Archive for the ‘irishblogs’ Category

All thrown into one messy post…

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

Hello from London, here for another few hours then back to Dublin, then over to Galway, back to Dublin and then Cork for a little bit of work and a long bit of rest. 2009 has been a cracker and a killer of a year. More on that in later posts.

So anyways, London. I was here for another MeasurementCamp which is an event with some of the brightest minds coming together and sharing information and insights around social media. Real social media done by real genuine people. We should have one of those in Ireland … oh wait.

There were three speakers this time and all three made me consider how people do social media but two in particular fueled an epiphany (or two) for me. Two Johns, John Griffith and John Willshire talked about social media but from different angles yet both were honing in on the idea that it’s not just ROI and it’s not just about quick hits and moving on. John Willshire talked about social media being a bonfire when advertising is fireworks. It’s not about hashtags in Twitter so you can spam your client’s name to as wide an audience as possible and who’ll forget you a few day later. It’s hard to boil down John Griffith’s talk. It covered a lot in a short time but the way he views social media is how I’d love to see it in the future. We are not clones of each other and when a company realises this, everything can improve. He talked about delivering a marketing message to your granny and how what you tell her is not important but what she says to her friend in her version of the story is the important bit. Social media almost becoming spiritual.

Saw Stephen Malkmus in Camden on Wednesday night. Great gig. Photo:
photo

Was in the Tate Modern on Thursday. Saw the Big Black Box installation. Great idea, giant art is always fun.

There was also this exhibition called: No Ghost, just a Shell, the blurb of which is:

No Ghost Just a Shell project, which was initiated when French artists and frequent collaborators Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno purchased the copyright for Annlee, an animated figure originally designed a Manga agency in Tokyo. No Ghost Just a Shell proposes scenarios in which Annlee is liberated from ownership and allowed the chance to resolve the ambiguities of her fate.

Photo of one of the works:
photo

Bought Charles Saatchi’s book on himself. I am Charles Saatchi and … which is excellent. Well worth a quick read. Used this quote before but if only every company had this printed out:

By and large, talent is in such short supply that mediocrity can be taken for brilliance rather more than genius can go undiscovered

Oh yes, got some media calls about the new Facebook Privacy settings. On Facebook and miffed? Get over it, public or not, you already upload all your personal data to the computers of a foreign company.

Oh yes and lastly, I normally use the Apple Store in Regent Street to check emails with my phone and upload pics to Flickr etc. And this time I logged into Foursquare and mapped my travels too. But St Pancras Station now has free WiFi and it’s worth a visit too after getting a beautiful makeover. Pic:

photo

The Art Fair 10th-13th Dec – Some nice affordable art

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

Got this via email:
The Art Fair is on soon in the Nora Dunne Gallery. 52 different artists displaying, price range to suit all pockets, I’m told.

5000 complimentary tickets are all sent out…more are on the way. Each ticket once filled out will enter the customer into the draw for paintings by John Morris, David Nolan and Judy Glynn, Handmade silver jewellery, A TV DVD player, 200 euro voucher for the no-reserve Auction coming up on the 29th December and whatever else turns up on the day.

Big fan of art especially if at a good affordable price. Have a looksee.

Frightened Rabbit

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

The support for Modest Mouse tonight.

Google Realtime search – powered by Twitter

Monday, December 7th, 2009

Imagine they had something better than Twitter at one point and killed it? Here’s Google Realtime Search, powered by Twitter. Remember the days when Yahoo! search was powered by Google? I’m sure Twitter realises that Google will do their best to build something so they don’t have to use Twitter one day…

Making (Real) Money With Social Media Marketing – The Komplett Experience

Monday, December 7th, 2009

This is a guest post from Aaron McKenna who is the Country Manager for Komplett.ie, the Norwegian electronics etailer. Komplett launched a social media marketing campaign in May 2009. In this guest post, Aaron will discuss some of the elements relating to their experiences and lessons learned since then. This is a blueprint on how to do business online using social media. Download, print, send on and share with as many people as you can.

Komplett will make a high six figure sum out of social media marketing in Ireland in 2010, having made a modest six figure sum in 2009. By 2011 it will be seven. I don’t joke. I was reading an article in the latest BusinessWeek talking about social media consultants being the equivalent of snake oil salesmen in some senses: Extolling the mantra of social media as gospel, adhering to strict doctrines about ‘the conversation’ and selling many companies just that; expensive snake oil.

Personally, I’ve decided to class myself as a ‘sceptical convert’ to the idea of Social Media Marketing.

