Although vaguely aware of more men of all ages shopping on their own in food supermarkets, the subject was brought home with a shock when I spotted a young man bottle-feeding a very young baby while bagging his goods and manoeuvring his trolley single handedly.

He was obviously well practised at this and completely oblivious to stares from matronly mums. The lady on the till and an elderly lady in the checkout queue valiantly attempted to come to his rescue.  But he airily used his free hand to wave them away, packed his bags, paid, and with the baby snugly in a car seat in the trolley, strolled nonchalantly out of the store, still bottle-feeding on the hoof.

My till lady confirmed a change in food supermarket shopping, with retired people shopping together and the younger element showing an increase of men shopping on their own.  And she reckoned, judging from their baskets, that men are better at pricing.  They went more for own label and offers than well known brands.

All of which shows how valuable ongoing research can be.  It is a fast changing world and traditional PR and advertising targets may have to change to blaze a new trail. We’re on the case.

That’s what happened at the recent Bahrain Grand Prix, when the politicians got into the act and stole the headlines.  Instead of racy entertainment and excitement the lasting memory is of a protest against an authoritarian government – definitely not the result the F1 organisers wanted.

This is not a situation that most organisations will encounter when organising an event to publicise their business, but it is a salutary lesson. In a more localised setting it is as well to be aware of local feelings and such obvious matters as clashing with other events.

Our experience is that some companies who have not taken advice have ended up with a flop, either because their event clashed with something on a national or regional scale or because there was no demand for the type of event they staged.

Following the KISS principle (Keep It Simple Someone – the last word is at your choosing) is always a good idea and our events team do just that.  We set out our client’s objective, design a strategy, put in rock hard organisation and get a fantastic result.

The great thing about a successful company sponsored event is that it becomes a double whammy when it is reported in the local media.  Perhaps it’s one of the few occasions where it is totally acceptable to kiss and tell.

However, there is a clear economic benefit for businesses that want to practice what they preach and deliver against mission statements on company ethos and charitable giving.

The Governments Community Investment Tax Relief (CITR) scheme is still available to both individuals and companies and is worth up to 25% of the value of the investment.

There are a lot of good causes out there fighting in a competitive space for funding which stretch beyond charitable giving providing companies with an option to mentor or lend their professional expertise to people with a direct link to their industry or employees.

Syncro PR works with Fredericks Oxfordshire, a local loan fund for people looking to start or grow their business with small loans when they are unable to get traditional finance.

What makes these loans different from other finance is that they come with a package of support and mentoring, to ensure the best possible future for their business.

Fredericks Oxfordshire is the result of a lot of hard work and determination by a group of committed people.  Significant funding and support as been gained from many organisations including: Beard Construction, Unipart, ByBox, Critchleys, Jennings, Torpedo Group, Spratt Endicott and Oxford United Football Club to name a few.

By creating a CSR strategy with maximum effect reinforces what a company stands for, enhancing its reputation with many different stakeholder groups including prospect customers and employees in addition to maintaining existing relationships.

Traditionally, corporate communications and CSR professionals prepared and disseminated annual CSR reports or updates for shareholders, customers and suppliers to read at their leisure. Now, there is very much a pressure to be ‘part of the conversation’ irrespective of the size of the business.

In tough economic times and with businesses fighting to stand out of the crowd there is a need to engage its stakeholders on a personal level which is also reflected by the rise in online social communities. CSR provides the perfect opportunity to enable a business to do just that.

Our first year in business defies the current economic trend and increased levels of scrutiny applied to marketing budgets, proving that PR is readily considered a cost-effective way to deliver results that have a positive impact on business performance.

In addition to our first birthday, we announce the expansion of our team with the appointment of Kelly Stroud as Account Director who has a wealth of experience in consumer and sports PR.

Kelly has already won her first Syncro contract to support Sail Training International with ongoing Event PR for The Tall Ships Races 2012 and Irish Sea Tall Ships Regatta. The charity’s flagship summer series of events is expected to attract up to 1million visitors in each host port of St Malo, Lisbon, Cadiz, La Coruna and Dublin.  Syncro will support Sail Training International on all Event PR including traditional, digital and social media in addition to press office management.

