Blog posts tagged with 'nes news'

The NES Trade Show team was off to Edmonton Saturday, where they linked up with Dale, Will, and Kevin of our Alberta-based sales team to set up for the 2012 Alberta Foodservice Expo. Once we got everything onto the show floor, we managed to get the booth set up in about four hours and make sure that everything would be ready to go for the Sunday Morning start. After finishing up the set-up, I headed out into Edmonton to explore and to get a bite to eat.

While I was walking down 118th Avenue, I came across the Kaleido Family Arts Festival. This weekend-long festival features music, dance, theatre, film, literary and visual arts all in a four block stretch of 118th Avenue between 90th and 94th Streets. There were musicians playing, and numerous street vendors showing and selling their hand-made sculptures, paintings, and other unique pieces. Lots of families with young children were having a good time and there was just a great vibe in the air. It certainly didn’t hurt that the evening weather was also fantastic.

I continued along 118th Avenue to the corner of 95th Street and decided to have dinner at Habesha Ethiopian & Eritrean Cuisine for some authentic Ethiopian and Eritrean food. This was the first time I had ever had Ethiopian or Eritrean cuisine and it was quite the adventure. Not really knowing what to order, I decided to ask the waiter what he would recommend. He brought me a sampling of menu items which consisted of a variety of meats (some spicy, some not), specially seasoned potatoes, and a mixed vegetable/salad on a large platter that was covered with pita-like flatbread called Injera. The meats and potatoes were in small fruit nappy bowls (each about 5 ½ ounces) while the mixed vegetable salad was piled onto the middle of the Injera. The waiter then said dig in. It didn’t take me to long to figure out that this meant I was to eat everything with my hands and use the Injera to scoop up the food. After watching my neighbour at the next table, I quickly dumped all my bowls of meat and potatoes onto the Injera bread and salad and began to dig in.

I found my dinner experience most enjoyable and would highly recommend anyone who has a little adventure in their spirit to go for what I found to be one of my most unique and enjoyable dinners of the past summer. I would also agree with the 4 ½ out of 5 rating that Trip Advisor gives this restaurant. I should add that if you have trouble with smoke, you may find it difficult to stay in the restaurant. During my time many of the patrons were smoking from Hookah’s and many other patrons were waiting for a Hookah to come available.

The National Event Supply Tradeshow Team is getting ready for a trip out west to the beautiful City of Edmonton for the 2012 Alberta Foodservice Expo. We were at last year's Expo in Calgary, and knew that we couldn't miss this year's show. The 2012 Alberta Foodservice Expo is being held at the Edmonton Expo Centre on September 9 & 10. National Event Supply will be in booth 434 and would love to see you!

Five reasons to stop by our booth!

We'll have our new Crystal and Glassware on display

We've had our Serenity Crystal Wine Glasses for a couple of months now, and they have been flying off the shelves. From a 12 oz White Wine Crystal glass to a 22 oz Red Wine Crystal glass, we have a wide assortment of crystal wine glasses to meet your needs. We also just received our Eclisse line of glassware this week, and the Alberta Foodservice Expo will be the first trade show where we'll have it available for viewing and for order. We know that if you take a look at our Crystal and Glassware, you'll love the design and the price.

We'll also have our new porcelain bowls in our booth

We showed these bowls off in a previous blog entry, but there is nothing like seeing them in person. Available in three different sizes, we have slanted bowls and wing bowls that can add a flair to your table. In addition to our new porcelain bowls, we'll have a wide selection of our porcelain dinnerware, platters, and bowls for you to examine and get a feel for.

You'll get a chance to examine the cutlery being used in the Culinary Stage Competitions

National Event Supply is providing the cutlery to the judges for the Culinary Stage Competitions. Our Maria Line of 18/10 Stainless Steel Cutlery is our most popular line of cutlery and designed for the rigours of a busy restaurant. With its clean lines and well-balanced heft, Maria Cutlery would make a fine addition to any restaurant's table.

