PCM appears in the Yorkshire Post for its silent movie inspired by The Artist
After the recent launch of our new Server Disaster Recovery service which used a PCM Ltd silent movie production to help publicise it, there has been much positive feedback from prospects and clients alike! Now PCM has appeared in the Yorkshire Post no less, for the in-house produced movie.
The video was inspired by the recently acclaimed silent movie, "The Artist". A silent movie seemed to be a perfect way to promote the server disaster recovery service given the almost slap-stick nature of some of them. The whole film was made entirely in-house at PCM, with the screenplay and story boarding created by marketing manager, Sula Windgassen, the filming and editing done near expertly by production manager, Matt Feeny; and starring roles going to managing director, Adrian Shaw and IT programmer and engineer Lukasz Kisala.
It was decided that a video would be the perfect way to try and engage interest in the new service which focuses on the protection of business continuity, because of the inherently dry nature of the subject matter. "There's only so many different ways you can write about the importance of business continuity and having a server backup" states Sula. There had been a lot of talk about creating a PCM funny video after the electronic Jibjab card sent by Ula Gebura at Christmas which featured the PCM team faces on the bodies of elves dancing around a Christmas tree. The video was sent out to clients and featured on the website and caused a huge gain in website traffic. Therefore when the opportunity to create a video with a strong marketing message in it came along, it was welcomed with open arms.
Click the link in the text to have a look at the PCM silent movie or to find out more about the new PCM service. If you would like to hear more from our team about the making of the video please do give us a call. Alternatively you can follow us on LinkedIn, by clicking the links on our team profiles.
Yorkshire loan company suffers massive data loss crisis
The personal details of 1.4 million customers and thousands of staff were found to be missing just before Christmas. It is not clear whether the data was lost or stolen and as the tapes were not encrypted it means that the potential for accessing the confidential data is a lot bigger.
An investigation has been started, police have been informed as has the Financial Services Authority and the Information Commissioner. This security breach has been said to be "potentially serious" by the data watchdog. The company has admitted that the missing data could be used fraudulently which is doubtlessly of no comfort to their 1.4 million customer base. The details contained names, addresses, payment histories and date of birth of many customers as well as National Insurance numbers, and bank account details.
The Yorkshire Post covered the story, acknowledging that the tapes were password protected however they were not encrypted. Penalties could include a fine of up to £500,000 showing the matter of data loss not to be a light one. The Information Commissioner, Christopher Graham had warned in October that the number of data security breaches within the private sector continues to rise with 58% more breaches being reported to the ICO than the year before. He stated that "companies need to consider the damage that can be done to their reputation".
PCM offer a Remote Data Backup service which provides an automatic means of backing up, encrypting information that is backed up and transferred to a secure server. To find out more about the benefits of Remote Data Backup and the advantages over tape and other commonly used methods of backup, visit our Remote Data Backup page. For further advice please don't hesitate to get in touch with one of our team on 0113 231 1066.
Success stories: social media initiative & web marketing service. Thanks for your feedback
A lot of our clients will now be rather familiar with our series of social media tips that have been primarily focusing on LinkedIn and some of of them will also be using our website marketing service. For those of you who haven't heard of either you may be interested to hear the following news!
Our social media initiative came about as a response to the ever-rising trend for businesses including SMEs to use social media for business. We are also aware, having talked to a lot of our clients and other businesses, that many are uncertain of the best way to implement social media into their marketing strategy and whether it is even of any use! We wanted to break down simple strategies for effective marketing, concentrating on LinkedIn. It is always nice to receive positive feedback and we wanted to say a big thank you to those of you who have given us feedback and expressed a wish to engage further in using social media. We are always glad to be of service.
We are also pleased to announce that website marketing clients of ours, AWS Ltd are having great success having landed a huge deal recently. More details on this are to follow. In the meantime if you would like to find out more about our website marketing service you can visit the service page or alternatively give us a call and we'd be happy to give you more details or arrange a meeting.
Happy New Year, new services and new prosperity!
PCM wish a happy New Year to all and hope that you had a very merry Christmas. We are now excited to see in the new year with the launch of our new service, Server Disaster Recovery and with more personal introduction to our new member of our web marketing team, Lara.
Before Christmas we hinted that we would be able to offer a new service at the beginning of this new year and we are near ready to unveil it! We are going to bring to you a bigger and better business continuity solution for when disaster strikes. It means that if you lost your server through disaster, rather than losing valuable trading time restoring your various operating systems and then all of your data, we could provide you with a complete replica of your server right away.