“I am extremely pleased that Kelly has joined us and know that she will prove a substantial asset to our agency.  This appointment marks the start of an exciting period in Syncro’s development, our first year has been fantastic and more exciting than we could have ever imagined.  The business has attracted excellent clients helping us to put in place a strong and talented team who take pride in the results we deliver.  We are all looking forward to many more birthday celebrations to come!” says PR Director Claire Thompson.

The expansion of the Syncro team ensures the continued delivery of highly targeted PR campaigns incorporating both traditional and digital media outlets to reach broader groups and influence web-based communities.

(Photograph from left to right: Iain Lewis, Tracey Lord, Claire Thompson, Joe Moore, Kelly Stroud, Katharine Earley, Eddie Duller and Laura Barnett)

A fifth of the world’s 5 billion mobile phones are now smartphones, with the most popular smartphone activities in 2011 reported as texting, internet browsing and playing games, prompting brands worldwide to cash in on the growing trend in ‘gamification’ in order to generate sales. Social media networks, including micro-blogging site Twitter, are perfect for rapid consumption (and dissemination) of information and news, however, other more traditional forms of media are less easily transferable to this modern, ‘fast food’ approach to media consumption.

If you add to this the fact that the latest generation of business people are already using Facebook as a search engine and some of the world’s leading companies, including IT giant Atos, are developing social networks for their employees in place of email, and we start to see a completely different picture of how future generations will seek information and consume news.

Interestingly, media consumption is significantly more popular among tablet owners than laptop or smartphone users, according to research reported by Marketing Week. Video content is by far the most highly consumed of all media via tablets, with tablet owners more likely to watch video clips, TV and films than smartphone users. A third of tablet owners also read magazine content, although this is less popular than reading newspaper news. The majority of tablet owners check the news at least once a week, although 28% never do, and many seem unconvinced of the value of news apps.

As Marketing Week rightly highlighted, while tablet owners’ consumption levels are currently sky high, media companies still need to devise coherent strategies to address the question of whether to develop content for apps or the mobile web, and will need to design content formats with tablets in mind.

Some bosses positively tear their hair out when employees tweet away with abandon, or are very sceptical of the benefits to say the least, but they are being won over because more people than ever want to know what the boss is saying.

A new survey by Brandfog, a social media branding company, claims that consumers and employees think that company leaders who use social media are the tops. They claim their survey shows that 78 per cent of respondents said CEO participation leads to better communication, while 71 per cent said it leads to improved brand image.

And to underline the positive aspects of the social media the study findings show that 82 per cent of employee respondents trust a company more when the boss and leadership team get going on the airwaves.

So, there you have it: one more piece of evidence to back up my conviction that top people can get in touch with their consumers much more easily than before – and they and their companies can reap the rewards.

There’s nothing like good and regular communication to keep brands alive and perk up business and one way of doing it is to have a good natter on social media.

We also spotted that PR was the only sector not to predict a decrease in staff numbers, while many consultancies are expecting a busy period of mergers and acquisitions. This all bodes well for a marketing discipline that has continued to prove its worth as an effective communications tool both during and post recession. And with debate around the new definition of PR continuing, it’s certainly a lively profession to be a part of just now!

The PRSA’s definition of PR places a strong focus on PR’s strategic value, and we feel that it is PR’s role in forging dynamic and successful strategies that will continue to propel the industry forward. As businesses increasingly focus on how best to form strategic relationships with their publics, PR professionals will continue to thrive by doing what they do best: shifting perceptions and forging lasting, beneficial relationships.

 “Public relations is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics.”

PRSA, March 2012

Entrepreneurs have a very specific attitude to risk, luck, convention and decision-making. The dean of Oxford’s famous Saïd Business School, Peter Tufano, explained during his opening speech to the assembled entrepreneurs at Skoll that he saw the key ingredients of the entrepreneurial mindset as: ‘foolishness’ (a willingness to take risks, whether it leads to success or failure), knowledge and expert managerial skills.

We’ve seen a huge trend in entrepreneurial start-ups in Britain in the past three years. Start-up businesses represented nearly 50% of insurance applications to a leading UK insurance provider in 2011, representing an annual growth rate of 3%. This compares with a decline of 3.7% in 2009, as the recession took a hold. Interestingly, of nearly 1,600 businesses founded in Oxfordshire during a six-month period in 2011, 34% are directed by women.

