What to do in Wellington when the Southerly hits

• Visit Animates - either Ngauranga Gorge or Melling Bridge
• Don’t miss the 1pm cultural flick at the Lighthouse Cinema
• Don your parka and buy garden plants from Moores Valley Nursery past Wainuiomata.
• On your way, drop into Hutt Hunting & Fishing - possibly my favourite store on planet earth!
• Tour the Seaview and Evans Bay marinas looking for stray yachts to rescue
• Surf Trade Me for a new dehumidifier
• Stock up on hardware at Petone’s crazily big Mega Mitre 10 (don’t miss their charity sausage sizzle at the main door)
• Drive to the South Coast and knock a few years off the life of your automobile.
• Join Twitter and discover the favourite nightwear being worn by local celebrity journalists

find out more from http://twitter.com/williecass

#followfriday. Read Liv’s blog article: http://www.livlarge.co.nz/2009/05/using-video-to-increase-site-traffic

The dust is settling on a busy period at Trade Me. Earlier this month we took to the road to share a few stories with over 300 New Zealand marketers and their agency folk.

The Trade Me Revolution Tour showed audiences in Wellington, Auckland and Christchurch the progress of New Zealand’s largest website over the past ten years with CEO Jon Macdonald sharing insights into our passion for speed, ease of use and some measurement tools. Bernard Hickey from Interest.co.nz told us that Kiwis are only interested in mortgages and interest rates, demonstrating these big numbers against the tiny numbers involved in our sharemarket, for example. Trent Mankelow and Mike Pethig shared some techniques and ads that people don’t hate. Finally Geoff Matthews from new-kid-on-the-block site, TaxRefunds.co.nz shared the perfect storm that is driving his traffic and profits sky high in only 7 months.

We were keen to show marketers who are moving online a few tricks and traps to help with their websites and that marketing those sites using a considered combination of Television and Trade Me is effective and recession-busting. We got some challenging questions and a bunch of great responses from attendees. All in all, a huge success.

A few thoughts arising from the series:
* This recession is a biggie. A real biggie. It’s going to take a long time to recover, and recover from.
* Recession is not a time for sitting on hands; simply ‘riding out the recession’ ain’t going to cut it this time around.
* Recession equals restart. And it’s time to hit the restart button. It’s a chance to take stock and regroup.
* Cut out the stuff that either doesn’t work or that you can’t measure.
* It’s a really good time to just do the stuff that works.

I didn’t retell this gem but it still makes sense today as a business analogy, more so now than ever before.

For many marketers the online revolution has been underway for a few years now. For some, it’s only just started. If you would like to see the video and presentation of our five speakers, please email me to mg at trademe dot co dot nz and I’ll send you the link.