By way of introduction to this new service and to one of our new members of the team, Lara will be doing her best to call our clients to talk a little bit about the service. To kick off the new year with humour, we have been more than a little amused to find that one of our clients enjoyed our all-singing-all-dancing Christmas tribute from our team that it was sent around the entire office which proceeded to slow everything down for a while! Sorry about that, but always glad to be of entertainment... and there is more where that came from! Watch this space.
Festive Welcomes and Farewells
In the lead up to Christmas and New Year we are keen to update everyone on our new staff members and bid a fond farewell to others. We are delighted that Lorencia has taken to PCM like a duck to water and you may now find out more about her on "Our Team" Section.
We are also happy to report that Ula is doing very well settling into her maternity leave and blessed us with the interactive Christmas card that can be watched in the previous news upload.
It seems that New Year is indeed the time for change as we are sad to announce that Andrej has now left PCM, to go back to Lithuania. We wish him all the best and thank him profusely for his work here. Not only was it much valued, it was a subject of admiration amongst the team! Some may then also find it uncanny that we have managed to find ourselves an Andrej replacement... also called Andrej! We look forward to having him work with us in the New Year.
So a very Happy Christmas to our team, past and present and to all of our lovely clients. If you haven't already, please do watch our Christmas video of our team rocking around the Christmas tree.
Happy Christmas from the PCM team. Watch us rocking around the Christmas tree!
As a special Christmas treat we have put together a festive jig performed by the PCM team! Yes it is true, you can watch team members including Managing Directors in a top class production of the old favourite Christmas tune. Have a look; you are sure not to be disappointed.
We wish all of you the very best of Christmas cheer and hope that you enjoy the festivities of the season as much as we enjoyed this video (and hope you do too). There are two versions, featuring the different staff members, so if you are disappointed that you can't see Lukasz, Nico, Lara, Matt or Sula in one video, make sure that you check out the other below.
Merry Christmas everybody!
Welcoming Lorencia to our team
It's an emotional time here at PCM with our beloved Ula leaving us to take her maternity leave next week and welcoming in a brand new member of the team to take over. Lorencia has been undergoing training for the past few weeks so she is ready to hit the ground running next week.
Although we are sad to see Ula go, we are very excited for her own new arrival who is due in the New Year. We're also very happy to have Lorencia join our team and look forward to the new year with a new staff member. We will be adding Lorencia to our team page very shortly.
In addition we are in the process of recruiting for a new member to join our production team and will hopefully be welcoming someone in January. Lastly, we are pleased to report that Lara has been settling in very well with us at PCM and doing a great job for our web marketing clients.
PCM's new social media initiative
For a while now businesses have increasingly been getting involved in social media marketing, creating profiles online and interacting with their client base. Big corporations have had the financial resources to outsource this work to dedicated social media companies who plan and implement campaigns on their behalf.
For smaller businesses however, this is not an option and they have begun to wonder how best they could implement their own social media strategies in-house.
Since launching our new website marketing service which incorporates the use of social media (depending on the requirements of the client), PCM have decided to provide our clients with some basic advice and steps to start creating a social media presence and utilising it effectively. We will be sending our existing clients a series of tips for use of LinkedIn, twitter and facebook. This information will handle the basics of setting up individual and company profiles as well as tips for most efficient use of them in tackling different targets.
We will be encouraging our clients to connect to us on our different social media sites and be enhancing our website to facilitate our own social media strategies. If you would like to know more about social media for business or our website marketing service you can call a member of the team.
A letter and email has already been sent to those of our clients who appeared not to have LinkedIn and we will be sending out more information in the coming weeks.
Forget Me Not Children's Hospice - family fun day
We are pleased to announce our client, The Forget Me Not Children's Hospice, is having a family fun day on Saturday 5th November 2011 between 10am and 4pm.
The day aims to showcase their brand new hospice with:
- Guided tours
- Cake & refreshment sales
- Arts & crafts
- Face painting
- A variety of family activities
We wish them all the best and hope the day goes well. Please see the attached PDF flyer for more information.
Wolseley UK sells Encon group to management buy-out
Our client, Encon, has been sold by Wolseley UK to a management buy-out, led by Stuart Moore.
The team at PCM wish them all the best!
The importance of a thorough website consultation: Get yours free!
