This year has been by no means an easy one and I think I must make a list of all the positive things that happened before I kick 2009 in the butt.

I have an overall feeling of thankfullness. Through these tough times Red Ribbon has somehow (no, we call it hard work) managed to grow. Grow in numbers (we have appointed a right-hand women for Deirdre in Johannesburg) and outgrown both our offices which forced us to get bigger office space for both Johannesburg and Cape Town. We have also grown in number of clients and signed a few exciting ones: Barnstone, Silverkeys and Cape IT Initiative.

Red Ribbon still managed to generate awesome coverage for our clients even though hordes of publications closed down or went less frequent.

We also discovered and somewhat mastered the world of social media. We started our own blog (you’re here now!) in the beginning of the year, made our website SEO friendly, discovered the value of Google Adwords and started participating in platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter.

Red Ribbon practised what we preached and did our own PR for the first time ever with amazing results and positive feedback. See two of our articles on Bizcommunity and Marketingweb.

On a more personal note… We had many exciting firsts in the company such as th arrival of Inge, Deirdre and Roald’s little bundle of joy, my and Moller’s son, Julian, first birthday, Marlene and Marnus’ first wedding anniversary and the marriage of Elanza to Dewald after a whirlwind romance!

In fact, if you look at it - all in all a good year. See, it helps to highlight the positives and off course a good, long break will also help me forget the terrible D word: world Depression.