I’m a convert because we’re actually making money out of it. It’s driving revenue. There are results beyond how many followers we get, and impressions to our blog. These are nice things to have, and the brand value of our exercise is quite important… But at the end of the day, there has to be a bottom line result; and the word ‘results’ is something I find a lot of marketing agencies and consultants tend to shy away from when you quantify those results on the bottom line.

Yes the money is, in the grand scheme of things, not a massive amount of our total turnover… But another good piece of advice on business is, it’s a game of inches; and social media marketing for us has been quite cheap all things considered. And the potential I see for it is much broader than what it stands at today.

I’m a sceptic because I inherently mistrust anything that every business consultant looking for my cash is extolling the virtues of. The first thing I look at in any business/marketing consultant is how many successful businesses/marketing campaigns they’ve run, barring their consultancy. It’s low, for many of them, and I mistrust mostly their lack of understanding of the day-to-day fundamentals that business leaders have to deal with.

I remain committed to growing our social media efforts whilst in the back of my head wondering how much of this is a fad or a bubble. Surely some of it must be, I think…

But the trick to succeeding in the long run will come in being strong in the areas that will stand the test of time and still be around in five years. Not just platforms, but modus. I truly believe that you have to add value to reap success in this medium – Setting up a Twitter account, getting 10,000 followers and spamming them with ‘deals’ all day long; or talking about the weather outside your office, these things do not add value.

Adding value is writing ‘How-To’ articles for the DIY products you sell (in our case, computer components) and being around to answer questions for people on the fly. It’s hotels giving me a great guide for the locality so as I know where to go and what to do within easy striking distance of the lobby when I arrive for an overnight business trip. It’s being able to tweet the reception to say what time I’ll arrive because of a flight delay, and getting asked how it went in the end when I finally arrive.

The second lesson I have after adding value concerns the bottom line: It’s something that is often left out of discussions regarding social media marketing, whereas in my view and, I think, in yours too it is a central concern. How much money can I make out of social media, when and how?

While our circumstances and experience sure as heck won’t be yours, I find value in reading the stories of other businesses and applying my own lens to it.

The Beginning

We kicked off in social media marketing for four main reasons:

  • 1. We’re a web company, and web based marketing reaps direct results in a playing field we’re suited to
  • 2. Social media has been on the rise for some time now, and all that noise warranted some exploration
  • 3. Yours truly originally comes with a background in online media, and so you could say I have a bias towards this field (and knowledge of how to make it work) that aided our decision to explore it
  • 4. It’s cheap. Let’s face it, we’re all looking for the cheapo marketing option, and till now our social marketing campaign has cost us, per month, less than the cost of an advertisement, just one ad, in many magazines and newspapers

We tested the waters a little with some not very convincing and sporadic content for a few weeks, kicking the tyres, picking platforms and seeing how they work – A blog, Twitter and Facebook were chosen as our three main avenues of attack.

Bebo is popular in Ireland, but not amongst our audience – though not to say we’ll never go there. LinkedIn and other services like that have value, but focusing on them takes more resources and doesn’t provide enough value, so I made the decision that we should focus our efforts on these three platforms.

This, I suppose, could be a lesson pulled out for you right here: No matter what the mediums you choose, and the way you choose to approach them, you need to be able to focus daily attention to them. Spreading yourself too thin reaps poor rewards in all channels.

Finding A Strategy

After a while, having spent no money and a little time on the effort, I figured there was something in it and we’d need a strategy. Obviously it needed a strong ‘social’ element, with us becoming more active on Twitter and Facebook and growing our audience there… But I still needed to find the ‘Something’ that would add value and give people a reason to participate with us beyond our charm and good looks.

At the time we were running a fairly popular campaign, doing free ‘Build Your Own PC’ classes in our office on a Saturday morning. (A campaign that will see light again in 2010, incidentally. We’re working on ways to bring it to a wider audience.) A clear value add: We teach you how to build your own PC and you’re more likely to do it, and shop with Komplett because you know us – we’re the guys who taught you how to do it!

It doesn’t take a genius (which is fortunate, considering I was the guy doing the figuring) to figure out that we could make a jump into offering how-to content online via the blog. A phone call later and Marc McEntegart, a henchman from my days in media, was sat in my office and we discussed ways to shape it. The idea of how-to and technical content was my idea, as was the evolution from this into writing up product spots and doing deals. Marc came up with the idea of filling in the middle with tech news and general articles, growing our traction with a reader base whom we could later convert into customers.

