If you’ve not booked your ticket to the Digital Festival that’s on in Dublin on February 24th then perhaps this discount that they sent on might entice you.
The discount code is BFSDMULL which brings the ticket price down to €275+VAT @ 21%. So that’s 100 euros off. I’ll be availing of that myself. Some people I greatly respect and admire will be speaking.
Test your risk intelligence.
Got this via a press release:
As the current financial crisis demonstrates, many people are bad at thinking about risk. Expert gamblers, however, seem to be an exception. They are less prone to the cognitive biases that affect most of us and as a result, they can think about risk more clearly.
In the next lecture of the 2010 College of Science, Engineering and Food Science (SEFS) Public Lecture Series at UCC, Dr Dylan Evans will present his initial findings from recent interviews conducted with expert gamblers and outline some ways for thinking more wisely about risky choices.
The lecture titled: “Risk Intelligence” – How expert gamblers can teach us all to make better decisions” will be delivered on Wednesday, February 10th at 8pm in Boole IV Lecture Theatre.
Dr Dylan Evans is Lecturer in Behavioural Science in the School of Medicine at UCC. He is the author of several popular science books, including Emotion: The Science of Sentiment (Oxford University Press, 2001) and Placebo: The Belief Effect (Harper Collins, 2003) and writes regularly for The Guardian. He is a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association, and a Member of the British Fulbright Scholars Association.
That new device from Apple (avoiding putting it in the blog post title or body to avoid Googler traffic during the hype cycle) is going to make using the web easy for people who up to know found using a mouse, keyboard and a browser a tad intimidating. Webstats show that iPod Touch traffic has been quite strong and growing and this larger version is going to bring a whole new demographic online who might never use such an onbnoxious pointing device. A device without a “real” OS so no need to install patches, no need to shut down properly, no need to figure out all the shite UI gotchas and so on. A thin piece of glass that we touch and the full blown web and all the data she carries.
I’m sure it’s killing those that want the web acessible only via oily machines and those that somehow “deserve” the web but tough. The majority of people don’t give a shit that you can’t modify the device or Jobs owns their functionality. The same way most people don’t add a big fuckoff exhaust and go faster stripes to their car. Apple’s obsessive paranoia about control gives us devices like the iPhone and the iPad and the proponents of openness give us … the Nexus Phone two years later and One Laptop Per Child. Out of the box, Apple devices work for the greatest number. That really must take the power away from those that are called upon by the family to sort a driver for some device.
A tweet that sums up the massive potential for the device is this:
I’ve been pretty vocal about my dislike towards the iPad but I still want one. Imagine – not having to carry anything to class but a slate!
iPhones and iPod Touches are already being bought en-masse by educational institutions. Bye bye school labs and awkward desk setups. Schoolbooks and courseware direct to the device. Art galleries use iPod Touches for multimedia tours. Tate Modern has a great one. Apple from feedback knew the screen on the touch was an issue for lots of further uses of the device so this new device will fill a gap. It will probably impact on the Touch. Apple has shifted 20 million iPod Touches so far.
So, democratisation of the web. Is it open platforms that need an engineer or is it easiest route to get to the web, even if in a “closed” device?
Oh yes and ChromeOS, I think you just got sunk.
I’ve been telling people that they should be able to pitch themselves/their business in a single Tweet. If you can’t explain what you or your business does in 140 characters then you need to work on your pitch. If you’re in a lift with Bill Gates and he asks you what you do, can you tell him before his bodyguards chuck you out on the 5th floor?
Huge amount of Irish businesses in the past few minutes are doing just that by tagging their twitter messages with #biztweet
Example:
Spoke about this at the Online PR course on Saturday on what doesn’t work. Heads up to the PR companies out there that are trying to engage with us but are wondering why it is not working. Here’s the template that yourself and your peers are using and it doesn’t work. The implied bits are in ( brackets )
Dear < insert blogger's name >,
Love your < insert blog name > and especially liked < insert recent blog post title >, it was certainly food for thought. I’m contacting you today to let you know about a new campaign we are doing for a client. (50 quid if you can actually spot a difference between this and the same campaign last year) The feedback so far (by the people afraid to be critical of the spend) has been great. I think the readers of your < insert type of blog > blog will get a great kick out of it ( or maybe the fact we have pics of a fat dude in a suit next to a woman dressed like a hooker.) Maybe you’d like to blog it? If you’d like to talk to Brendán who heads the marketing for the Company (you remember that souless corpspeak waffler who made it clear you gave him a rash from just being around?) let me know and I’ll arrange for you to do an interview for your blog. (I hope you’re getting the fact that I have a column to fucking fill in Excel and we got you pissed last year on petrol flavoured alcopops so you owe us)
Hope all is well and keep blogging about < insert that recent blog post title >!
