We just wrapped up Society of American Florists’s (SAF) latest Profit Blast conference this past weekend in Seattle which is the association’s third event of this type. The first two were in Atlanta and Baltimore. Attendance was a healthy 80 with 10 vendor partners showcasing their products and services. We tweeted heavily from the event so check out hashtag #safpb to track the discussion.

My session was called “Online Branding-Content is King” where I shared the value of regarding the shop’s “technology,” such as website, online communications and social media as really just 21st century “marketing,” which of course, is a core initiative of any retail business. We thus discussed the importance of not treating individual technologies as business checklist items, but rather taking a holistic marketing approach by coordinating all these media to build a consistent online brand.

As the session title suggests, our focus was on how florists can easily and methodologically create content — in the form of text, photos and videos, by determining their business’s taxonomy and applying this to their website structure — as titles, descriptions, headings and content for their homepage and subpages. We then discussed how florist can leverage the same content to write appropriate posts customized for their various social media.

The session sparked great discussion and questions, many of which have been answered in previous Plugged In columns in SAF’s Floral Management magazine. Rather than have our florists look through back issues, I took the extra step and compiling this material and put on a CD that we handed out. In case you missed the session and want a copy of the slides and articles, I zipped up them up here for down: ProfitBlastCD.