The challenges facing new businesses are numerous, and particularly so in the current economic climate, with clients and customers in every sector consistently seeking a smarter service or product for less. Companies need to stand out from the crowd and deliver excellent value in order to survive. However, we know that many start-ups are making it work, and in fact, many of the world’s most recognisable businesses (including Microsoft and Disney!) were born at times of economic hardship. Perhaps the most important factor here is having an entrepreneur at the helm, someone who has the knowledge, managerial skills and commercial edge to understand what’s needed to deliver a successful business, but who also comes equipped with a highly tuned, maybe even foolish, attitude to risk.

Despite concern that small firms are focusing on cutting costs and avoiding bank loans rather than investing in R&D, the chancellor is ostensibly starting to create economic incentives for entrepreneurial start-ups to flourish. Here in Oxfordshire, entrepreneurial start-ups are already receiving helpful financial support from Fredericks Oxfordshire, a microfinance and support group founded in 2011 that helps companies that might otherwise be refused a bank loan to access finance and advice. After just eight months in business, both beneficiaries and investors are doing well, proving that microfinance models of this kind really do help to catalyse growth.

This is certainly positive news, as after all, we are relying on SMEs to create employment, as reported recently in The Telegraph. Correspondent Jeremy Warner explains that in the UK, our 197,000 SMEs make a significant contribution to the country’s economy. Successful entrepreneurs like to fund other entrepreneurs as well as further start-ups, he says, so therefore if we can establish this positive circle of events, the future doesn’t look so bleak!

Add to this the fact that UK users are using the site in quite a different way to their US counterparts, with top interests including web analytics, SEO and marketing (versus crafts, gifts and interior design in the US), and the story of Pinterest really begins to pique the interest of the marketing community.

The site, a social network whose 10.4m members display or ‘pin’ images of interest relating to specific themes, has grown by 4,000% in the past six months, and is now driving more traffic to major brands than Google+, LinkedIn and MySpace combined. Users are typically spending a good deal of time perusing and pinning images, providing brands with an exciting opportunity to launch dynamic, visually-led marketing campaigns.

At first glance, this new medium doesn’t seem appropriate for the professional services sector. While the site is a potential goldmine for product-based consumer campaigns, the opportunity for law, accountancy or financial firms, whose services are far less visual, is not as obvious. A firm could, for example, create an account that shares information such as recommended books, forthcoming local events and company blog posts. Similarly, financial consultants could pin images that represent client goals, such as financial independence or financing education.

However, the real call to action for professional firms is the reminder provided by this latest social media sensation of the importance of search engine optimisation (SEO). Savvy marketers are using Pinterest to drive quality traffic for their clients by creating multiple links back to their clients’ sites, using cleverly chosen keywords and selecting relevant, interesting images that appeal to their clients’ target audiences. These really are the three guiding principles of successful SEO: creating ‘back links’, optimising keywords and delivery fresh, timely content.

Professional services firms can improve their search rankings by adopting a proactive approach to SEO and reviewing the most practical and appropriate means of ‘joining in the conversation’. Many accountancy firms, for instance, are already engaging with Twitter. Now could be the time to create a blog or even an interactive microsite or Q&A. Firms should also ensure that they are including relevant pictures, where possible, throughout blogs, e-newsletters and other marketing collateral.

Images provide a highly effective means of telling a story, and are absorbed far more quickly by the reader than the written word. All that’s needed is the time and creativity to identify the image that fits best with the news or ‘story’ in hand. We saw a plethora of interesting images recently when it was revealed that bargain hunters are being caught out by Capital Gains Tax when making thousands from sales of Chinese artefacts! We look forward to seeing what the latest craze in image-sharing will produce among the country’s numerous professional services firms.

While trusted ‘every day’ voices have long been a feature of TV and radio news, they have traditionally been used to provide a human dimension to a story, or present the views of ‘the people on the ground’, rather than convey an authoritative viewpoint. Now, in this ‘post media age’, communicating news has become a communal activity. No longer the preserve of Fleet Street, anyone can tell a story, without regulation.

All this presents a challenge for communications professionals, whose chief focus is ensuring that their clients’ messages are heard loud and clear by their core audiences. Creating a community of advocates via social media has never been more important. If consumers are storytellers, we want to ensure that they tell the right story…

But where does word of mouth start, how is it generated and how can anyone be sure that the chatter will be beneficial?  The answer is that word of mouth comes from diverse sources and mainly through the written word in one form or another, such as  a website, an email, a newspaper or magazine article, the radio or the TV before it is shared verbally or through various forms of messaging.

