Choosing A Broadband Provider
August 6, 2010 at 9:09 pm
Soon to be moving to Clontarf and need to sort broadband and phone. I thought I’d share with you the reason I’ve chosen Magnet.
Digiweb
I’m currently with Digiweb on 5MB download with a cap of 30G and no free calls. Imagine my surprise to discover that all their packages now have free calls built in, or higher download, or more capacity – and not once in the last 4 years of being a customer have they told me about it! I have been paying an average of €63 a month when I could have been getting what I was getting for €54.99. The package I’m on isn’t advertised anymore and the company hasn’t communicated to me that I could be on something new and save money. It’s not as if I haven’t been in contact with them – around July 2009 when I started Simple Assembly Me Hole, I experienced a good deal of telephone problems. Another negative is that they don’t have call forwarding.
So Digiweb aren’t getting my business because they have shown more interest in hooking new customers than in keeping loyal existing ones happy.
Eircom
I’m inherently against the Big Telco and its market controlling ways, but all those ads of speeding cars over bridges are doing their trick so I gave eircom a whirl. They’re not that competitive and their customer service still sucks. I telephoned because I had specific questions not addressed on the website and it took the Indian sales person 24 minutes to deal with my queries. He kept getting interrupted by colleagues, put me on hold 3 times and found it difficult to deal with someone who didn’t fall into the category of being asked whether they were a small, medium or large user. I’d be wary of the fact that they cap your usage at 50G because I’ve heard they hit you with big charges if you go over that. Plus I don’t support the way they are being reporting users of certain sites for being bad!
Wimax
I got a bit excited when I found out I could have unlimited usage, 7MB and unlimited landline calls not just to Ireland, but to UK landlines as well! Yes I can port my number, yes they do call forwarding which Digiweb can’t, and my new home is located not far from their station. I didn’t like the €50 activation fee, but I could live with that… but then I hit Boards and came across pages and pages of people bitching about their Wimax service. So that’s a no.
Magnet
Last but not least I telephoned Magnet to see if I could get that service in my area. Great news to hear that there’s someone else on my road using the service. And what a service! A whopping 24mb, no sharing, free offpeak landline calls and 100mins of international ones (which I probably won’t even use because I’m a heavy skype user), and free tv on pc. It’s slightly more expensive at €54.99 but the hard to please Boards people have nothing but good things to say about it. Phew! Even though the price is a little more than the other contenders, it’s still less than I’ve been spending with Digiweb, so I’m saving. Find out more.
I hope this summary is helpful to you if you are considering which broadband provider to use in Clontarf Dublin 3.
Tags: broadband clontarf dublin 3
This Should Have Been Yesterday
June 17, 2010 at 5:19 pm
Brightspark was 7 years old yesterday. I was busy getting out the door with my new baby boy to catch some rays and have the usual celebratory lunch (this time sans alcohol!). I really intended to get something up here to mark the cycle of 7, here is something I found that is kind of nice:
Spinning, laughing, dancing to her favorite song
A little girl with nothing wrong Is all aloneEyes wide open, always hoping for the sun
And she’ll sing her song to anyone that comes along
I won’t sing my song to anyone these days; 7 years of being in business has made me more discerning than that. But definitely dancing to my own tune these last 7 years of self employment has made my heart sing.
Enjoy the music, even if it is a bit high on the cheese quotient:
Tags: 7 years internet marketing business, brightspark birthday
Verified by Visa FAIL
May 21, 2010 at 8:49 am
I take umbrage at being forced to use sites that fail. Take for example, Verified by Visa. You’d think a large financial giant like Visa would have the cop on to put some basic functionality – like a ‘login’ button on its login page, but no.
For anyone who’s not on Visa, Verified by Visa is this additional level of security that is put in to protect the banks. The way it works is this – you’re buying something online, you’ve done all the steps, put in all the details, you’re at the very last step, then up pops this verified by Visa box that requires additional user name and password. This can be very frustrating when you’re trying to do things in a hurry – like when I was trying to buy tickets to The Specials earlier this year, the time it took me to complete the verified by Visa thing saw most of the tickets sell out and I only got to buy one in the Gods instead of two in the front like I wanted.
This morning Gorillaz tix go on sale. They are my favourite band of the moment so I’m definitely getting tickets. I got on to AIB to ensure that my verified by Visa details are all in order – they have an irritating habit of resetting your password if you haven’t used it in a couple of months…
- AIB Phone Banking weren’t able to help
- AIB Credit Card centre were able to point me to the screen I needed to go to, this one. Apart from the dodgy CSS around offers in the navigation bar, does it immediately leap out at you how to access verified by visa here?
