Posts Tagged ‘health and safety’

How does a Health and Safety Forum Help Your Business

How does a Health and Safety Forum help your business?

Forum marketing is not new it has been around since the beginning of the internet and has been and still is one of the most effective ways to promote your business.
Follow these guidelines and you will see a good response and maximise the marketing opportunity for yourself and/or you business.

Use a credible nickname.

If you are using the forum to promote your health and safety business make sure that you use a credible nickname something that shows you are professional. You could use your business name or dare I say it your real name. By doing this you show that you have nothing to hide and that you are proud of yourself and your work. This approach will create trust from other members of the forum and will reflect positively on your business image among them, creating good publicity.

Treat others as you would wish to be treated.

Not everyone has the same knowledge and experience in health and safety as yourself in your specialist area, there will be a time when you want to find out something that you are not an expert in, remember this. The great thing about health and safety forums is that they attract a mix of individuals all looking for something slightly different. Treat them kindly and they will pay it back later.

Use your signature.

On the forum there is an option to have a signature which is displayed under any and every post you make. By having a professional looking signature that mentions your business and links to it and by being seen as an authority by always providing polite and helpful answers on the forum you literally create a free advertisement for your company or yourself. The other often overlooked advantage of the signature is that it provides back-links to your website or blog. This should not be overlooked as it has a massive advantage, search engines love forums it’s a fact. So every time you post a question, raise a debate or help somebody out with a query you create a link to you own business, that the search engines will pick up and this in turn will improve your search engine ratings.

Use polls.

A great tool that is available on the forum is the voting or/ poll tool. Use this tool, and you can ask questions to any other members in the forum. The others members will vote the answers they think are correct. This tool can be used to help you gather opinions very quickly, and could be a valuable tool for marketing research or product launch or testing.

Be discreet.

Be discreet in promoting your business. The last thing any member wants is to be sold something. It is far more effective to become a magnet and pull people to your business because you have established credibility through helpful answers and interesting posts instead of just blasting your business down others throats.
You can refer members to your company website, but only if it provides specific answers to the question being asked. Once again, members of a forum hate the feeling of being sold but they will be attracted to you and your business if you provide solid, quality responses to their questions.
Be consistent.
Don’t use the forum for week post lots of questions and then disappear for a couple of months, become a usual and useful suspect, again this will help build your credibility within the community.

Quality not Quantity.

Whilst quick replies and one word answers, yes or no will create your link it will not do much for your overall reputation and will not attract people to you or your business.
Explore the topic in discussion, elaborate on your opinion and raise your views on the subject if you can, be slightly controversial if appropriate but don’t ever get into a dispute.
These techniques will help you turn your time already spent on the Internet and a health and safety forum into a viable and free marketing tool.

I hope this helps your health and safety business.

Tourist attractions fall victim to compensation culture

I read this morning on the Daily Mail Online that tourist attractions in the UK are having to spend thousands of pounds on compensation to visitors who injure themselves on days out.

The popular destinations have all been hit for big payouts for trips, slips and falls.

Surely this is further evidence that every walk of life is being blighted by the growing compensation culture.

Some of the more incredible claims include a woman who fell into a moat while trespassing at Carlisle Castle at 2am.

She suffered pelvic and hip injuries and received £15,000 from English Heritage, which also paid her legal costs of £37,250.

The V&A had to pay £400 to a man who put his thumb in hot soup in the museum’s restaurant. The man had found the food counter unattended and helped himself to the soup, scalding himself in the process.

Figures published in the Sunday Telegraph show 24 organisations, which cover hundreds of individual sites between them, had paid out at least £2,149,345 in compensation payments and legal costs in the last five years.

Last night critics hit out at the rise in compensation culture across the UK saying it could have a financial impact on many attractions.

In many cases, organisations had to pay out far more in fees to the claimant’s lawyers than to the claimant themselves, prompting criticism of so-called ‘ambulance chasing’ lawyers.

In most cases, the payouts were made by insurance companies but the costs would have been passed on in higher premiums.

The Carlisle  payout was the largest made by English Heritage. The woman fell into the moat in 2003 but the legal case was not resolved until 2007/08.

A spokesman for English Heritage said: ‘The woman passed a sign stating that our opening hours were 10am to 4pm as well as a notice saying ‘Please take care, historic sites can be hazardous’.

‘She can have been in no doubt that she was not entitled to enter and was trespassing.’

I find it really interesting that there is no mention of the women being prosecuted for trespassing.