Damien Mulley

Richard’s on the ball, again.

You buy one of the following contract phones from Carphone Warehouse: Nokia N95, N95 8GB, E90, E61i, 8600 Luna, 8800 or 6120.

Link to more details. Small print is here.

Blurb:

This holiday season, why not live the movie star life-style with the Exclusive New Nokia Concierge Card. Need a table at a top restaurant, VIP tickets to the must-attend concerts or perhaps you need to organise a party for the loved on in your life or you lack the free time for mundane tasks, such as taking the cat to the vet or grocery shopping? With Nokia Concierge Service, you have easy access behind the velvet rope, whether it’s a full-service travel planner, personal shopper, city entertainment guide, home maintenance guru, all-purpose coordinator or research expert. The Nokia Concierge Service will deliver on anything and everything you will ever need. The perfect gift for your loved one this Christmas!

Not only has Google punished all those people judasing their opinion on the web for some silver, but now the EU is saying that companies who pay people to write fake reviews of products will get fined and be liable for criminal prosecution. Well according to the Register anyway.

and the upshot is that companies (including sole traders) will no longer be able to pay individual bloggers or professional agencies to post false or misleading blogs or reviews online. Nor will they be able to do it themselves.

A little step in the right direction for the malevolent marketers and their deceptive disciples who would rather make a quick buck then have a moral backbone or an ounce of creativity. In actual fact this is law in many EU countries already, this is what the EU wants:

Certain commercial practices across Europe are banned outright under the Directive. To ensure that traders, marketing professionals and customers are clear about what is prohibited, a Black List of unfair practices has been drawn up. Which types of commercial practices does it cover? The commercial practices on the Black List are unfair in all circumstances and no case-by-case assessment against other provisions of the Directive is required. The list may only be modified at EU level, by revision of the Directive with the involvement of the European Parliament and the Council (representatives from Member States).

And the one for this blog article:

Professional trader disguised as consumer “Falsely claiming or creating the impression that the trader is not acting for purposes relating to his trade, business, craft or profession, or falsely representing oneself as a consumer.”

Is paying someone to blog about your product covered under this?

Is it Law in Ireland? Under the Consumer Protection Act 2007, in section 55 it outright bans:

(x) making a representation or creating an impression that the trader—
(i) is not acting for purposes related to the trader’s trade, business or profession, when the trader is so acting,
or
(ii) is acting as a consumer, when the trader is not;

And the fines:

56.—A trader who contravenes section 55(1) or (3) commits an offence and is liable on conviction on indictment or on summary conviction, as the case may be, to the fines and penalties provided in Chapter 4 of Part 5.

But would the below section mean that once someone delcares Pay Per Post, they’re ok?

(q) using editorial content in the media to promote a product (if a trader has paid for that promotion) if it is not made clear that the promotion is a paid promotion, whether in the content itself or in any oral, written, visual or descriptive representation in the promotion;

I’m not sure myself but I’m not a legal scholar so I’ll leave it up to one to clarify it when they read this. However part x is quite clear and useful. You can now make a complaint to the national consumer agency if a marketing or PR company leaves fake comments as “consumers” and have them done for breaking the law. Not that the NCA will give a damn or make an effort to do anything about this. I should think Boards.ie can make massive use of this given how so many marketing companies and all sorts of companies come on to the site, register as new users and talk up new products pretending not to be linked to them. I remember a certain Satellite Internet company used to do that on the IrelandOffline forum on boards, come on talking up their product and denying they were from the company.

Update: Daithí was 9 months ahead of me!

Adrian won the Business Technology journalist award from the UCD Smurfit School, congrats man! Also, well done to John Kennedy from Silicon Republic for being shortlisted.

In the yoof grouping, Mark Paul from the Sunday Times won the Young Journalist of the Year with Ian Kehoe from the Business Post and Laura Noonan from the Indo getting shortlisted.

Also well done to Ally Donnelly from the Evening Echo for winning Regional Business Journalist.