Go to the bottom right. Click on ‘go to’ – a sure sign that this page was constructed by developers with no wish whatsoever to take users into account.- Next up you are presented with this screen. If you’re already registered and you are lucky enough to know your user name and password, what do you press? There’s no sign of a login button. Take a punt – click on the unintuitive option, ‘Account Manager’.
Now you’re presented with a screen in which opaque language instructs you to choose a personal message – but it doesn’t tell you what the personal message is for!! Nor does it set down any rules on what form your message might take. I had to try twice before I hit their desired message length and format.- Now I’m in and free to use my own credit card to buy things I would like …
Verified by Visa is like adding a disability to customers who shop online. I do not wish to use it. I don’t understand how Mastercard customers are allowed to shop without it. And even with Verified by Visa, the bank still stops your card if you’re in Brazil or other areas they deem dodgy territory and you’re on a bit of a spending spree.
I’m all in favour of banks protecting me, but please – invest a little in usability and make the whole process a bit more intuitive.
Tags: AIB FAIL, Verified by Visa
What Did You Do?
May 11, 2010 at 9:28 am
In years to come, when economic historians look back on this period and our children are still paying for the mistakes and excess of recent years, what will you say when you’re asked “what did you do?”
“I was too busy working to pay an exorbitant mortgage. In those days we were glad to have a job…”
-Nobody forced you to take out a mortgage you couldn’t afford. True you had to work, but in this age of connectivity you have choices and options in getting your voice heard. The good news is this evening, a sunny May Tuesday when, let’s face it, there’s nothing on the telly – you can get out and protest the old fashioned way. Head to the Garden of Remembrance at 7.30pm and add your voice to the crowd who will be there to be make a stand and express dissatisfaction with the way things are being handled.
I’m going because it’s not just a Trade Union / Socialist Workers Gig.
Speakers include:
- Fintan O’Toole (Journalist)
- John Kidd (SIPTU Firefighters)
- Janette Byrne (Patients Together)
- Walter Cullen (Unite trade union)
- John Bisset (Canal Communities Project)
- Professor Kathleen Lynch (UCD)
- Siobhan O ’Donoghue (Community Workers Co-op)
I feel very strongly that the Government is bailing out the banks and not dedicating the same resource to making sure that businesses get looked after in the same way. Weren’t we all led to believe after the first bank bailout in Sept 2008 that banks were open for business and would keep lending? Yeah right! I know of many businesses who are on the rocks because they cannot get finance to keep afloat. My own brother who is a true entrepreneur is unable to continue expanding his operation which employs close to 50 peoeple – because he can’t get the banks to match his own investment in his enterprise. And sadly, we’ve all heard the shocking statistics of small businesses closing. These aren’t just numbers – these are people’s sweat and hard work – gone in a moment because there is no-one willing to help them.
Ireland got praised yesterday for being ahead of Spain and Portugal in terms of the austerity measures taken in Budget 2010. But the truth is that Budget was an anti-youth budget. The very strong message I heard was if you’re under 25, and without a job, feck off because we don’t want ya. We’re about to engage in a truly horrible social experiment. One in which we’ve seen working class areas transformed through employment these last years. Young fellas had bright futures as carpenters, plasterers, plumbers. They jumped at the opportunity and worked hard. Now that’s all come crashing down and the next generation is facing the same old shit that’s been available for time immemorial – unemployment or emigrate.
I finished college in 1993 when there weren’t really that many jobs. At least we had the option of going to the bright lights of London or New York. I chose the former and made my way there. Today’s graduates have no such choices – they’ve been hauling themselves through college while the Celtic Tiger has been dying around them… and now they don’t even have the safety net of London or New York to go to. I’d hate to be 22 again….
Yet my niece of 25 says she’d hate to be my age … because we all jumped into the property market and have mortgages around our necks.
We’re all sitting around feeling sorry for ourselves and each other. We’re happy to moan about what’s happening, being forced to do more with less in our jobs and our lives. Well tonight at 7.30pm you can join a bunch of like-minded people who want to show that they are not happy with what’s going on. I’ll be there – I’m the one with the bump!
Tags: Bank Protest Dublin May 2010
Got Great Idea, Need Some Funding?
March 3, 2010 at 11:45 am
Your Country, Your Call is a competition to ignite imaginations and inspire thinking.