The great benefit to businesses is that it ends up as a personal comment, usually an endorsement of a satisfying and pleasant personal experience.

It is important, however, that businesses should take on board that the whole conversation can be created and managed through forming a partnership with Syncro and using our expertise to get tongues wagging.

Every business has loyal customers that rate them highly and there are ways of building a relationship with those customers to promote the company and lead to increased customers, sales and market share.

In short, what I am saying is that we can help businesses to turn satisfied customers into ambassadors and help to route their comments through social networking. Whether their endorsements are verbal or written it amounts to the same thing – it’s all word of mouth when a recommendation or favourable comment comes from a third party.

It is a cost effective method that works.  It can be set up within a reasonable time frame and successes and values can be measured.  So, for any business wanting to get the word out to potential customers, it’s got to be worth talking about.

While ‘sustainability communications’ have certainly become more mainstream in recent years, many companies have been slow to embrace social media as a means of conveying their commitment to a green future. Traditionally, corporate communications and CSR professionals prepared and disseminated annual CSR reports or updates for shareholders, customers and suppliers to read at their leisure. Now, there is very much a pressure to be ‘part of the conversation’.

Social media demands a dialogue between a company and its publics. Many stakeholders have a firm idea of the green policies they believe businesses should adopt, and have no qualms about raising their online voices to denigrate or goad brands over their perceived behaviour or attitudes. As the expectation grows for brands to engage, so the inexorable march towards the vortex of worldwide social conversation accelerates.

Leading global players are starting to adopt a more proactive stance towards social media, with some of the top companies in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index now actively engaging with customers via Facebook pages, blogs, Twitter feeds and sustainability-focused microsites. The most successful will be those that create a ‘community of advocates’ by truly listening and becoming a part of the conversation that’s evolving around their brand, rather than simply using these channels as a means of self-promotion.

Content, as ever, will need to be meaningful, relevant and really strike a chord with core audiences, while simplifying the language of sustainability and using it to ‘tell a story’ will also be important. Coca-Cola’s high profile social media campaign to raise money for a new wildlife sanctuary in the Arctic region culminated in an advertising spot at this year’s SuperBowl. Using animated polar bears (who even responded in real time to the game, as it unfolded!), the brand set out to raise awareness of the danger to their habitat. However, some wondered whether portraying the bears as football mascots (so to make it palatable to the masses) really rang true with brand’s sustainability values.

Animated polar bears aside, there is undeniably a pressure for marketing campaigns of any kind to demonstrate ROI, so it will be fascinating to see how brands use both traditional and social media to address this challenge in the future.

Watson explains that PR agencies began debating the topic in the 1960s, with several of the leading players developing proprietary measurement systems by the 1980s (Ketchum, Hill and Knowlton, CARMA). Since, then volumes of material have been created on the subject by academics and professionals alike, all exploring different methods of evaluating the effectiveness of PR.

The Barcelona Declaration of Measurement Principles moved the PR industry closer to more consistent global measurement standards in 2010, focusing more on identifying outcomes than calculating the success of media campaigns with numerical metrics. The CIPR also emphasises the importance of looking beyond ‘outputs’ to consider ‘outcomes’ in its latest series of PR training courses. Current thinking suggests that weighing up outcomes against investment and communication objectives is the way the industry is going.

Typical methods of measuring PR are for instance: measuring the quantity or quality of press cuttings generated from a campaign, calculating the ‘advertising value equivalent’ in pounds and pence, evaluating audience sentiment (through focus groups, polls or surveys), benchmarking results and measuring client ‘share of voice’ in particular articles, whereby the number of client ‘mentions’ is compared to the number of ‘mentions’ generated by competitors.

Increasingly, PR agencies are using integrated media evaluation tools to compile reports for clients. Media monitoring agencies such as Precise, Cision and Gorkana all offer digital platforms for measuring PR results. As PR and communications campaigns gravitate towards online and social media activities, measuring results becomes more transparent, with definite techniques in place for evaluating the digital success of campaigns.

