This week we’re looking at some of Shropshire’s marketing professionals, starting with Telford supermum and web designer @WhizzLizWeb.

Liz Bridges, a busy mother of two, moved to Telford from her job at the IBM head office in Portsmouth because she wanted a better work-life balance after having her first child, and subsequently set up a successful web design business from home.

“There’s huge diversity in my job,” says Liz.

“Last week I put live a pamper parties website, as well as a finger print jewellery website, and I’m currently working on projects for a potter, a natural health company and a chap who hires out VW beetles as wedding cars.

“I do quite a few projects for local businesses but my clients are generally nationwide. I’ve even done a website for a stud farmer in Queensland!”

Liz says that she doesn’t advertise because most of her business comes from word of mouth and personal recommendations.

She discovered Twitter when she became a member of WiRE (Women in Rural Enterprises) and attended a conference about blogs and twittering.

“I’ve seen a lot of things come and go on the internet, so I didn’t put too much stock in it initially, but I’ve found the quickness of Twitter is fantastic, especially if you haven’’t got time to write a full blog.

“And because my time’s quite precious, I don’t have chance to read many forums and magazines, so instead I follow lots of people who post interesting tweets about web design and all the information I want is already cherry picked for me!”

Oswestry PR executive Frankie McCamley, who tweets from @FrankieMcC, says that using sites like Twitter is important for anyone in the communications industry.

Frankie works for PR and marketing agency Seal at its branch in Shrewsbury, and says she first heard about Twitter on the Chris Moyles Show, during a debate about whether it was useful to the general public.

“Being involved with PR, it’s obviously vital to maximise all potential channels to reach our target audience, so I signed up – and a month down the line I’m a keen twitterer.

Frankie says she uses Twitter to communicate with colleagues at other branches, keep in touch with journalists, find out about what other people are interested in and sharing clients’ information.

“I also use the site to track celebrities,” says Frankie. “This is really useful, as we use celebrity endorsement for some of our clients.

“When I’m tracking them on Twitter, it’s a way to get to know then, find out what they like and who they are – I can then apply this knowledge when approaching them to represent one of my clients.

Our final marketing-savvy twitterer is Andrew Corbett from Ludlow, who tweets from @jacorbett.

Andrew works for a web company that’s studying how clients can get the best of social media like Twitter, Facebook and blogs.

“In fact we’re doing a talk for Telford Business Partnership about it in June,” says Andrew. “It’s entitled ‘Twitter, Facebook and Blogging – waste of time or marketing tool.’”

“So far we’ve found that opinion amongst clients is sharply divided between ‘it’s a waste of time’ and ‘it’s a lot cheaper than Google Adwords’.

“But there are lots of Shropshire businesses who are doing extremely well from Twitter, like Karen Thorne from @HoptonHouseBnB, which is very encouraging.”

By Lara Page