Be Afraid Be Very Afraid
March 8, 2010 at 7:48 am
Were you, like me, getting a bit tired of all the warnings about ’social media experts’ last year? It seemed as if there was more written about beware of dodgy experts than there was about the space itself.
However this morning some folks on Twitter were talking about this guy – The Twitter King – Social Media Expert. His site is definitely written to the American market. He makes big bold claims about making $50,000 in just weeks and guess what? He’ll show you how….
I would just like to say that I have never heard of the man. Never come across him on Twitter in all the years I’ve been active there. Never met him at a single event. Never heard of any of his clients. And I would file this guy in the same camp as the dodgy dating techniques seminars of last year.
Facebook App for UK Market
March 4, 2010 at 7:04 am
I was on the hunt for Irish Facebook app developers a little while back. The reason why was because I needed to get an app developed for a competition running on the Discover Ireland GB fan page. It’s now live – and Betapond (the winning company) were great to work with and pulled this out of a hat in record time. It’s great to see one’s ideas translated into action – with just the right amount of tack factor involved!
Check it out here - but remember, you can’t enter if you’re not in England, Wales or Scotland.
Not All Flashmobs Are Good
January 29, 2010 at 8:30 am
Corporate America – please do not hijack our beloved flashmobs! Cringe-inducing performance on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange last Friday (22 Jan 2010). How not to do Flashmobs:
Best in Blogging – we’re in!
December 18, 2009 at 10:04 am
Arrived back from London yesterday to discover that this blog is in the finalists of the Digital Media Awards – Best in Blogging category. Delighted for that! I’ve not been a finalist in the DMA’s before. Congrats to everyone who made it this far, including:
Curious Wines
Fast Blog
Ronan Lyons
The Story
Now the only thing is – we’re all up against Damien Mulley. So I won’t be holding my breath re. this one. The judges are going to be looking at standard of content, quality of writing, overall design, and usability – all that I’m fine with. But they’re also looking at whether the blog is influential and regularity of updates and there Mr Mulley wins hands down. He is a more dedicated blogger than I am, averaging at least one post a day and sometimes more – he even writes on weekends! He has thousands of keen followers, his every post generates a barrage of comments. The man is behind the main thrust behind the Irish Blog Awards. He is, quite simply, the Ard Ri of Irish Blogging.
It reminds me a little of the current show down between Simon Cowell’s X-Factor and the campaign to get Rage Against the Machine as Christmas Number 1. I never thought I’d identify with RATM, but now I do. Brightspark for Christmas Number 1. I mean DMA’s!!
LinkedIn Tip To Save You Time
November 18, 2009 at 8:33 am
If you’re on LinkedIn and you’re in groups, then you like me will be well used to receiving the ‘high class spam’ that comes daily to your inbox. Lots of it is repetition; same people starting the same discussions on different groups. Increasingly, I’m noticing spammy ‘get rich quick’ schemes being posted in their CAPITALISED GLORY promising FREE STUFF. It’s too much. I resent the time and energy it takes me to delete it from my inbox.
LinkedIn Tip: remove yourself from all updates
Log in to LinkedIn. Click on groups. Select a group that annoys you a lot. Click on More/My Settings and deselect all the contact settings:
Now you’ll still want to keep up with what’s going on right? Simply diairise it to go in and have a little look around. I don’t live on LinkedIn as much as I do on the other social networks. In order to remind myself to keep my profile up-to-date, I add little reminders to my Google Calendar that send me to LinkedIn. Now I go in once a week and check out all the (in)action I’ve been missing out on by removing the daily emails.
It works for me. It might work for you too.
On a similar note, last year I deactivated the setting on Twitter that notified me whenever anyone was following me. I did this when I was at around 500 followers. Now I’m on more than 800. That’s 300 emails of no substance I’ve removed from my consciousness!
Again, you’ve got to make sure that you’re not missing out. So I have a custom landing page for people who are checking me out on Twitter. It asks them to say hello to me on Twitter and that way I’ll know them and follow them. It works for me. Might work for you too.
Tags: LinkedIn tip, Twitter tip
Social Media & Internet Marketing Training
September 1, 2009 at 7:02 am
I’ve always believed in providing training in how I do things so that people who are interested can learn and then it do for themselves. That is why I’ve been delivering web writing training since 2001, internet marketing training since 2004, blogging training since 2006, and now the latest addition – Social Media Training.
I’ve thrown in some of the more popular elements of Internet Marketing training to deliver a practical day that will equip you with all you need to start to do really market your business online – beginning with using social media tools to listen and then engage.
Things You Can Be Sure Of:
- It’s not just about listening to me drone on and on… the course is carefully structured so that just when your eyes are beginning to look a bit glazed, we’ll be getting down and working on our own examples for our own campaigns. I don’t believe training should be all about listening – because then it’s a seminar and not a training course.
- All your questions about social media and internet marketing will be answered to the best of my ability. Go on – hit me with them.
- There will be no more than 8 people in the group, so you can be sure of getting attention and you will be heard. Examples will be tailored to suit those in the group.
- You will be working on real life examples. These can be about your own business. So you take-away practical experience that you can manage afterwards.
Want to know more? View the social media & internet marketing training course outline. Then book. Be sure to book soon as places are limited to 8.
One of the golden rules of social media seems to be not to call yourself a social media expert. There’s a lot of bitching amongst some bloggers about who can and who can not call themselves one. Take a look at the first page of Google and see what I mean!
I am not a social media expert.
But I have been using these tools since they have evolved. I’ve delivered successful results for clients who have engaged with their markets using these tools. And now I’ll show you how.
