News just in from the British Chambers of Commerce:

Please find attached a letter that David Frost has received from Stephen Timms MP, Minister for Competitiveness and John Healey MP, Minister for Local Government concerning the publication of new strengthened guidance on how businesses can protect themselves from flooding. This guidance has been updated following the experiences and issues that arose for businesses affected by the floods over the summer.

The Ministers have asked Chambers to help raise awareness amongst SMEs about this new guidance so you may wish to alert your business members to it.

Here’s a link to the letter.

Liverpool Pub Watch is giving its full backing to a campaign by North West Ambulance Service to highlight that verbal or physical abuse of ambulance staff can result in prosecution.

The Chamber’s Business Crime Direct team has circulated posters warning of the penalties of abusing paramedics throughout pubs and bars in Liverpool city centre and these are supported by banners at prominent city centre locations, such as Concert Square.

In addition, in a move believed to be a first, anyone who is arrested following an incident involving ambulance crew will receive a ban from Liverpool city centre Pub Watch area of between 6-12 months.

Read more about this story on the Liverpool Chamber website.

The Daily Telegraph is looking to do a piece on how businesses are coping with the increasing complexity of employment legislation.

Essentially it will be based on the question: How do you employ someone?

They are looking for two firms in any sector, employing 20-30 people to take part in telephone interview.

The piece will run in the first couple of weeks of the New Year.

If you  would like to be involved contact Nick Dines, British Chamber of Commerce’s Head of Communications on 0207 654 5812 or email: n.dines@britishchambers.org.uk

This time of year just wouldn’t be right without some lists looking back over the past twelve months. So to avoid being left out, here’s a little look at how Liverpool Chamber got on online in 2007:

• Liverpool Chamber’s main website had over 382,200 unique visitors
• Over 1,201,700 page views
• An average of 1,134 visits a day
• An average of 3,565 page views a day
• Our most popular pages were from the Members’ Directory (where all members can be found by potential customers)
• We took over 400 online event bookings and membership applications
• Our fantabulous free e-newsletter is now received by over 7,000 people a week (you can sign up in the box to the right or here on our main site)
• This blog has had over 50,770 visitors
• The blog now contains nearly 700 stories in 47 different categories

2008 promises to be an even more exciting year for Liverpool Chamber. As well as playing an important role in Liverpool’s Capital of Culture celebrations, we will be continuing to improve the range and quality of services we provide our members. We will also be launching a brand new website with lots of new and exciting online functions. These will make it even easier for you to do business with us and your customers.

So a big thanks to everyone who has visited us and supported us this year. We’ll try and do even better in 2008.

Liverpool Airport is to get two new routes from April 2008 following today’s announcement from Ryanair. Direct flights three times a week to Malaga and Nantes from Liverpool bring to number of routes offered from Liverpool by the carrier to 42.

The airline is carrying 2.5m passengers each year from Liverpool JLA, making it it’s fastest growing base in the UK. This throughput of passengers is ensuring 2,500 local jobs and bringing an annual visitor spend of £200m to the city.

Vic Brodrick, spokesperson from Liverpool JLA said: “We are delighted to be able to offer two new routes, they demonstrate Ryanair’s commitment to Liverpool.”

TravelWise Merseyside has added an extra exciting benefit to joining its Wise Moves Club.

Members can now call on expert help and advice from their very own Travel Plan consultant.

A brand new consultancy support package is available to help promote and progress Travel Plans at organisations which join the Club. This site-specific service is free and the consultant will provide support for a full year.
Each organisation needs to match this consultancy support with their own member of staff who will work with the consultant at their premises.

Further details and application forms are available at the Travel Wise website. The closing date for applications is 18th January 2008.

A Travel Plan helps organisations to enable staff, visitors and suppliers to reach their premises easily and efficiently. It can reduce parking needs and congestion, ease recruitment and retention, offer better travel subsidies, improve the health of staff, the image of the organisation, and improve environmental performance.

The ever-wonderful Lifehacker website has an interesting article on how you can have your own professional looking web domain and website using free online applications.

Once you’ve bought your domain name (e.g. mybusiness.com), you can use a variety of tools to build and host a range of different site types and email clients:

“Want your very own web site address, but don’t want to mess with pay-for hosting packages or server configuration? Today you can buy a domain name for around 10 bucks a year (or less) and map it to a variety of free web-based apps for no-mess and no-cost hosting. Typical commercial web hosting starts at around $100 a year and comes with clunky webmail and apps you have to set up yourself. Instead, you can have a full-featured web site with multiple spacious email accounts, blog or static web page hosting, and other services for free.”

Read the full article here.

Over 100 guests of the Chamber of Commerce enjoyed the annual Christmas Platform lunch of turkey with all the trimmings followed by entertainment from comedian, Mickey Finn who treated guests to a traditional stand up routine. Guests also raised over £500 for selected charity, NSPCC with a game of heads an tails.

The next platform lunch is on 22nd January at Bar Italia in Castle Street, Liverpool, when the format will return to business presentations by guests pulled from the hat. To book online visit the Chamber website’s events page.

Pictured above is Mickey Finn entertaining the guests.

It’s Friday, it’s nearly Christmas, some of you may even be going on your work’s night out later, I know we are (w00t!).

What you need is a nice little game to calm you down during your tea break.

So, have a go at Bejeweled, the classic game where you have to re-arrange the jewels to score points. Move them around to form rows of three or more to get points and clear the board. Simple, classic and not too taxing.

Play Bejeweled here.

Flickr, the groovey online photo storage website, has introduced a fab new tool for Pro Account holders.

Now you can choose to opt in to see comprehensive stats on how many times your photos are viewed, where these viewers come from and what they searched for to find you.

If you know this information, you can manage your tags and descriptions better to maximise the impact of your images.

If you have a pro account, activate Flickr stats here.

If you haven’t got a Pro Account, it’s only about £12 per year and well worth it if you add lots of pics.

Why not boost our stats a little by visiting the Chamber’s Flickr page?