Other winners:

Business News
Winner: Kathleen Barrington, Sunday Business Post
Shortlisted: Nick Webb, Sunday Independent and Aine Coffey, Sunday Times

Business Comment
Winner: Brian Carey, Sunday Times
Shortlisted: Ciaran Hancock, Irish Times and Arthur Beesley, Irish Times

Business Feature
Winner: Arthur Beesely, Irish Times
Shortlisted: Aine Coffey, Sunday Times and Mark Paul, Sunday Times

Business Broadcast
Winner: John Murray, RTE Radio One, The Business
Shortlisted: Emma Mc Namara, RTE and Diarmaid Fleming, BBC Dublin

Specialist Business Reporting (marketing, personal finance and recruitment)
Winner: Niall Brady, Sunday Times
Shortlisted: Bill Tyson, Sunday Tribune and Laura Slattery, Irish Times

I’m giving a training course on Friday in association with Wicklow County Enterprise Board. The training course is for businesses who want to start a blog or have one and want to improve their blogging skills. There are still a few places left for the course. Full details here.

This is a rough overview of what I’ll be doing but will probably change on the day to suit the needs of those attending:

Module 1
Aim: Introduction to Blogging
1. What is blogging? Why is it good for business?
2. Search Engines and blogs: Why blogs are a natural fit.
3. What are blogs to model yours on? What are the good Irish blogs?
4. Community Building: Blogs have human qualities.
5. Is it worth the time and effort? Why spend more time on another tool?

Module 2
Aim: Setting up a Blog and going live by the end of the day
1. Getting started: Choosing a blogging platform
2. Blog installed, now what? What makes a good blog post?
3. Copywriting for blogs: Titles, wording, formatting, linking

The Science bit: URLs, links, trackbacks, spam, what are these things?
4. Getting noticed: Links, comments, mail shots.
5. Interacting with your new audience: How followers can build your company for free.
6. Nosy neighbours: Who’s talking about me and my blog?
7. Live, from this room: Going live.

Congrats to Pat and everyone else at Cubic. They had good competition too from Nitrosell, YouGetItBack and XCelesol. Cubic one in the Emerging Company category.

If you’re not familiar with the Hype Machine it’s this excellent site that searches all the mp3/music blogs out there and will create playlists for you on content you want, and using their player, you can play all these mp3s scattered across loads of websites. For their new design and functionality upgrade, they said they’d launch it to the public, only if there were 10,000 people logged on to this page at the same time. (Page now redirects to main page)The buzz was already building with many influential bloggers having private tested the new design and so 100s of bloggers started encouraging everyone to log on to that page, spreading the word far and wide about Hypemachine. Great idea. And cheap.

For those that don’t know Uncov, it’s this bitchy, nasty, fabulously catty website that takes shots at the Tech world. Think Techcrunch with more arrogance and a billion times more cynicism. Hard to get advertisers on a site that takes no bullshit from anyone right? Well Opera did a very clever thing with Uncov, they ran a competition on it which encouraged the readers of the supernitpicking site to find bugs in Opera, the winner getting access to the Opera launch party. It’s a nice way of leveraging your product with what others would consider a hostile market.

BT2 are doing some kind of dealy with Phantom and maybe other stations too. They’re hosting songs from new Irish bands, you submit your stuff to them and they’ll stick them up on their website. Shame their website is utterly unusable. Cute idea with jigsaws but it’s almost impossible to find the sections to the site without having to move your bloody mouse over the whole page in order to find the hidden links to the various parts of the site. But hey, designs that irritate are good, right? It’s nice to associate your hipster brand with some of the really good emerging music talent in Ireland. You get love from your existing clientele and some love from the bands and their devoted followers too. A good way of reaching the people you want to market to.

Any clever bits of marketing you saw recently? And Not the cadbury’s Gorilla.

This was the offer. Well, both reviews for the first wine, the Spanish Alaia 2004 are now in. This is the one from Deborah on the Alaia and then there’s the Alaia review from Michele.

I’ll nudge Mark to start sending out more wines for review now.