The goal is to pick two truly transformational proposals so big that, when implemented, could secure prosperity and jobs for Ireland. Proposals that could help change the way we do things, allow businesses to grow, employment to be created and prosperity to flourish.
Have you got one of those ideas floating around your head?
Visit the site, become a member and you can put forward your idea. If you haven’t got one, you can always do the Irish thing and knock the ones that are there… oh sorry, I mean support the ones that are there!
While it says on the site that there are 58 days left, it doesn’t say anywhere what the actual closing date is. So maybe that’s a bit of a hurdle to sort the maths/science heads from the rest of us. It also doesn’t say who’s coughing up the €200,000 cash – is it us again? The tax payers? Some slush funded quango? Or are the public sector being asked to take another pay cut to fund it? Now there’s an idea….!
Tags: Your Country Your Call
This Is Not A Recession, But A Reset
December 13, 2009 at 2:36 pm
ChangeThis is like a pdf version of TedTalks. It’s on a mission to spread important ideas and change minds. They describe themselves as a ‘bunch of optimists’ who don’t believe humans evolved to be so bad at making decisions, so poor at changing our minds, so violent in arguing our point of view. People with ideas can submit their manifesto – it’s got to be short and to the point. Every so often a round-up of the best ones lands in my inbox. Last week I was moved to read the following manifesto by John Hope Bryant. I’ve copied the main bits and pasted them verbatim in here. If you would like to read the full thing – and I strongly advise you do – you can get it here. But I think this pretty much sums up my preferred way of thinking about the current crisis we are living in.
‘I keep saying that this is not a recession, but a reset.’
Society has a vested interest in “keeping the party going,” even if for only a little while, and even if that means fooling ourselves. With this seemingly insatiable need to “keep the party going,” the pundits start up again with how growth is returning, (some) consumers are spending again, and how financing (for those with an 800, near-perfect credit score) is available again.
Oddly enough, all of this propagating, by extremely intelligent people as well as the average willing consumer alike, is driven by one thing: fear. Fear that the party as we knew it, really is over, and fear that we might actually have to build something that has real and sustainable value. Fear that we may have to do the real work, and offer the real sacrifice, that love requires. Fear that we may have to once again define winners and winning as something other than the guy who makes the most money, accumulates the most power, or dies with the most toys, or worse, the guy who succeeds in fulfilling his own dreams only by trampling on the countless dreams of others. Wining in this vein is by necessity about creating losers, and over the long-term is not winning at all. Fear has the world in its grips these days, and fear is the ultimate prosperity killer.
I believe in a capitalism that goes beyond the question of “what do I get,” and focuses instead on creating real value for self, society and others—through the power of the idea, and a focus on what we have to give.
The world needed a dose of pain in order for it to change.
We will soon have to deal with the reality of a world not in a cyclical recession, but that has been fundamentally reset. If we handle it right, the next 30 years could easily become the most amazing in modern history. As with most things, the tide of history could swing either way. Depending on the decisions we make, and the reality we embrace, the next 30 years could be our best, or it could be the catalyst for 100 years of pure pain, and two generations of suffering—for our children and our grandchildren. It is up to us.
A compelling article in Asia recently confirmed that there are presently 500 container ships sitting idle off-shore of Malaysia today, waiting for orders and shipments that probably will not come. This represents an idling of 10% of the global force of container ships in the world today, and here is what is really amazing: South Korean ship building yards are operating at full-force today, cranking out orders for countless new $100 million container vessels ordered in 2007 and expected to come online in 2010 and 2011.
And to what, where? The Iranian government agency which handles maritime affairs has already indicated that it will not have the money to pay the remainder of what is owed on several new vessels it ordered 2 years ago when the world was different. South Korea put the Iranian vessels up for sale like you and I would do for furniture or clothes we no longer had a place for; a high-end, football-field length yard sale. And so, South Korea’s dream of controlling 40% of the ship building industry in the global economy means that you literally have “fully employed” cities and regions of the country that risk going completely off line in 2010 and 2011 unless we and they come up with a fairly good Plan B.
But instead, we all just keep plowing forward; building ships we have no use for on the right hand, and idling perfectly good ships with no conceivable destination on the left.
Don’t look to China to get us out of this mess. Yes, China is working to grow its own domestic economy and consumer base, but this is not akin to making a morning pop tart, and there are real risks to China in making this transition. If internal Chinese economic growth slows below 6% per annum, and it will, then they will be faced with an entirely new set of serious internal social problems to contend with, and the $3 trillion in cash reserves (the current estimate in China) won’t last long when faced with 1.6 billion not-so-happy people focused on the fact that they are not so happy.