With all the advances of the past few decades in moving towards a commonly accepted (and respected) means of evaluating PR, it’s worth considering that ultimately, how PR is measured is as much dictated by the client’s own priorities as by any measurement technique. The metrics used may depend on how the client needs to demonstrate PR effectiveness to the board or to shareholders. Some clients, depending on personality or personal preferences, may simply be keen to see hard-hitting, creative ideas or multiple hits in specific titles. In this light, the debate over how to measure PR looks set to continue well into the coming years.

We at Syncro welcomed the move to create a more modern and meaningful definition of PR. We have consistently observed that PR has come into its own post-recession, as businesses have rethought their communications strategies and sought to increase dialogue with customers and partners, while achieving the best possible value for money. Put simply, as more companies realise the business benefits that PR can bring, so the need grows to communicate what it is and how it works.

The digital age has transformed the face of communications and added a whole new facet to PR. With news being communicated in an instant around the world, savvy PR practitioners seized the opportunity to integrate online channels and social media alongside traditional tactics. Despite this, we regularly uncover confusion among businesses as to how digital PR can reinforce their communications activities. Add to this the historical confusion around whether PR is a type of advertising and the controversy around ‘spin doctors’ that persisted through much of the 90s, and you quickly see how murky the waters have become.

There is a real need to lift PR from the misconceptions and labelling that surround it and create an overarching definition that helps businesses to understand its role in achieving their strategic objectives. A fresh understanding will also help PR professionals to take pride in their occupation and encourage bright graduates to pursue PR as a career. Of the three definitions proposed by the PRSA, we hope that emphasising the strategic value of PR will take precedence in the final decision.

Public relations provides businesses with a highly effective means of building their reputation, shifting the perceptions of their target audiences and ultimately driving behaviours that help to influence sales. When approaching a strategic PR campaign, we take a structured approach, clearly developing a set of communications objectives to meet our clients’ business aims, defining the target audiences, crafting a set of key messages and creating relevant, timely tactics (across traditional and social media) to set the plan to motion. While we work in partnership with our sister companies on integrated marketing campaigns, we believe in PR as a strong and hard-hitting discipline in its own right.

While the PRSA has come under criticism for delaying its final announcement of their much heralded ‘new definition of PR’, we remain optimistic that the lively debate it has created will help to shape a more accurate and positive definition that we can all embrace. After all, regardless of the context in which public relations is used, its guiding principles are the same: using strategic communications to create dialogue between a company and its publics, with a view to strengthening the relationships between them and building mutually beneficial relationships.

Join the debate or vote on your preferred definition of PR at: http://prdefinition.prsa.org/.

So, in today’s blog I’d like to share with you a few key benefits of public relations, why it should be important to you and how you can milk a PR opportunity.

PR offers many advantages not found with other promotional options – for instance, studies show that PR has seven times the credibility of advertising.  When a consumer sees third party coverage of a product or service, it is perceived much differently than a traditional advertisement.  When we see an advertisement, we know the company is trying to sell us something.  Media endorsements gain far greater credibility and consumers are more likely to make a purchase based on third party endorsement than an advertisement.

PR is good for your bottom line, it’s much less expensive than advertising and the benefits of PR can be much more substantial.

It’s all about building the profile of your business, creating a dialogue with your audience to provoke them to react and interact with your brand in a positive way.

Here are a few techniques and tips that will help you to get started with a public relations campaign:

• Develop a PR plan – map out a few basics
• What you wish to accomplish
• How you wish to be seen by your target audience
• What important facts you wish to convey about your business

• Create a list of tactics to help you achieve your objectives i.e. press releases, articles, create a survey, enter awards, public speaking etc and create a target list of media channels

• Identify all the problems your business solves then shout about them

• Intertwine a human-interest element to bring it to life – you need to tell a story, not just sell

• Make it topical and align your story with a current news story – piggyback on topical issues

• Stick with it. When it comes to using PR successfully, the most important word for you to remember is persistence.

PR takes time and it can be a challenge for business people to get their point across effectively in writing so appointing a PR company is the best way to ensure your business stands head and shoulders above the rest.  The best results come from regular PR coverage and responding quickly to PR opportunities.

In May it was reported that 100,000 Britons deactivated their Facebook accounts along with six million who logged off for good in the U.S. – clearly a lot of people and brands are reaching a saturation point.

This month Gartner, the research firm polled 6,295 social networking users between the age of 13 – 74 and reported that the social media sector appears to be reaching ‘maturity’ in certain countries.