(goodbye smelly blogger)
Cheers dudes,
Droid 1.c
it@cork are currently looking for a marketing exec on a part-time basis.
Details:
We are looking for a person with PR and Marketing experience to temporarily fill the role of the Events and Marketing Executive who is covering the Programme Manger’s maternity leave. Experience of organising events would be a distinct advantage. The position is part-time, 3 days a week; the successful candidate would ideally be available from February 1 to July 30 2010.
For an informal discussion of the role contact Alison Reilly, Acting Programme Manager 021 2307076 or send your CV and a cover letter to alison
The role requires:
* Experience in Marketing and PR; event organisation experience would be a distinct advantage.
* Excellent communication and organisational skills with the ability to prioritise a large number of competing tasks whilst working under pressure.
* Excellent computer literacy including Word, Excel and PowerPoint; experience in using a CMS would be an advantage.
* Flexibility around work hours as some events will be run outside of normal work hours.
* Ability to work as part of a team.
Good News Friday is this Friday. Media Express is allowing you free access to their press release system if you send out positive press releases this Friday.
You can sign up now and even compose your release and then time it to go out on Friday. The idea is that Friday’s news then will be full of positive news on the day which is normally the most depressing of the year.
Download a prep pack too. (PDF) Light the scented candles, drink some hippy tea and start putting together nice news!
Photo owned by me’nthedogs (cc)
Free Online Marketing event in Dublin on Tuesday morning. “Using the Internet for Profit and Political Gain” – X-factor style free business event. Tues, 19 Jan 8.00-9.30am at the Burlington Hotel, Dublin 4.
On Thursday there’s a webinar (no it’s not something durty) on social media from 4pm to 5pm. Being a webinar you can log in from home or the work desk. It’s free, leave it on in the background if needs be.
Online PR training course is on January 23rd. It’s booked out and over capacity but the notes are going to be released after.
Business Blogging in Cork is on Jan 25th. Places still left.
Social Media Unspun is on February 4th. If you want your Irish case study to be included in the talk, let me know.
The idea for a Communications bible came from the way some TV shows operate. They create a “Bible” for the show that describes the limits/boundaries of the universe where the show exists. It will cover the characters, their backstory and importantly their motivations. The idea being that when a writer is putting a script together the characters don’t do something that is out-of-character and it keeps continuity. (Yes it does sound bullshitty but it works!)
This is the Bible for Batman the animated series, this is the bible for Battlestar Galactica. (PDF)
As a business, what you want is a bible to show how your organisation communicates internally and externally and the limits of your staff and what they are able to do. The endgame for this communications bible could be to generate sales of your products, to increase awareness of what your company does, to improve a shitty reputation or to just make your interactions with customers better. You chose what you want.
To interact with your customers well, you need to understand what they want from you but also what motivates them before, during and after the interactions with them. Good salespeople are those who understand people (not businesses) and can relate to them. Some questions to consider:
There are plenty of people who will contribute to the success of your business while never being a customer or spending a penny with you. They include journalists, politicians, fans, business leaders and your competition to name but a few. How do you tell your story to journalists, how do you know what to give them that they’ll find interesting? What is so great about your business (this includes remarkable staff) that makes non-customers want to go and encourage their friends to use you?
Figuring these “characters” out before we start communicating with them will make our jobs much easier. The hard work for communications is the prep and figuring out what to communicate. The action of communicating is the easy part. You don’t tell a potential million dollar investor how the decision engine under your web app is built for example but maybe you do tell the tech reporter.
You now need to figure out the way a customer, now knowing their motivations, will contact you, what they could potentially ask and how it gets dealt with. Consider the numbers of ways one type of customer will contact and what they want and the number of people who could take in the request. Quite a lot of variations and so there is potential to drop the ball or communicate something badly.
This idea of a Communications Bible will be covered more at the Online PR Course on the 23rd.
There’s a conference on digital/social/earned media called “The Brainfood Store – Digital Festival” being run on February 24th. I got an email about it from the organisers. There seems to be a whole heap of these out there at the moment but there are three fantastic speakers that caught my attention:
Peter Kim, Managing Director, the Dachis Group.
Shel Israel, author – Naked Conversations & Twitterville.
Russell Davies, organiser of Interesting, blogger, author.
Tickets are €275 until January 31st, then they go up. I’m happily paying that to see these guys. I’ve seen Shel and Russell talk before, Russell’s blog is one of the blogs I click on first thing each morning and Peter’s company is changing the way businesses work by changing the way they communicate internally and externally.
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