The costume arrived, and on Monday 14th March, Nick came into work fully prepared (beard trimmed, hair in the style of Riker, facial expression toned and polished) and we handed over the costume, with instructions to make sure it got a lot of exposure. Take a look at the resemblance below. During the week Nick reluctantly willingly took part in the many embarrassing challenges we set for him, including  a trip to the bakery and into town. It turned out that people in Aldershot didn’t really bat an eyelid at the fact he was dressed as a Star Trek enthusiast!

Nick managed to raise £145 for Comic Relief – Well done Nick

Next on our agenda was getting the rest of the company involved. Seeing as we have an in house gym, we decided to take full advantage of it and organise an exercise-a-thon spanning over 9 hours. This involved us each taking part in a 30 minute cycle and 3, 10 minute stints on the rowing machine. Not only a great way to exercise but a way to take your mind off work for a while and get the endorphins flowing ensuring an even happier team!

The starting gun went and we all pedalled and rowed as much as we could being sure to keep track of how far we managed to get. As a company we covered 110 miles on the bike and over 57000 metres on the rowing machine, the equivalent of 2 London to Brighton bike rides and rowing from central London to the mouth of the River Thames.

As a few extras our Product & Marketing specialists Hannah Bird and Annie McLoughlin cooked up a storm to keep all the exercisers going, making ‘Red Nose Day’ themed cupcakes, cookies and a cheesecake. These were available for a small donation, and turned out to be very popular in the afternoon during the exercise for staff who needed a quick sugar injection. Combining the cakes, with the exercise-a-thon, pick a pose sweepstake and Nick’s Riker challenge we managed to raise over £350 for Comic Relief. A big thanks to everyone who took part. Any ideas for next year are very welcome!

I had finished designing the new Fubra.com site and like most times after finishing a website I couldn’t get the design out of my head. Thinking what if I moved this here or changed that image there.

What did keep coming back to me was the slogan ‘focused on you’ I had created to define our brand. With this I wanted to summarise what we do here at Fubra.

I have always personally felt this has always been our aim here at Fubra with all of our websites designed and built to help you our users find what they are looking for quickly and easily. Having pushed this brand on the new Fubra site. I thought it would be great if all of the guys here at Fubra can be really proud of what we do here and also be proud of why we do it.

So I thought what would be better than (literally) painting our identity ‘slogan’ all over our walls!

Me and Nick got started on the painting at 6pm and we had finished at 1am this morning. With a couple of breaks in between for Chinese food and to watch the end battle scene in Zulu :s If that doesn’t get you geared up for painting I don’t know what will!

Knowing you would probably not like to watch 6 hours of us painting we have cut it down to a mere 45 seconds for you to enjoy.

So I am now pleased to say that no fewer than 8 of our team have a personal blog:

• Harry Ford
• Matt Godwin
• Nick Haines
• Paul Maunders
• Brendan McLoughlin
• Andy Thompson
• Matt Ward
• Steve Whiteley

OK so we are not quite up with Sun’s 4115 staff blogs, but we are getting there!

If I have missed anyone from Fubra who has a blog, then please let me know and I will add you to the list! Please note that the opinions expressed on these blogs are those of our employees and not necessarily those of Fubra.

I joined Fubra full time in December to take over the publicity/press/PR from Brendan, who’d been juggling dealing with the press and running the company at the same time. No mean feat considering I’m now doing it full time and still find myself rushed off my feet!

My first week really threw me in at deep end, in a good way. It was the week that a splinter group of the original fuel protesters who disrupted the country in 2000 were planning to protest at refineries around the country, so after a quick briefing on the intimate working of the petrol industry, I got stuck in writing press releases for our petrol price comparison site, PetrolPrices.com. I did a radio interview on BBC Radio Leicester less that 24 hours after I’d started (!) and a series of newspaper interviews throughout the week, which got us come really good national coverage as ‘the voice of the motorist’.

Since then I’ve done so many interviews that I don’t get nervous any more – I’ve been on radio stations around the country, most of the BBC local station, as well as Radio 5 Live and even a TV interview for BBC News 24 (check out the gale force winds I was battling against!)

To maximise our coverage I write one topical blog article and one press release each week, both of which I email to our members and press contacts, and then it’s just a case of waiting for the press to call. I quickly learnt that if you want to go home on time, don’t send out a press release at 5.30pm…

To make my job easier, the web developers have made me some really useful tools. For example, I needed a place to keep all my press contacts in one place, that I could add to and edit easily, and use to email all my contacts at once. A few days later I was presented with an all-singing all-dancing database to do exactly that. Now I don’t have to waste time sifting through random bits of paper with hastily scrawled numbers and email addresses on, which makes me much more efficient.

Another tool I now have to help get the most press coverage possible is the ‘Generic Graph Generator’. I wanted it to be able to make graphs of our data really easily, so journalists can see at a glance if there is a story behind our data. For example, I used it to illustrate a blog about why diesel is more expensive that petrol, and how how diesel prices had risen across the UK over the last 30 years. But I can use it to make graphs for OurProperty.co.uk or any other site too, because it’s not tied to one site.

At the moment only I can use the Generic Graph Generator, but we’re working on making it part of a big press area for all our sites, where journalists can go to get all the information they need, all in one place. It’ll have loads of other cool features too, like the ability to book a radio interview slot online, examples of our press coverage and access to easy-to-digest facts from all our sites.

Things are shaping up really well, and I’m enjoying looking for innovative ways to get Fubra in the news… like the front page lead on the Daily Express today!

In plain English, this means that we are able to go directly to Ofcom to request telephone number allocations for our various communications services.

Our initial allocation of 80,000 x 0844 numbers will be used for a call monitoring and revenue generation service for one of our web-based business directories, as well as a call tracking service for members of the public who sell items on classified websites, but who do not wish to publish their geographic telephone number.

The building dated from 1670 but was re-built in 1984 and won a civic design award at the time. It was most likely originally built by Sir James Tichborne linking it to one of the most interesting legal cases in the victorian era, The Tichborne Claimant.

If we are a bit busy or you find it hard to get through over the next few weeks that will be because BT are faffing around migrating our phone lines but we hope this should go smoothly.