When a company decides that they want to proceed with getting a website built it is usually a big decision. There are a lot of considerations to take into account, not least budget; time-frame, branding, providing content, pictures, design concepts- the list goes on.
Generally the main impetus and emphasis from companies’ wanting a website developed, is the nagging notion to keep up with the competition and make a presence on the world-wide-web. This being the case a lot of other important considerations in the design and development can be neglected and forgotten in the process if there is no solid structure set out initially.
As with most things that require production, it is essential to draw up a comprehensive brief to precisely convey the details that will all contribute to bringing the concept accurately to life. This means that it is very important to have an initial meeting to decide exactly on the features that the website is to include, the design, the functionality and structure, the aims and the audiences. Such a meeting should shape into a website development brief.
At PCM we call this the “requirements gathering process” which is integral to all of our website development projects. In honour of this belief, we are offering free website development consultation to clients wishing to create websites. Our specialist team will work with you to ascertain your goals and the desired functionality of your website.
This offer can be viewed on Google Places. We are here to think of everything you don’t! For more information please don’t hesitate to call us on 0113 236 1066 or get in touch via our contact form. Don’t forget to print your voucher.
Welcome our new team member to aid us on our new website marketing service
We are thrilled to welcome Lara Verney to the PCM team. Lara has joined us to facilitate our new website marketing service which we have recently launched and currently provide for some of our clients. Lara is a Leeds University graduate with experience in PR and marketing and has hit the ground running since she started.
Our new website marketing service is designed to ensure that websites do not become stagnant and stale, and instead work actively to increase exposure of an organisation and convert interest into enquiries and/or sales. The methodology involved in this combines technical skill in the alteration and enhancement of websites as well as marketing expertise to direct the changes and compliment them with strategies to generate increased positive exposure of the website.
Lara is involved in the marketing side of the service which allows her to exercise creative thinking as to the best ways of publicising our clients online. Although Lara has a 1st class degree in music, her passion lies in marketing and is meticulous in her work. With a range of clients that benefit from our service the job provides variety in that the strategies and work involved is the same for no two clients due to requirements arising from sector, business aims and existing processes.
You can find out more about Lara in our team section and to find out more about our website marketing service in our website production section.
Partnership with Leeds Law Society giving extra benefits to members
Leeds Law Society has recently launched their new website which contains lots of new helpful features for its members. Along with a comprehensive calendar of the training and social events that they hold, the website contains an array of resources for members to use.
One of such resource which PCM are proud to have a part in is the membership benefit area which lists the different services that Leeds Law Society members can enjoy a discount on. PCM present a range of service offers to the members of Leeds Law Society and would encourage lawyers to take advantage of them.
In order to enhance our site we are also to create a “partners” section which will detail the different partnerships that we have which may provide benefits to certain users. In the meantime, to see what we offer to Leeds Law Society members on services such as IT support, data backup and website production you may click here.
AVG AntiVirus 2012 now available
Every business should have adequate antivirus protection across their network. This helps to ensure that your PCs and servers run as they should do, stopping infections from malicious programs, emails and websites, which would otherwise disrupt your business.
PCM are an AVG Antivirus Gold Reseller. One of the reasons we settled on AVG as our partner for antivirus software was that they are committed to keeping on top of current threats and continuously improving their software. That, coupled with excellent technical support, ensures that we are able to offer our clients the best possible protection.
AVG 2012, released at the start of September, uses fewer resources on your systems and you're therefore less likely to notice AVG scanning and protecting your computer. We'll be contacting our existing IT support customers in the coming weeks to implement an upgrade to the latest software.
If you are unsure where you are suitably protected against malicious attacks, please feel free to contact us – we’d be happy to assess which package fits your needs.
Brochure downloads now available
We've updated our website to add some useful PDF brochures that you can download. The PDFs are available for our Website Marketing service, Remote Data Backup, Google Apps, Direct IT Support and Comprehensive IT Support.
If you would like to get an overview of the services PCM offers, you can also download our service brochure.
You may have noticed... we've rebranded!
After extensive preparation we are delighted to have launched our rebrand on the first of September. This marks a big change and development in PCM, as not only have we lost our dull, dated and generic logo, we have also added to our service offering, our team and our social media outlets!
The pictures of our old website demonstrate just how much we were in need of change- and change we have. You can now follow and hear from us on facebook, twitter and linkedin where we now are rather active in "liking", commenting, tweeting and updating! We are also pleased to announce that following our article in June where we advertised that we were recruiting for a marketing assistant, we have now added a lovely new member to our team.
