I’ve been really pleased with how well our customers have adapted to life in lockdown. It certainly is strange meeting contacts only through video or phone calls, but most of our small-business customers have made positive changes to allow them to keep trading.
Our production team would usually be very busy at this time of year dealing with company and medical conferences, many of those annual events are now planning to remain electronic-only for several years and maybe indefinitely. As one of my customers said: “why bother spending £200k on a conference that can be done online for £2000.”
Small businesses have adapted too. We help over a dozen yoga, Pilates, and other group therapy teachers and they have all made good progress in producing online content to allow them to meet their customers’ needs.
A common question is how to distribute content to the masses. For video content this is quite simple, most people would produce a video file using their smartphone or tablet, then upload this to youtube or another video platform. You can then simply share the link to your youtube page in a tiny email. It’s even possible to have a private youtube channel for invite-only content, so if you only want your own yoga students to see a video after paying for a course then this is possible.
We also look after a few musicians who have been forced to record their new material and publish it via their website rather than rely on a traditional face-to-face gig to promote their music.
Churches have always been leading the way for presentations and using technology in sermons, and many of them have been recording the traditional Sunday services to distribute to their flocks via video services or their own websites.
Some written publications have started producing electronic copies of their newsletters as PDF documents. These files are often small enough to send via email, but a much better way to distribute these is to use a file sharing service like dropbox or mailbigfile or even upload them to your own website to allow people to download the files in their own time. We’ve helped a few of the local publications stay in contact with their readership: The Tipton Times magazine has gone totally electronic and their new news website has online articles and you can view the recent editions: https://www.tiptontimes.org.uk. Newton Poppleford parish magazine is also about to launch their new site with a magazine archive at https://www.popplemag.org.uk
If you want some no-obligation advice about your computer then feel free to get in touch. We keep an eye on the new computer market and often have good refurbished machines in stock and ready to go.