You're thinking about purchasing Chiavari Chairs

National Event Supply has NES Resin Chiavari Chairs available in five colours (black, white, silver, gold, and mahogany) in addition to the gorgeous NES Crystal Chiavari Chair. We also have fabric and vinyl cushions as well as plywood-base cushions. If you visit our booth, you can see how strong these chairs really are, how great they look around a table, and how comfortable they really are.

You'll get a chance to talk to Dennis about your needs and find our why National Event Supply is right for you!

Dennis will be representing National Event Supply and he always loves talking to customers and visitors to our booth. So stop on by and have a chat with Dennis. He can help meet your needs and show you solutions that you might not have thought of.

This past week Dennis and I were in Boston for Inbound 2012 hosted by the inbound marketing firm Hubspot. In a previous blog entry, I talked about the dangers of using black hat SEO techniques to boost your organic search ratings. Hubspot is all about raising your organic search ranking the right way. We think their software is pretty good and provides loads of information that will help you develop your website and increase the number of organic visitors to your website. They are currently rolling out Hubspot 3, and if you think you might be interested in their software and their solutions, I would highly recommend checking them out. They provide all sorts of information about their product on their website, and have a demo that explains what their software is all about.

4 things I learned at Inbound 2012

Social Media is Incredibly Important for Raising Your Search Rankings

Sometimes it's hard to get excited about tweeting or facebooking or using any of the other social media networks. When you start out and you don't have a lot of followers, it can feel like you're talking to a wall. But if you create amazing and engaging content, and listen to what others say and provide your comments, you can build relationships with both current and future customers. An interesting factoid, Facebook currently has more than 900 Million users and Google + has more than 200 Million users. So think about the potential…

Social Media is Hard to do Well... and That's a Good Thing

If social media wasn't hard to do well, everyone would be doing it. It requires time, thought, and creativity. It's not something that can be automated and still pass the sniff test. People can tell when you aren't being authentic. Originally the sales activities for your company were all about face to face conversations and relationships. As we moved into the cities, stores became larger and customer service fell by the wayside. Social Media has begun to turn this trend. Conversations and relationships are once more becoming more and more important thanks to social media.

By 2014 more than 50% of all Web Traffic will be from Smart Phones and Tablets

Does your website use Flash animations for navigation or for banner ads? If you do, the most popular tablet on the market (the iPad), one of the most popular phones by market share (the iPhone), and most Android-powered smartphones won’t be able to see everything on your site. Last month (July 2012), according to the Google Analytics for our web site (www.nationaleventsupply.com), 6.22% of all our web traffic came from iOS (iPads, iPods, and iPhones) powered devices with another 1.5% from Android and Blackberry powered devices. In July of 2011, they accounted for 2.1% of our web traffic. We're currently working on another redevelopment our website, and you can bet this new release will definitely be mobile friendly.

Google+ is Important because of the Six Letters in front of the + Sign.

Google+ isn't as popular as Facebook, so it's not as important, right? Except that Google has tons of money and still has a big push behind Google + and is starting to roll social media into its search results. If your friends have +1'd a page, that page will show up higher in your search rankings, and you'll see that your friend has +1'd it. These endorsements matter, because you're more likely to choose a result that your friends have endorsed. And, I don't know about you, but the majority of our search traffic still comes from Google.

I'm not a marketing expert and I won't pretend to be one. If you're looking for help with your marketing, I would highly recommend talking to Hubspot, and checking out what they have to offer. And of course by all means please, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, and/or subscribe to our blog.

My mother hates computers and the Internet. Well, that's not entirely true. She just doesn't have any affinity for either of them. She has a laptop which she uses to Facebook-stalk her nieces and nephews, check her email, and on very rare occasions surf the web. I spend most of my working hours using tools on my computer, on the internet, and making misbehaving technology work like it is supposed to.

As I write this, our office Internet is down. We have been without the Internet for a day and a half now. A technician has been dispatched and he should be here between 9am and 5pm. While we don't have internet, things have ground to a halt.

