through multiple distribution channels.
It has now expanded to be so much more, integrating with new channels such as Twitter, Facebook, Online Booking engines and indeed developing now to offer DMO's their very own Channel Manager giving them control over whose information they publish. Full integration with functions such as Google maps allow for graphical searches for accommodation, attractions, golf clubs and even pubs and restaurants. Events can be updated by event promotores and searched or job vacancies added.
New products powered by The Claymore Project for 2010 include Sitebuilder ProGolf, Open Rooms MMX, Destination Channelbuilder and an upgraded SiteBuilder LIte for small accommodation providers.
Scotland's For Me: This is one of those projects we've been working on forever and never really got round to doing anything with. Sure it looked pretty and showed off what we could actually do technically. Well 2010 sees an updated strategic direction in place and a fresh launch in the Spring. Bringing together content management, Social media, online reservations the project offers every business that even touches tourism in Scotland an opportunity to get involved.
So there you go. A one page summation of what Plan B is up to this year!