He – and here’s another lesson – is also a sociable fellow. Take a look at us on Twitter, on boards.ie, and the general tone of many of our blog articles. You ideally need a good communicator to front your social efforts. An introvert won’t cut it. Sounds silly, but there you go. Someone with tact is a bonus, too.

Our content heavy model won’t suit every business, but we spotted a gap (localised Irish how-to and technical content), and invested a near FTE into the effort… A big toe dipped in.

The flipside from the content on the blog – which we see as the anchor to our social media operation – is the communication channels, Twitter and Facebook. Here we’ve developed an offering tailored to the medium, becoming extremely chatty and friendly with people on Twitter, where constant conversation is the norm; and less sporadic updates to Facebook of the most interesting blog content.

So the ‘workflow’ of our social media campaign involves Twitter and Facebook conversations ultimately driving traffic to our blog, where the greatest value-add resides in terms of content; and from the blog we eventually convert customers with quality, useful content, like how-to’s and product spots highlighting what we think is interesting and why.

Not That We Forgot About The Conversation…

The blog is the anchor of our social media campaign, and it eats up the most time and resources. Our main focus is to drive people to the blog where we hook them with really useful and honest content.

That’s not to say that we think Twitter and Facebook are a means to an end. These, particularly Twitter, are places where we see a huge level of engagement with people on a daily basis; from answering questions about products to more social banter.

This engagement in conversation, be it with or without a blog, is extremely useful: For starters, we’ve got some of our best feedback from customers through this avenue. It’s a live finger on the pulse, and it’s proved useful to us on many practical levels… Including feedback from folks telling us that something in the webshop is broken and needs to be fixed, long before we would have ever noticed it.

How Do I Gain Traction?

No matter your strategy, be you tweeting alone or creating compelling content every day, you need to gain traction with your audience. Once you’ve hooked a customer into your social web – be they conversing with you on twitter or following your content via RSS or whatever – you can pretty much count on their loyalty, so long as the content remains good.

Komplett launched its non-traditional social media marketing campaign with a fairly traditional trick: we ran a competition for people following us on Twitter and Facebook, giving away a bunch of free games. Now, there is a discussion here about quantity versus quality in terms of your following: It’s relatively easy to get a thousand eyeballs on the internet. But quality eyeballs?

To my view, quality is all that matters – the customers we attract (for Komplett) have to be Irish (we’re an Irish webshop); they have to be web shoppers or people open to the idea of shopping online (believe you me, they’re not a wide grouping in Ireland per capita today); and buying the kind of stuff we sell: Computer components and consumer electronics. Whatever your audience profile, you need to target this group.

So, on the face of it is a competition going to generate quality followers for us? Depends on the competition. Our video game one was a bit of a wide net to cast, but we went about promoting it in targeted haunts – Damien here gave it a plug for us, and his audience would be right up our alley. We pushed it on boards.ie where we have a long-standing customer interaction forum (their biggest… I say to social media heads sometimes that we’re probably the oldest Irish company with a social presence on the web); and so the potential net was wide, but the delivery method was not.

You do need something to get you some buzz to get some traction – be it a targeted competition (the easiest route) or something more elaborate – and after that, the audience will grow itself slowly but steadily. Always focus on that: Slow but steady. Quality. Once you get in a few dozen eyeballs, they’ll begin to spread your stuff around and you’ll grow steadily.

The Salacious Relationship: Social Media And Money

As I mentioned above, many marketing agencies and consultants don’t like to talk money. (Not in terms of results, at least.) Particularly in the context of social media. It’s sometimes difficult to reconcile yourself against being social and honest and opening people’s wallets. Brand awareness, brand value, buzz, goodwill, word of mouth… All great words and phrases, but the majority of you out there (I’ll bet) are just like me: fighting for your lunches. Fighting for customers, conversions, sales and, ultimately, to keep a chair under your arses.

In the daily reality, you need a dual-band approach: All the buzzwords do translate into real value for your company. All that goodwill generated from all those people you’re tweeting with or from that funny video you threw up on YouTube is worth something to you: Branding, customer loyalty, whatever. But this isn’t always a result directly seen on the bottom line today, unless you’ve got an eye towards driving sales as well.

Focus too much on one aspect and you won’t go very far, at least not very fast – schill too much for sales and you’ll alienate people. Make them feel good about themselves, great, but where’s the call to action to make a sale?

Short term revenues matter. So does long term customer relationships. But you need to eat your lunch this afternoon. Social media, to my mind, should be about getting you a sandwich today and building the kind of relationship that delivers a big turkey every Christmas.