According to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), there are more than $1,400 trillion in derivatives sitting off balance sheets in the world today. To put this into context, there is less than $20 trillion in legal cash sitting around in sovereign reserves the world over today. This is not a problem you throw money at.
We will soon have to deal with the reality of a world not in a cyclical recession, but that has been fundamentally reset.
At its core this is not a recession, and it is not a classic economic crisis, but a crisis of virtues and values, underscored and made even more relevant by its global, one-world nature.
I am an optimist, a businessman and a social entrepreneur, and I believe there is such a thing as good capitalism. A version of good capitalism has helped to lift literally hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in China and India already.
Good capitalism helped individuals with a more just vision, individuals such as Nobel Prize winner Mohammed Yunus, give the poor (and particularly women) a hand up and not just a hand-out— in places such as his native Bangladesh—through micro-finance and micro-credit.
Good capitalism and responsible subprime lending (yes, there is such a thing as good and responsible subprime lending), leading to first time homeownership, has done more in the US to lift poor people out of poverty than anything else over the last 50 years. The problem has not been responsible subprime lending, but predatory lending, fraud based lending, preying upon financially illiterate borrowers and, of course, fear’s first cousin greed.
What got us into this position is something other than good capitalism. In the mortgage lending and banking industry of the last 10 years or so, we have been treating clients and customers more like transactions, and not like valued relationships. If we had made every mortgage loan like it was to our grandmother, we would not have a mortgage crisis with exploding foreclosures and landmark losses today. We would have made sure the loan made sense for her, and with a reasonable return and profit to the provider of capital—that it was something that would sustain and serve over time. We would have made sure that the product was rooted in dignity and not just a fee. But sustainability, service leadership and building real relationships were the last thing on the minds of many over the last decade or two. We have, simply put, been focused on the me, not the we.
Music icon Quincy Jones said it takes 20 years to change a culture. Well, over the last 20 years we have made dumb sexy. We have dumbed down and celebrated it. Over the next 20 years we need to “make smart sexy again”.
The power of an idea should be the focus of our creation, and ultimately the product, and not mere money.
Good capitalism builds value for society and serves individuals beyond those that provide of capital, while simultaneously speaking to one’s own personal and selfish sense of prosperity in the same breath. Good capitalism acknowledges that we are selfish, and advocates a “good selfishness,” one where we benefit ourselves by benefitting others. It is doing well and doing good, and doing well by doing good. Good capitalism is a sea where all boats rise, not just yachts.
Where there is no vision, the people perish
We talk about social networking as if it has been with us for all time, but a mere 10 or so years ago Google, Facebook, Twitter, Skype and the like literally did not exist. Today they are sweeping the world, sparking industry, creating wealth, banishing fear and dictatorial oppression based on a lack of information, and creating jobs and industry too. Former President Bill Clinton once said that every 10 years we must create an entirely new set of jobs. You cannot do that without the power of a new and inspiring idea that serves others.
Some people with good ideas:
Ted Turner and his idea, CNN. Steve Jobs and his Apple (and our cool iPhone). Or Bill Gates, along with Paul Allen, and the idea of Microsoft—and now his and his wife’s idea called the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Or, there’s the example of arguably the greatest investor of our day, Warren Buffett, who’s worth tens of billions, yet still lives in the same home he lived in 30 years ago and has vowed to give most of his fortune away before he dies.
For those who have pioneered new ideas – most of these individuals who pioneered eventually become rich (financially or socially rich) and powerful, but becoming rich and powerful was never their primary goal or objective. What drove them at the start, and in most cases what drives them to this day, is the power of their ideas. Money should be the by-product of pursuing an idea of immense value. But, instead, for far too many today, it has become the principle focus and, worse, “the product” itself.
Fear fails
Over the past 10-20 years, we have had an entire generation of so-called “leaders” and business titans who have been entirely focused on one thing and one question: “what do I get, and how do I make money?” That’s the wrong question, which leads inevitably to the wrong outcome. This is a reset.
Let’s stop re-arranging the deck chairs on this Titanic, talking about a recession when we know this looks and feels like anything but one. By focusing on the 5 Laws of Love Leadership in our lives, in our businesses, in our communities and in our hearts, minds and our decisions, we can build sustainable wealth that will last over time and we can confidently embrace change and reset a future vision that speaks to the we, not just to the me.
