Maryrose Lyons blogging since 2003...

Is there a need for an Irish Digital Industry Association?

January 30, 2008 at 10:48 am

Yes. I believe. Last night, I attended a dinner put together by Paul Walsh to discuss just that. View Paul Campbell’s pics here. Paul wants to set up a new non-profit independent association to represent the interests of a fairly wide range of players from our industry. He has defined stakeholders quite broadly, these range from students, graduates, academia, brands, technology providers, agencies, freelancers and government.

There was a lot of talk around the table as to whether we need a new association at all. Can I say, having tried them all, there is no association in this country that speaks to me, seeks to educate and excite me, or really does it for me. I am a member of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce; that is an organisation with legs and members that I do wish to meet. But I’m always there in the ‘oh you do internet stuff’ capacity. It’s good networking alright, but not with digital people.

• The IIA is supposed to represent people in the Internet industry, but it doesn’t. It knocks out courses on ‘how to search engine optimisation… ‘, ‘how to build a public sector website’… The IIA has nothing for the people who are already making things happen. It’s aimed at the people who buy these services. I’ve been a member for years now and have attended just two events, both of which I had to pay for (on top of my membership fee).
• The ISA is too expensive for me to join. So I can’t comment on that!

Wearing my business woman marketing hat (the one with the sparkles and the feathers!):

• Network Dublin is for women in business and the arts. I gave it a go for a year and never got a single piece of business from it. I learned about feng shui and nutrition, interesting, but not what I want from a business networking organisation.
• Dublin City Enterprise Board runs networking for women. It can be good sometimes, other times it’s populated by people who are ‘thinking of maybe some day’ leaving their job in a bank to set up a cottage industry at home. Not for me.
• The Marketing Institute of Ireland runs events that are attended by the latest influx of graduate trainees from large corporates.
• BNI is for hard core sales people. I gave it a go for close to 2 years when I initially set up Brightspark. It requires a weekly commitment to attend a meeting at 7am, follow up meetings with other members of your chapter, with the all important goal of getting referrals. I don’t think people really ‘got’ internet marketing back then; the quality of referrals I was getting was poor, so I let it go. I still have the utmost respect for people who are members of BNI, but I also feel sorry for them that they have to get up so early to get business!

But while I’m knocking the established collective groupings, I’m also thinking about the healthy abundance of non-establishment groupings taking place every week.

• Open Coffee – don’t forget it’s on tomorrow in the Morrison!
• Bar Camps all over the country which have morphed into Creative Camp
• Mash Up Camp
• Ruby Tuesday
• Open Tweet Ups
• Tech Ludd

The list goes on. So there is a definite desire for people to meet and get together, that much is evident.

Stick with me folks, there is an idea at the end of this….

What I love about ‘unconferences’ in particular Reboot is the participatory nature of assembling the speakers and the topics. The organisers of Reboot set a theme, last year was ‘human’ and people can put forward ideas of who they’d love to hear speak and about what. Sparked off by Niall Larkin’s comment about embracing the participatory nature of Web 2.0, I would like to put forward an idea of how this association could be modeled:

Think of the association as a framework; with an online social networking space and (hopefully) a vibrant offline component where people can meet …

Members can create groups (rather like in Facebook) and can request key speakers and other luminaries or experts to address their group on a particular subject.

Anyone can join a group that they are interested in. Anyone can create a group. This allows members of the association to participate by give and take. So for example, if I’m there in my giving mode, I might create a group called ‘Internet Marketing Tips for Freelancers’. I might tap into my contacts to get some good speakers along to address the group on low-cost ways of promoting yourself online. It would be open to anyone interested in internet marketing to come along. As a taker, I might be interested to attend a briefing on the top 10 plugins for Wordpress, or the latest Microsoft innovation, etc.

Just as Adwords shuts down your underperforming ad groups, so too would unperforming groups be removed from the framework. When you log in to the site, you should be able to see a top 10 of what’s happening at a glance. I can imagine a busy space where perhaps a group of web designers are giving a talk to ad agency execs on the essential components of a design brief. At the same time, the photo-bloggers group are being addressed by a Canon representative who’s going to present the features of the latest camera. Meanwhile, the accessibility group are meeting to argue about accessibility rule 243!

Groups can engage online through twitter, through Campfire, any number of ways. Offline events can take place in a small corner of a local pub, or in a large conference venue anywhere in the country. It depends on the size of the group and the nature of the topic. I’d suggest getting a number of small vibrant groups going, then when we’ve got a critical mass of engaged people, introducing groups whose purpose it is to lobby government, Enterprise Ireland, etc.

That’s my idea. What do you think?

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