How do you achieve this? Every industry and business will have a different answer. (It’s my hope that in reading this, of course, you see my logic and twist it to your circumstance.) For Komplett the answer comes through our business model obviously, we’re an online retailer, so we give you content about our products; making the most of them and what have you; and people buy stuff.

The relationship we forge brings them back: That relationship of trust between you and Komplett, that says we’re a human company that wants to do good by you. If we simply generated that goodwill we’d get sales, eventually… But there needs to be the call to action today.

If you’re a hotel and tweeting me on my journey, you’ll likely get the goodwill to bring me back next time. But how did you ensnare me the first time? Good content? A pre-sales conversation about the area the hotel is in, and what I can do around it?

What can you offer your customers, and where’s the call to action?

And what kind of results can you expect? For me, a quarter million added to the bottom line is alright, I suppose, a few percentage points, not worth a bankers bonus for sure. I won’t turn my nose at it. But I could make a half million in once off sales to a particular group of people if I invested time into it… So where’s the long term payoff in social media?

Well, that quarter million represents customers who are most certainly satisfied and will likely be loyal to Komplett; they may even tell all their friends about us. I need the quarter million today, the couple of million tomorrow, to justify the investment in time and effort in social media… But the long term takeaway, the thing that the social media consultants like to extol the virtues of, is still there; and that will build your business for the long term.

Depending on your business the fundamental numbers will be different. Five thousand or fifty thousand or fifty million, it doesn’t matter, it’s marketing 101 as to defining success: If you’re a hotel (sorry, I’ve got hotels on the brain today) and you follow my advice and offer content, how many hits do you get on that content a month? What’s the click through rate to your online booking form? What’s the conversion? The average order value? Wham, bam, thank you ma’am.

The long term virtue of the relationship with that customer is obvious. But the key is you just made some cash out of them today. That’s critical. And yes, tomorrow or the next day you might get the other people who took a peek and decided not to buy… But I’ll bet your boss (or bank manager) looks at the figures for customers who pulled the trigger, not the ones who played with the pistol and might come back tomorrow.

Dip your toes in. Define your strategy, and your criteria for success. Invest in it, you’ll spend money before you make it. If you’re not being successful, tweak it. Eventually you’ll get there. My recommendation is to drag in guys like Damien once you’ve figured out your criteria for success at different investment levels. Give the consultants a clear framework and they’ll bring excellent value to your efforts, defining routes to achieving the success you’ve defined, not some vague definition of it taken from the social media bible.

Social media marketing is new, it’s going to evolve tremendously in the years to come in terms of platforms, methods and tools (I already see people creating tools to track down potential sales leads on the social networks); but like any other investment you make in time or money, it needs to deliver money today as well as the long term promised value of customer loyalty and brand awareness.

On Twitter: Aaron McKenna

Fluffy Links – Monday December 7th 2009

Monday, December 7th, 2009

Jonathan has a new blog: Awesome Geek.

Eoin is doing a series of recommended book purchases for Christmas.

Who wants a certification in social media? Pre-Christmas special from Mulley Comms.

The real whizbang full-blown Google Zeitgeist stats for Ireland 2009.

So the top 10 hotels in Ireland are…

I expect to get this t-shirt for Christmas.

Male pole dancing. The legwarmers are chuckleworthy.

New iPhone app from Mercedes.

Virtual crime is now real crime. Very interesting.

Interesting iPhone app. Knocking. Share your screen with another iPhone around the world. Use it to stream video, share photo galleries etc.

Lovely idea. Weeknotes. Each week a company gives a raw and transparent summary of what they did that week. Good way to share with the rest of the world and increase transparency.

Via I Guess I’m Floating: Radiohead behind the scenes at the Grammys

Raising Cork Table Quiz – Dec 7th

Sunday, December 6th, 2009

For those interested in helping those who are suffering from the recent floods in Cork, got this via email:

We’re holding the Raising Cork Quiz in SilverSprings Moran Hotel on Monday December 7th in aid of the Cork Flood Victims – with all proceeds going to the SVP Cork Flood Victims Fund. We are aiming to have 200 teams of 4, and raise in excess of €20,000 for this worthy cause.

George Hook has kindly offered to be the Quizmaster Go to www.raisingcork.com – all the information you need can be found there, and it will be updated regularly over the next week.

We have set up a twitter account so if you tweet, you can follow us on twitter.com/raisingcork.

Fluffy Links – Friday December 4th 2009

Friday, December 4th, 2009

Recession wine. Another great design of wine bottle labels.

Interesting Facebook application from An Post. A bit like an addressbook.

