So the forecasters are all feeling extremely pleased with themselves having predicted recession, and been right (for once), and having all our credits crunched by a global wave of panic selling and pound stamping.

Doom and gloom is spreading and we're now all cutting back. 70g paper is replacing the 80g in the printer. The fancy Italian wrap we usually buy for lunch is now being replaced by home made sarnies. We're even considering the prospect of buying a Bernard Matthews turkey for Christmas, rather than splashing out on one from the Tesco's finest range. Bootiful!

But never fear, in our latest fun packed Christmas Credit Cruncher we have included TEN ways in which the web can make your money go a little further.

1. 1. Go paper free. Cut your costs for printers, printer ink (the price of a printer alone!!) and paper by sending as many electronic mails as possible. Slash your postage costs.
2. 2. Use Skype for your phonecalls. Be like enotions and don't use traditional phone lines. Use Skype for all your phonecalls. Calls between Skype users are free. Calls between Skype and conventional phonelines are a fraction the price of conventional to conventional phone lines.
3. 3. Buy online. Don't buy in the high street or at the superstore. Buy your office equipment, your software, your hardware, your day to day business assets online. It'll save you loads. You just need to plan ahead and show some patience as online sales is the only thing about the web that isn't immediate.
4. 4. Viral not TV. Don't spend £1,000,000 on a TV ad. Spend £1,000 on an enchanting viral and start circulating through friends and social networks.
5. 5. Nano sites, not web sites. Don't rework your main site. Create nano sites (consisting of one or two pages only) with an impactful message to underpin your brand, campaign or company. Put links to these sites from your main web site.

1. 6. Ditch the site all together. Get yourself a blogging site and customise it yourself. Set yourself up with a Company Facebook page. Set yourself up with a YouTube channel page. Use the social networks that are already established and bubbling with activity. They're free, tend to be viewed with less suspicion than a company site by users and all they need is you to keep them up-to-date.
2. 7. Cancel the morning paper. Come on. All the latest online news is up to the minute, with latest developments and comment thrown in for free!
3. 8. Traveling by train? Buy your tickets online and save a shed load of cash. You've all seen the adverts with sheep, haven't ewe? (sorry, bad bad joke - one for our farming clients)
4. 9. Consider remote working. Save on costs commuting into the office. Save on power when you're not there. Save on consumables during the day. Talk to your IT about getting your emails directed to your home PC. Download Skype and direct your calls to it. Think about it, even if you work from home one day a week, you'll save up 20% off your weekly business costs.
5. 10. Use enotions for your digital. Okay, that's slightly underhand but ... we're lean, mean and all but the techies are clean, and we're a fraction of the cost of many other digital agencies.

And if all that fails, try this advert that we found in a local London paper .... you never know.

Staff under the spotlight

Linnie Richardson
Age: 37
Based in: Enotions HQ, at a secret location just outside Salisbury.

Grim and murky past: Linnie and Rob met at University, and then spent the next ten years or so following each other around the country, working for some of the best multimedia agencies in this green and pleasant land. When Rob decided that he wanted to start up his own company back in 2002, Linnie took a deep breath and gave him her full support, knowing that Team Richardson had as good a chance as any at making a go of it.

A typical day: there actually isn't a typical day for Linnie, which she finds quite refreshing. She divides her time between dropping off and collecting children from school, spurning Anthea Turner's perfect housewife ideal by cleaning and tidying on a "visitor only" basis, and participating in the enotions' daily fun. She likes designing from a blank canvas or a well-aired concept equally, but loves a strong idea and vibrant visuals to work from.

What's the book on the bedside table? I am reading "The secret lives of Pippa Lee" at the moment. It's brilliant. But my favourite book this year has been "Random acts of heroic love" which I have passed on to Rob and he loves it too.

What's on the telly? Oh the shame... I love "Strictly come dancing"! I also love "Spooks", "Location, Location", anything that involves a couple knocking a house down, rebuilding it and almost splitting up in the process. I used to love "Heroes" and "Lost", but YOU PRODUCERS OUT THERE, you are diluting your storylines to extend the series too far!!! No-one likes weak Ribena!!!!! I also like sitting down to watch "Merlin" with the kids on Saturdays.

Interesting facts about yourself: I sing in a local group called the Dunn Valley Singers, and am a member of the Dunn Valley Players, which I love perhaps more than anything else. I also make jewellery in my spare time and used to attend pottery classes until the am-dram came along. I spend an unhealthy amount of time looking up beads on the web.