Within the past year, our shipping partners have deployed online shipping calculators for us to get our own shipping rates or have requested that we send emails for shipping rates. In addition, all of our small package shipments are done online. An electronic request for a truck to come pick up the packages is sent out and the thermal labels are sent to our label printer. Without the Internet, the shipping department is still able to function, but things take longer. The Internet provides efficiencies that are greatly missed.

The story is different in the sales department. Internet access for the sales department is absolutely crucial. While our website and email server is hosted off-site, without the Internet, we cannot retrieve any of the emails that we are being sent. As more than 50% of our business comes to us through email and through forms on our website, this is a massive problem. A couple of us have had the email redirected to our Smartphones, but this is an imperfect solution.

The bigger problem is our sales system, SugarCRM. It is currently hosted in "The Cloud" on SugarCRM's servers. While their uptime has been fantastic, we are still unable to access the data without internet service in our office. One of the reasons we went with SugarCRM over other CRM offerings, like Salesforce, is because SugarCRM can be hosted locally. Moving our SugarCRM deployment in house onto our new server is a project I'll be handling in the coming months.

In the grand scheme of things, losing the internet for a day and a half is a inconvenience. What happens when a hard drive dies? We've had two catastrophic hard drive failures in the past five years. The first time, we managed to recover the accounting system and get the user back up and running without the loss of critical data. The second time, Dennis lost 3 months of email and numerous files. Backing up regularly is essential; keeping back-ups offsite can enable you to rebuild your business if there is a disaster at your offices or if someone steals your computers. It is also important to test your back-ups before you need them. If they aren't going to be able to recover your system, they aren't worth having.

Spending the time to check that your mission critical systems are protected from power fluctuations, hardware failures that could lead to data loss, and from the loss due to theft is essential. Just think how much work would it be to rebuild your accounting system if the hard drive failed or was destroyed and you had no back-ups. What would happen to your employees if you weren't able to do the payroll? In the long run, it's cheaper to spend the time and money protecting your systems and preparing for disaster than it is to wait until you actually have a crisis.

Google Adwords. Organic search results. SEO Services. Tweets. Like Us. Follow Us. Are you LinkedIn? Stick a pin in it?

Working on the website and handling the IT for National Event Supply has forced me to learn about ideas, concepts, and services that have come to the forefront in the past 5 years. When I started using the internet, Larry Page and Sergey Brin hadn't started work on what would become Google. Now Google plays a very important part in the marketing of our products.

On a typical day, I get 2 or 3 emails and 1 or 2 phone calls inviting me to sign up with various SEO Companies. Their pitches are all the same. Google Adwords can be expensive (true). By optimizing your website you can improve your organic search rating (true). If you sign up with our company, we can GUARANTEE that you will appear on the first page of Google (false). In fact signing up with these companies and letting them do their magic can destroy your Google Search Rank and you can quickly find yourself on page 80 or 90.

Google uses secret algorithms to rate pages. Their goal is to provide their users with the best quality results for search terms. Better quality pages, containing unique, relevant, content, from well-respected websites with numerous inbound links appear higher in search results than pages containing no unique, relevant, content, from websites that no one links to. Bad SEO companies will game the system, using "Black Hat" techniques to get you onto the front page. However, if Google figures out that you are gaming the system, you can lose your first page ranking in a heartbeat.

JC Penny found that out when Google discovered they were gaming the system. Suddenly they ranked 71st for terms that they used to be ranked number 1 for. JC Penny is a large company and they were punished for their actions. Don't think for a second that if Google catches you, they won't punish you.

The internet is a marvellous tool for finding information, and it is only natural to want more people to find you when they are searching for someone to help with their next event. It is important, however, to remember the old adage that if someone is promising you something that appears to be too good to be true, it probably is.

And because our SEO consultants say that every blog entry needs a "call to action", please don't hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or are interested in getting a quote for any of our fine products.