Gartner suggests that users who were among the first and early adopters of social media have started to experience fatigue and are visiting sites like Facebook less often. They say that social networks must innovate and diversify, they also advise that brands with a social media presence must keep content fresh and instantly attract the attention of consumers, as users are likely to be turned off by dull or dated content.

It is easy to get dispirited with the relentless pressure to partake in the multitude of networks: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Groupon, flickr, YouTube, Google+, Instragram – and more are coming.  Each seems to be as important as the next and before you know it you are drowning in social media accounts.

It is important to remember that we are using these tools to enable new connections, engage with new customers and reach a wider audience.

• You don’t need to spend your life joining new networks, creating new content and re-adding connections to new platforms.
• You do need to keep a clear view of the platforms you have committed to and keep the content fresh to capture people’s attention.

Businesses need the expertise to map out how they can effectively create a social media strategy.  Who are you connecting with and why?  What’s the measure of success?

So what should you do…

• Identify your target market.
• Recognise what people are talking about, what questions they have and what questions you can answer.
• Content is key – work out what you wish to communicate – do you have information that will be of benefit?
• Use tools like Tweetdeck, Google Alerts, Social Mention to find out what information others are providing and what others are saying about you.
• Distinguish which networks your target market is using and get started.  You don’t need to adopt multiple platforms initially, start with one and branch out only when you are ready.
• Keep the content fresh to capture people’s attention and keep on at it.

With the benefit of a clear focus you will be able to have more meaningful, deeper conversations with fewer people that you will gain greater value from. Hopefully with a clear social media strategy you should be able to combat social media fatigue!

So, this is our first blog and I would like to give you an insight into the very exciting and challenging process it was choosing a company name – parts of it were fun; parts were arduous, but we are very happy with the result.

For me, creativity was key when choosing a name; it was not about being influenced to find a company name based on the availability of the domain name.  We had a massive criteria to fulfil: the name had to be simple to remember, easy to say, spell, it had to stand out, be descriptive, evocative and would need to be unique.  Oh, and how could I forget, the main stipulation was to find a name ending in ‘o’ inline with the two sister companies Torpedo and Lingo.

So we started brainstorming, me from home at nights and weekends and Torpedo held a company-wide brain storming session.  Thankfully there are lots of creative minds at Torpedo and together we inspired a whole list of great ideas, all sorts of names, misspelt names, metaphors and brilliant name combinations – around 200 to be precise.  At this point it seemed we were spoilt for choice, the selection process however was not as easy as the creative stage.  I have no doubt it would have been easier to choose a name for any other company than our own.

At this stage we were checking Google, Companys’ House and most importantly domain availability for each name.  It’s fair to say that practically all names, animals, numbers, colours along with almost every object and acronym imaginable had already been taken.

Now, I do think people should worry less about the small stuff and choosing a company name sounds like such a small thing but in the greater scheme of things it’s huge as it stands for the company’s public image and in the context of PR is vitally important.

We had gone about this in the right way, we had been truly creative, explored all options and come up with exceptional ideas but the decision making process was not as easy as the whole process was subjective and highly emotive.

It wasn’t a matter of whittling down a list to a few solid finalists; we all needed to agree on the ‘best fit’ name.  At this point we decided to ditch the stipulation of a word ending in ‘o’ to widen the search.  Bring out the thesaurus!  I can’t tell you how many times I had been through the dictionary by this point.

There were times of pure inspiration when the most perfect name would present itself only to find that the name would have some form of unsuitable undertone, so the search went on.

We now had limited time before the launch of company ‘X’, the pressure was on and creativity skills were tested.Torpedo spoke to their clients whilst I canvassed my family, friends and contacts to come up with new ideas.

Then in one blinding moment of clarity it came to me – in the shower!  They do say that inspiration comes when we are most relaxed.  Following the usual process of debate and discussion Syncro PR was born. We felt that ‘Synchro’ spelt in the right way sounded slightly too techy and didn’t quite capture the character or nature of the business, so we dropped the ‘h’.

In-sync with your audience and the media – at last we had found the name we had spent so long searching for.  We then registered www.syncropr.com along with every possible version – a total of eight.

What have I learnt?  Finding a company name is not as easy as it seems.  Would I do it the same way next time?  Yes I would, even though the process was arduous at times and took much longer than anticipated.  Above all, we got there in the end and we are all convinced Syncro is a great name – what do you think?