Pet hates: waffling politicians - ANSWER THE QUESTION! Traffic wardens; ditherers; impoliteness; silent phonecalls; press 1 if you require this option, etc; buck passers; pretzel crisps; chicken poo (this is a recently added pet hate).

Life's ambition: to sing a duet with Hugh Jackman. Or even just being in the same room as Hugh Jackman.

Client News

We've been dividing our time between London and Salisbury recently. The guard on the Exeter to Waterloo train knows us by name now. About 1/3 of our clients are in London and one of our most recent clients is Holborn Studios, the long established, well respected and thriving film and photography studio in the Capital. Holborn Studios is the sort of place you dream of visiting as a kid. Miles and miles of corridors, huge purpose built studios for all manner of scenes and themes, cameras, cranes, clapper boards and creatives. We were delighted to be asked to develop their new site for them.
 

Closer to home we've been working with all manner of businesses, from really cool recruitment agencies, Require Recruitment (yes, really cool recruitment agencies do exist!) to cooking up some killer virals for The Hidden Brewery. The Hidden Brewery is Salisbury's best brewer and perhaps the best real ale in the world. With the first bottles rolling off the line (to date it's been on draught apart from limited celebration runs) and distribution now extending as far as Khasakhstan (Borat loves the stuff) we've got the opportunity through tactical viral campaigns to turn the world on to finding The Hidden Brewery.

Groovy Technology of the Month - Harvest / Co-op:

By Sebastian Grant - Head of Development

For well over a year now, enotions has employed the services of two paid online applications to keep the operations side of the business running smoothly.

The first of these applications was the company chatroom, provided by CampFire (www.campfirenow.com) - we used this to track everyone's movements and keep in touch with everyone working on a day to day basis; the other our time tracking, estimating and invoicing software, Harvest (www.harvestapp.com).

These software applications have helped us to become an efficient "virtual company" - able to plan projects and manage our resources to a degree never before seen at enotions.

Recently we have been looking at ways to streamline our process, reduce overheads and more accurately plan and resource projects; it was around the same time that Harvest released their new online application "Co-op" (www.coopapp.com) - a free application that lets managers and other staff view exactly what each member of the team is working on at this precise moment and for the rest of the day. What's more is that Co-op also links in with Harvest's time tracking web service and is a free service.

By using Co-op our team have managed to more accurately track time on projects, keep everyone up to date at the same time, reduce the "witty banter" in the chat room and increase efficiency and resource planning accuracy at the same time as reducing the number of web services the team are required to log into and reduce the cost overhead of Campfire.

In short, this technology is groooooovy! Tying the process together nicely whilst increasing efficiency and decreasing overheads! Definitely a winner in my book!

Client spot

This time around we're looking at Carol Hayes Management, one of our longest standing and most respected of customers. Carol Hayes, who was introduced to us back in 2003 through our joint work on PJ Smoothies, runs the leading fashion stylist booking agency in London, Carol Hayes Management.

We have been responsible for maintaining their site with latest stylist work, events and news for the past 5 years. A dedicated team manage the site for her so that updates are made swiftly and correctly.

Carol Hayes Management have over 150 stylists on their books, including the likes of Gok Wan, Kirsty Drury and Maureen Vivian, styling for films shoots, magazines, cat walks and junkets.

We're immensely fond of Carol, her team and her agency for their attitude, the opportunities they have brought us and, of course, the work they've given us over the years - we cannot recommend them highly enough.

How we work?

Last time we sang the merits of Campfire but nothing stays around for long on the web. This time around, we've ditched Campfire and embraced it's better cousin, Co-Op.

Co-Op is much the same as Campfire, with the ability to log in, say 'Hi' and say what you're working on for the rest of the team's benefit. However, what Co-Op does that Campfire didn't is it combines the day to day chat with the ability to log your time on projects, there and then.

At the top of the page, you can choose the 'Track time' tab and, from the tab, pick the project you're working on and what task you're doing on that project. Enter in a description of the task, click 'Enter' and bingo, the time starts to be tracked. Even better, within our time tracking and billing system, the description is then listed alongside the time so the project manager can instantly see how the time was spent.

HAPPY CHRISTMAS

Anyway, time to pull a cracker and tuck into some turkey. We hope you have a great Christmas and look forward to seeing you and working with you in 2009.

Here's hoping the only thing that goes crunch on your house this Christmas is Father Christmas' boots on the snow-topped roof.

Let us know what you think or if you would like to see a particular topic covered next time. Click here if you have any feedback for us. Hope to see you same time next month!

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