As an enterprise, we’ve had a rather unusual journey. Here’s a little bit of history for you…

Back in the Mists of Time (2008) we were all working on a little creative magazine, Noir et Blanc, that we thought was going to bring Portsmouth’s rich, but segregated cultural offering together and cause an exciting fusion, funded by UnLtd. To cut a very long story short, it started to achieve its aims, but, as arts projects often do, it became unsustainable.

Rather than biding our time, waiting for the right investor or funder to come along, we kept ourselves busy by running and promoting arts projects (our own and others’) – we ran a couple of photography courses for the young-and-out-of-work, an intergenerational community project, a series of exhibitions of art-therapy work and several others.

Throughout this period we often found ourselves with very small marketing budgets – we always had to be creative with the way we reached our audiences. Social media was well-established as a concept, but Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook (now the biggest of the big boys) were still just cutting their teeth. We used these to talk to enormous audiences, and achieve quite remarkable things. Before we knew it, people were asking us to teach them how to market themselves using these services, and we were doing seminars and presentations all over the South.

As time went on, we got more excited about promoting other people’s projects, and less about running arts projects while we waited to get back to printing our magazine. We were spending almost all of our time in training rooms, on stages and in meeting rooms, helping people to make the latest web revolutions a part of their marketing strategies.

After we realised what had happened to us, we decided to concentrate on doing just that – helping the amazing businesses and entrepreneurs around us tell their stories and market their wares to the people that needed them. Noir et Blanc Magazine turned in to NeBMedia.

We’ll do another magazine one day.