Read the latest school food blogs, including Irene Carroll, Former Chair of LACA as she talks about healthy school lunches and the build up to the week.

Hi again,

Thanks to everyone who has read my blogs, left a message or sent an email. The interest has been fantastic. We are getting up a great head of steam that I am sure will be built up much further as we get closer to the week. Thank you also to the suppliers that have shown an interest and booked their place in the suppliers' directory. This is invaluable as it enables us to do more to promote the positive messages of school meals.

The suppliers' directory is a great addition this year as suppliers can promote their products and services online. There are three packages with different prices. The first is just for contact details (£100), the second allows two graphics and a page of copy (£250) and the top package allows a web contact plus a banner headline in the website (£400). These banners will rotate at random so the pages always look different. The big advantage of the top package is it gives the supplier another "in bound" link that will help their Search Engine Optimisation.

There are two questions we are wrestling with at the moment and perhaps you can help. The first is who should be the voice of the week? By that I mean which personality, athlete or celebrity should we have? It can't be a footballer because we can't afford it and more importantly whichever person we chose we would upset the rest of the football fans across the country and so be unproductive. Should it be an Olympian like Rebecca Adlington, the swimmer that one two gold medals in Beijing, or Rebecca Romero who has won a silver medal for rowing in 2004 and in 2008 she won a gold medal in cycling. Could it be someone entirely different? What do you think?

The second question is what are the ten most popular school meals main courses and puddings. The reason for asking is on the Monday of NSMW we are organising the "Big Vote" to find out Britain's most popular school meal. To do this we want to get people's top ten so please send them in. The vote will show regional variations so you can see what is popular in your area.

Just email me your ideas and thoughts at Irene@iloveschoolmeals.co.uk. I really look forward to hearing from you and as our strap line says I hope you "Get involved".

There is so much going on with NSMW that it is difficult to know where to start. Marketing is changing as a result of the massive growth of the Internet. The role of paper based items is now to drive people to websites. There is also a huge growth in social networking as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter dominate more of our customers' lives. More and more people are creating their own content and letting it be read by the online community. This blog is a good example.

Our young customers and often their parents have embraced this technology and taken multi-tasking to a new level. They can talk on their mobile, send an email, go online in a chat room, listen to music and still have TV playing in the background. Communication is now on a different level. There are all the new media channels and whereas we often used to send letters that could take days and sometimes weeks, we now communicate via email, text or SMS and the response is often instant.

We need to understand, accept and use the new digital techniques. Let's start with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). This is a technique to increase the page ranking of the website. By this I mean getting your website in the top three pages of Google and ideally on the first. Very few people go beyond page three when they put in a search item e.g. school meals. People surfing in this manner will be shown the results for both "natural search" and "paid search". Paid search is what it says on the tin, as Ronseal would say. Someone is paying for their website to be featured at the top or top right hand side of the page within a highlighted area. LACA is using SEO to raise its natural search profile via NSMW.

This means writing blogs, encouraging inbound links, using key words in the copy and writing copy in a specific way that reinforces the messages. Fortunately we have Karen Fewell to help us. Her success and use of SEO can be measured very easily. Just type in "Digital marketing consultant" into Google. I have just done it and Karen comes out Number 2 in the world and Number 1 in Europe. Thank heavens for that!

SEO is something that school caterers must be aware of. You should talk to your web providers and see if they understand how to use this technology. If they don't then you must find someone that can. We are caterers and long may that remain.