The lads from Motorcheck.ie got on to me a while back for some feedback on getting attention for what they do. One of the reasons I signed up with working with them is they use technology in some very clever ways, one of which is this: The Motrocheck.ie Car Index – It’s a nice tool to show you some amazing stats about cars in Ireland. You can do checks of car models, county, whether they are new or imports etc. 88 BMWs were imported in January in Cork compared to 39 new. Only 7 new BMWs were purchased in April. Go play with it.

Nice hyperlocal website. Everything you ever wanted to know about Baldoyle

Google jacks roll. Not officially sanctioned. This is though.

And the cheapest Michelin Star restaurant in the world is…

Paddy Anglican’s response to the Murphy Report.

Can you define beauty? Well…

Using the web to bounce around the world. 80 days.

Maybe I should switch off the working world at 5.30pm?

Seems Google is now forcing their ads into every service including Google Earth. Disappointing in a way. Give something to the web without sticking craps on it please.

Editors – Lullaby

Foursquare Dublin advertising in action

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

Logged into Foursquare today and noticed I got a local ad/special offer:

FoursquareDublin1

When you click through:

FoursquareDublin2

People were wondering how Foursquare would make money and how businesses could use Foursquare for business. So you pay Foursquare for you to reward repeat customers or potentially new customers. See other post on Foursquare. I look forward to Irish Foursquare apps too.

Additional note: Expect to see more stuff like this photo of Cafés saying they’re on Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare. Kanum on Mespill Road already mention in their pamphlets that they’re on Facebook.

iPhone and iPod Touch Apps to use in Ireland

Monday, November 30th, 2009

For those giving and getting iPhones and iPod Touches from Santa and elsewhere, here are a few apps to have a look at. Apps.ie also contain an impressive list of Irish-made apps. Not being big into games, I’ve gone for more utility apps.

1. Encyclopedia Wikipedia App
Encyclopedia Wikipedia App for iPhone. Made by Patrick Collison. Costs €6.99. Allows you to view and search the whole of Wikipedia on the iPhone/iPod Touch with and without an Internet connection.

2. Shazam – Guess that tune iPhone style
Shazam is simple. Put the phone near the radio and it’ll tell you the song playing and you and you can go buy it.

3. eirtext – Use your free webtexts directly on your iPhone/iPod Touch
Made by Vinny Coyne, eirtext is an Irish App allowing you to use the free Webtexts from Irish mobile providers via your phone.

4. Flickr App – Upload your photos and see what others have
Upload photos from your iPhone to photo sharing site Flickr. Stamp GPS coordinates on the photos and also see other photos taken in the location you’re in.

5. Echofon – Nice Twitter interface on your iPhone/iPod Touch
Allows you to use Twitter on your iPhone. Really handy application. Easy interface.

6. Evernote – Information taking and retrieval
Evernote is a document management system, a note taking application and more. Take a pic, it converts it to text. Add notes to it. It synchs with their website and your desktop if needs be.

7. Facebook
Everything on Facebook except on the iPhone. Very powerful and simple to use.

8. Daft Layar – Snoop on local houseprices
See details about houses around you for sale or rent with this Daft.ie Layar app. Whip out the iPhone and as you look through it via the camera then you can see notes, photos and videos tagged on to buildings and streets. This uses Augmented reality to show off the data (adds links and notes as you look through the screen with the camera).

9. Irish Phonebook
Irish Phone Book. All phone numbers in Ireland, all on your phone. Free and pro versions. €2.39 for pro.

10. Dublin Bus app
Nice app to find our routes and timetables for Dublin Buses. €2.99 to buy.

11. Entertainment.ie iPhone app
Concerts, events, TV and movies. The Entertainment.ie Entertain me app is very handy for finding listings and then connecting to the venues to make a booking. Location aware too.

12. Phantom 105.2 radio app
Phantom, one of the best radio stations in Ireland with some superb music choices now has an iPhone app so you can listen to their web stream from your iPhone or iPod Touch.

13. Skype
Make and receive Skype calls on you iPhone. Crystal clear phonecalls and they can be done for free when you are in a WiFi zone.

14. Foursquare
New to Ireland, Foursquare is building up a healthy following worldwide. Right now a consumer application, it will become more interesting when businesses in Ireland start to use it.

15. Dublin Bikes Layar
Despite the Dublin Bikes people banning a previous app about this. This app is here to use. It uses augmented reality to show off data.

16. WiFiTrak
Via James Cridland is WiFiTrak, a way of searching for open WiFi networks and seeing can you connect to the net via them. Picks up more networks than the iPhone scanner. €0.79 for it.

Way way more out there to put on your iPhone too. Add your own to this list.