About John Hope Bryant
John Hope Bryant is the founder, chairman and CEO of Operation HOPE, which empowers the poor and the under-served with financial literacy, teaching” the language of money”, inspiring hope, and providing access to capital, opportunity and ownership. Operation HOPE is the only national urban delivery system for financial literacy empowerment in the US, operating in 68 urban communities and 6 provinces in South Africa.
I am convinced that in this environment of global economics, if you don’t understand the language of money and you don’t have a bank account, you are an economic slave of the 21st century.
Download this brilliant manifesto and have your own colour copy. Visit The Hope Foundation and see what this guy does every day.
Tags: john hope bryant, recession ireland
Customer Service 2.0
November 30, 2009 at 9:04 pm
A good post from Darragh Doyle last week has got me thinking more about customer service and how big corporations can use social media tools to solve it. Darragh’s been spending some time with eircom’s online customer support team recently, sharing some of his wisdom about how to engage online.
This isn’t rocket science
It’s saying ‘hello, I’m here to help, can I?’
He wonders if eircom management actually look at all the call centre logs and email queries and identify problems that need to be fixed, then throw their weight behind getting them fixed? (Sadly I think not).
He makes a good point that to engage successfully using Twitter or in the broader sense of online, it requires a shift in metrics – not to measure the number of calls that were answered, but the number of interactions to get things done.
This reminded me of a post by Seth Godin who imagines a new type of customer support. One in which asynchronous results are not guaranteed, but one in which senior management are hired and fired on their ability to solve problems. It requires a new approach to customer service, but it makes a lot of sense to me:
1. Customer service problems go into a system and work their way up the customer service pyramid. Each person who touches it either takes responsibility for solving it thoroughly and completely, or passes it up the hierarchy. Any problem not solved within 20 hours goes to some senior level executive who gets it solved or gets fired. (I’m serious).
2. At the end of the month, there’s an easy trail to follow. You can see who solved the most problems. Who’s passing the buck when they should be grabbing it. You can identify the delighted customers and what delighted them.
I guess what it boils down to is ownership and transparency.
If customer service teams are incentivised on number of problems solved, rather than number of calls answered, it will push a new ownership mentality into teams.
If corporations continue to embrace social media tools as they are, then there will be transparency as we can all see if problems are being addressed or not.
The two go hand in hand.
Tags: customer service, Social Media, Twitter
Blog That Doesn’t Bother To Update In Times of Emergency
November 13, 2009 at 12:20 pm
Blacknight regularly wins awards for its blog and its use of internet marketing. Today I received a desperate call from a client who is hosting with Blacknight – the Blacknight server Morgana was hacked yesterday. All the information is gone. And shock of all – the last time it was backed up was 27 August.
The client found out by someone notifying them their site was down. I visited the blacknight blog just now and there’s some ego-driven article about ‘me in Seoul’. While the MD is gallivanting around the world, the server has been hacked and no-one is telling customers about what’s going on.
In the meantime, I telephoned Blacknight, got through to someone on support who had no answers, got put through to supervisor (Jonathan) who also had no answers. He told me he didn’t want to disturb the engineers who were fixing the problem by asking them why it hadn’t been backed up since August. As the client facing supervisor, isn’t he supposed to have those kind of answers? The one bit of information in relation to backup that I did manage to extract from him is that all their other servers are backed up everyday. Woopy doo. But can he prove it?
When I asked him how they were notifying clients about this failure in service, he said they posted a notice up to Blacknight Status.com – a first for me, I’ve never heard of that site before, but seemingly I’m supposed to know all about it and I”m even supposed to have RSS feeds so I can keep myself updated as to what calamity has happened next.
Blacknight have failed to deal with this problem effectively in my opinion.
- A blog is not just for vanity stories, it is also an ideal vehicle for communicating when errors have been made.
- A simple email to all clients they know are affected would notify people what’s going on – and possibly even instil some confidence that the issue is being well handled.
- Blacknight are all over Twitter. But there is silence on the Twitterwaves about this.
Once again we see another Irish business who uses social media tools for promotion purposes only. File this one under the same category as The Big Switch who forgot all about their Twitter account when people were urgently contacting them when the laptops and data went missing.
Update: read Blacknight’s response to this post.
Tags: Blacknight Server Hacked, Poor Customer Service
Dublin City Council Fail
August 17, 2009 at 9:22 am
I tried to pay my bin charges online. Overall a crappy user experience.
