Society of American Florists' (SAF) newest blog, www.SAFFreshDelivery.com actually soft launched last Monday and was officially announced to the membership this past Wednesday in the latest SAF Ebrief e-newsletter. So my announcement may not be news to some but I wanted to keep fellow association peers not privy to SAF communications in the loop of our Web 2.0 activities.

When you take a look see, you may see a lot of familiarity with SAF's other blog, www.CapitolLettersBlog.com focused on the association's government relations activities. Why? Cause I copied it and retweaked it out. The wonderful thing about the Joomla content management system is that any Web site built upon it is essentially a folder with ties to a separate MySQL database. Everyone agreed the look and feel of CapitolLetters was a winner so we didn't want to reinvent the wheel. It was just a matter of copying the database and folder and renaming them! Much work was done of course to redo the sections and categories but at least it was not from scratch.

In fact, www.SAFFreshDelivery.com, I'm sure, broke all sorts of records (in our minds anyway) in regards to Web site development since I don't recall us even thinking about another blog just a month ago. But I believe with the growing success and feedback from our CapitolLetters blog, it gave us confidence to communicate more with this medium.

So why another flavor of blog? Well our aim was to increase SAF's "touch points" in the floral industry community and reinforce SAF's brand as a valuable, credible source for industry and business intelligence, trends, best business practices, etc. If you've ever worked on a magazine, think of all that ends up on the edit room floor because of space constraints? Our new blog now is now an unrestricted outlet for all of SAF's content creations that may have been edited for space. So hopefully this will expand SAF's online presence with awesome information to help floral businesses.

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The Society of American Florists' (SAF) Government Relations (GR) department has caught the blogging bug. Thanks largely to the success of its experimental blog to promote SAF's Congressional Action Days event - still found here: http://blog.congressionalactiondays.com/, GR wanted to retool the blog to highlight the department's everyday activities on the Hill beyond the annual event and support its grassroots efforts. It's been rebranded and repurposed as SAF's Capitol Letters Blog at http://www.capitollettersblog.com.

GR Goes Gen Y

SAF is relying on the Gen Y, new media talents of Brian Gamberini, a proud Tarheel who serves as SAF's government relations coordinator. He'll be the primary administrator of the site, coordinating posts from SAF lobbyists and members. In fact, kudos to Brian for quickly picking up the particulars of the Joomla backend. After the initial setup by SAF's IT department, he's shown tremendous geek potential configuring the modules and functions of the Website. We just may have to recruit him away from GR in the near future.

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SAF's crazy busy Web development is winding down with the launch of http://nationalfloristdirectory.com. As the URL suggests, this site allows you to find a SAF member for your local floral gift-giving and delivery needs. This is a companion Web site to our highly visible http://www.aboutflowers.com presence we developed more than seven years ago. Both Web sites now run on the Joomla content management system (CMS) that allows greater content control and a modular platform to upgrade both sites with more interactive functionalities -- more on this later.

We believe http://www.nationalfloristdirectory.com serves as a great member benefit for our retail florist members. It both serves as another marketing outpost to assist consumers in finding a local florist and hopefully will help boost SAF member search rankings with a live embedded link in the directory to their shop Web site.

I'm using google analytics along with built-in metrics on our Web server to monitor hits and traffic. Mostly, I'll be paying close attention to the keywords folks are using to find local florists. I'll be incorporating more of the unique keywords into the Web site's fabric to climb in the rankings. I'll report more on this project as we gather more data.

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As I mentioned in a Tweet last Friday, I was busy working on Society of American Florists' (SAF) latest Web presence vehicle, a blog featuring contributions from SAF's Governement Relations Department, SAF members and special guests plugged in the political scene. Well, they officially launched it last Friday and I totally spaced out and forgot to mention it. Regardless, it's active and can be found at http://blog.congressionalactiondays.com

As followers of this blog would likely guess, this new blog creation is based on the Joomla content management system based on the LAMP stack -- Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. So in essence, development cost was low since the software was free and it was developed using staff (me and Joe) time.

I've been talking up the benefits of blogging with SAF's executive team -- and really anyone who would care to listen -- for months so it was great to see SAF's GR department take the initiative, in particular, SAF COO Drew Gruenburg. Drew, who oversees SAF's GR activities and an avid reader of several other blogs such as Tom Peter and Guy Kawasaki, pushed for a blog to promote SAF's Congressional Action Days event. This is SAF's first official blog -- mine is still considered "rogue" despite the fancy logo above my bio -- so we're taking a wait and see attitude on whether SAF will expand postings to blog about day to day SAF Hill activities.

Hopefully, with insightful postings about CAD and activities on Capitol Hill, this blog will fulfill its promise to better engage SAF membership who participate in SAF's legislative activities and build grassroots support in general for legislation beneficial to the floral industry.

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