Lara Verney started this September and we will be adding her to our team page along with a dashing picture and a bit about her.We have now issued a letter and email to all of our clients regarding our rebrand and we are currently in the process of visiting as many as we can to give them our brand new service brochure detailing exactly what we do. This includes our new website marketing service which you can find out more about on our website marketing page or alternatively call us and we'll be happy to have a chat about it!
PCM launches Encon's sister site, Nevill Long
After the successful launch of the Encon site, PCM are pleased to announce the launch of the Nevill Long website. Nevill Long is a division of Encon Insulation Ltd, and is a specialist distributor, dealing in the supply of fit out interiors such as ceilings, partitioning and drywall systems as well as flooring, lighting, fire proofing and insulation. To have a look at their site please visit: http://www.nevilllong.co.uk
Websites can actually LOSE companies business
In a recent article published by the BBC, it was revealed that online sales can be cut by up to 50% by committing one simple mistake. Contrary to what most may assume, this mistake is not a technical mistake which needs an IT company to rectify, nor is it a design issue that requires an expensive website designer to amend...
It is spelling!
Apparently one single spelling mistake can reduce online sales by half. In the BBC report it was said that poor spelling is actually costing the UK millions.
Why? Faulty spelling loses a company credibility, as visitors to the site become more weary about the competence and reliability of the company which allows for mistakes to feature on their website.
The best plan of action for any company with a website that does not have a dedicated copy writer and/proof reader would be to outsource. The cost of proof reading and copy writing at PCM is inexpensive and very worthwhile when considering the business that could potentially be lost.
For businesses that have websites that are out of date, or lack finesse of design, it may be especially important to encourage visitors to buy from them. Such businesses also need to be aware that spell check is not necessarily the safest option to avoid the issue:
"Eye have a spelling chequer,
It came with my Pea Sea.
It plane lee marks four my revue
Miss Steaks I can knot sea."
For more information take a look at the BBC story http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-14130854.
If you are worried about the content featured on your website, why not give us a call?
We're Recruiting- why not join us?
As part of PCM's expansion and development, we are now recruiting for 2 additions to our team. We are looking for a marketing assistant and a finance and administration assistant. Both roles are part time initially, with a view to develop into full time roles. For more details you can look at our adverts on the Gumtree.
Marketing assistant: http://www.mytinyurl.net/4501c6
Finance and administration assistant: http://www.mytinyurl.net/680723
We look forward to hearing from you!
Richard conquers the Great North Swim
We're pleased to hear that Richard Holdsworth of 2-3D Design successfully completed the mile long swim in Lake Windermere. Blessed with a lovely day for it, Richard said that it wasn't too cold and he celebrated his charitable achievement by stopping for a meal in Addingham on the way back home. Around 10, 000 people swam over a period of 3 days raising over £1 million. We'd like to congratulate Richard on his sponsorship raised of £375. For more information on the event visit www.greatswim.org.
PCM Associate allows SEO insight in Brand Yorkshire Magazine
In this months issue of Brand Yorkshire, our valued associate Chris Weatherhead lifts the mist on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Proficient and highly experienced in online marketing, Chris has focused his skills on SEO. For many SEO is a new age digital myth, however the article demonstrates succinctly the true value and indeed the tangibility of the popular internet marketing tool. PCM have recently started offering this valued service to clients, as well as other forms of website marketing. For more information on SEO you can read Chris's article (tinyurl.com/brandyorkshire) or contact us via email or phone.
Rat Catching On Radio
On the 14th June, a valued client of ours, Vermin Solutions appeared on BBC Radio Leeds launching the new invention of their new humane rodent traps called Rodent Eject. Such a trap is innovative and commendable in its features in that it is environmentally friendly; it avoids the use of poison which can cause a slow and painful death, unlike the trap which is instantaneous. Furthermore it means that rodents can be killed and collected in larger quantities saving on the carbon footprint of pest controllers who have to drive back and forth to collect one rodent at a time for disposal. The product is also made out of recyclable material and uses air pressure to power the trap. As it is now clear that rodent infestation is a prominent problem within Yorkshire, it seems that they have launched the product at the right time. We are honored to have created their informational site www.r-eject.com rapidly in time for their radio appearance for them. We wish Vermin Solutions the best of luck and look forward to continue working with them.