The back of my bill says to go to Dublin City.ie and select online payments. Apart from the fact that there are browser issues going on, making content get hidden behind a navigation column, the online payment button is hidden:
Shimmy on over to Dublin City Council home page and have a look. Can you see it? No?
I couldn’t either.
It’s located under top 10 content, under online services, it’s a blue link that’s not highlighted. So obviously the council don’t think it’s very important. Or maybe more people are interested in ‘careers in Dublin City Council’ which appears to be the second most important thing on the site, judging by its position on the right hand nav bar.
I did a search. [Search works] But more problems arose when I tried to pay online. Which would you choose from the following list?
I chose Environmental Waste Charges. But I was wrong.
Then I chose Other Payments. This is where the real dumbness starts. The service and item dropdown boxes don’t work. They have nothing in them. So this entire form is a waste of time.
So how do I pay online?
I don’t. I have to telephone Dublin City Council. I’ve done that before and run into problems trying to pay with Laser. They can’t accept it over the phone for some reason.
This is crap. We have a large highly funded council that moans about people not paying their bin charges. I’m a good citizen trying to pay my way and they make it so bloody difficult! I’m very surprised about this as I know that Dublin City Council is a client of IQ Content – the usability experts. I’d love to hear from someone at IQ why they made the decision to hide online payments on the site. The other errors are obviously programming and I think the internal IT team who looks after the site at Dublin City Council can put their hand up for that.
Tags: Dublin City Council Fail, pay bin charges online
How Things Change (Not Really)
August 13, 2009 at 9:46 am
I’ve been doing a fair bit of networking recently and have noticed a rake of new Internet Marketing companies about. Some position themselves as social media marketing specialists. Others focus on just search. There even seems to be a mini-industry around events aimed at PR and advertising people teaching them how to Tweet, Blog and take part in social media! I believe there’s plenty of room for everyone because budgets are moving over to digital and with the exciting opportunities that emerge day by day, there’s sure to be plenty of work to keep everyone busy.
What I’ve been reflecting on is how I market my business now as opposed to 2003.
- In 2003 I set up Brightspark as a pure Internet Marketing Ireland provider. Services offered were search, pay per click and email. Much of my time was spent making the case as to why budgets needed to be allocated to internet marketing. This was not long after the dot com bomb which was built on the mantra of ‘build it and they will come’.
- By 2005, Google had IPO’ed and everyone who came to Brightspark wanted a ‘website and a number 1 on Google’. I had added in website design to the Brightspark mix because I had found in many cases I was working on driving traffic to sites that failed due to poor design. I had a lot of conversations at this time about why a number 1 on Google was not necessarily the best bang for a (limited budget) buck. Business blogging and repackaging blog content in the form of emails for marketing were often a strong alternative.
- Web 2.0 dawned in 2006 and we were on the case. For corporate Ireland, this didn’t mean an immediate switch into App-land. But Brightspark made a point of incorporating blogs, links to Flickr, and other social apps into as many sites as possible. We were responsible for the creation of Ireland’s first social networking site aimed at Spanish speakers – created on the Ruby on Rails platform. You could say this was the start of social media marketing. At this time there was a huge appetite for blogging training and writing for the web training. Corporate Ireland had switched on to the importance of content. By now, design focused on the user experience was included in all of our websites.
- Today we are blessed with such a wide variety of tools. The industry has matured and specialisms have emerged. Web design has come down significantly in price thanks to Wordpress. And it’s increasingly difficult to find examples of really bad sites when preparing for the various training courses I offer. Before I presented people with a list of services on offer. Nowadays it’s much more tailored to the individual company’s needs. No, that’s not marketing speak, it’s true! Most internet marketing strategies begin with listening. A quick scoot around Twitter and the blogosphere to find out what people are saying about a brand, a company, or in the absence of that – a need. And then come up with an online strategy that will reach out and engage.
If I was to summarise what I’m doing now, it’s less about offering services from a menu - more about listening to the company and having a conversation with the management team about their vision for the business. Our job is to know what’s hot online and to advise on what will work and what won’t work for a particular business. We work with clients to help them to translate their business vision into something that will work well online, generate a return on their investment, and make us all happy.
There you have it! The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Tags: Blogging Training Ireland, Business Blogging Ireland, Email Marketing Ireland, Internet Marketing Ireland, Search Engine Optimisation Ireland, Social Media Marketing, Web Content Writing, Write for Web Training