Email Marketing Results For Ireland
May 13, 2009 at 2:29 pm
I’ve been in this game for quite a long time. And it occurred to me recently that I’m sitting on some pretty interesting data about email marketing results achieved for Irish clients. I’ve decided to share.
A Couple Of Things To Note:
- I’m deliberately keeping them vague so as to protect identities of my clients.
- These are the kind of results you’d expect to achieve with lists of up to 3,000. If you’re using lists with larger numbers than that, that are less cleaned, you might expect to achieve slightly different results.
Email Marketing Results For Ireland
I’ve been managing email campaigns for Irish clients since 2003. The following is a summary of results for campaigns going back to April 2007.
- Two full years of data – I’m no statistician, so didn’t have desire to go back further
- Clients ranging from B2B, B2C, not-for-profit
What is the average open rate?
You’ve got two types of lists here – those who know their list very well and those who know their list not so well. Please note that clients are always asked to confirm that they are legally compliant on the lists they supply.
- Know list well + personalised: 35.6%
- Know list well + non personalised: 28.0%
This proves that people are more likely to open your email if you address it to them.
- Know list vaguely + personalised: 22.1%
- Know list vaguely + non personalised: 22.0%
When people don’t know you that well, it doesn’t matter if you personalise or not. You’re going to get slightly less than 1 in 4 opening.
What is the average click rate?
- Know list well + personalised: 41.6%
- Know list well + non personalised: 30.5%
Conclusion: people are more likely to click links in your email if you’ve engaged them by addressing it to them.
- Know list vaguely + personalised: 26.5%
- Know list vaguely + non personalised: 34.0%
Conclusion: if you’re sending to a list you don’t know well you’re better off sending it without personalisation.
The Initial Buzz
In our experience, there’s often a fall-off in open and click rates for service companies after the initial send. When managing email campaigns, we’re more interested in the average click and open rates from the second send onwards. It’s easier to identify trends when you exclude the initial send. But for ecommerce sites, while open rates stay more or less the same, clicks rise. If you’re an ecommerce site and you’re not actively emailing, you should!
The Importance Of List Cleaning
We’re always banging on about the importance of list cleaning. See here for more info.
It’s worthwhile to look at your bounces every couple of sends and either convert them back to live email addresses or remove them from your list. What’s the point of marketing to people who are ‘dead addresses’? Some clients partake of this service and the results are really positive:
- Open rates on lists that have been cleaned increase by 6.8% from the first send to the second send.
- Click rates on cleaned lists still go down from send 1 to send 2 by 11.2%.
I hope this information is helpful to you if you’re planning to introduce email marketing to your marketing mix. Or if you’re a competitor and you’re having a look, I hope these excellent results sit up and make you take note! I believe that we achieve higher rates than average on our client campaigns because we offer a complete email marketing service:
- Planning – based on what we know works
- List building
- Layouts that work
- Design that begs to be opened
- Copywriting that makes even the dryest content sing
- Template construction that breaks the balls of most email clients
- On time delivery
- Reporting – that comes from an inherently nosy place. I love to get to know your lists through their actions!
When you can have all this for the same price as licensing someone else’s software, it’s a no-brainer to go to Brightspark.
The results above are available to download for the pdf lovers out there. Feel free to pass around.
Tags: Email Marketing Ireland
Networking With A Difference
March 27, 2009 at 12:49 pm
This week I attended two new networking events. The first was on Tuesday and it was aimed at creatives. Ooh very interesting – fashion people, photographers, cool musicians, film people and the like. It took place at D-Light Studios, a large warehouse just behind the Five Lamps. A lovely large studio space with natural light, perfect for shoots… but will someone please tell them that when you host an event the following items are key to a successful night:
- Food and drink
- A host to welcome people
- Someone to open the door
We stood in the freezing cold for 10 minutes outside before someone came to open the door. I wasn’t impressed by the organisation, but I was impressed by the following cool new people that I met:
- Timi Martins of Rap Ireland – a hip hop magazine covering all aspects of the culture
- Padraig Mannion of Studio Rua
- Claire O’Connor of Lil C Couture – save your click, it’s just a placeholder site
- Photographer Hu O’Reilly who has an exhibition of his work for Medecins sans Frontieres in Chad running in Filmbase 16-23 April.
- Aisling Nelson of Rangoli who makes gorgeous wedding jewellery. She’s also got a blog.
- Conor Lynch of Connector – who’s going to be on the Dragon’s Den on 2 April at 10pm
On Thursday I went to the launch of Cater Pass by the Catering Industry Skillnet. I was there as a guest of my favourite catering website client, 3Q Catering. I was looking forward to it all week because, instead of it being regular “everyone mill around a function room” networking… it was taking place in an Italian Cookery School!
What an amazing place for an event!
There’s a big kitchen and on arrival we all enjoyed some delicious Italian wine, cold meats, and other tasty nibbles. Then the cookery class began proper. We were making home-made meatballs in tomato sauce, and spinach and ricotta ravioli – with a cream sauce. I enjoyed mixing up the meatballs with my bare hands!
When the food was cooking, we had a presentation about the new Cater Pass which was being launched. When the food was ready, everyone sat down together to enjoy and eat. Lots more red wine a -flowing, people laughing, a thorougly enjoyable event.
If you are looking for an interesting venue to host a team building event, a product launch, or just a night out with friends, I totally recommend you check out the Italian Cookery School at City Link Business Park at Kylemore Luas Stop.
Website in a Week : Fin
February 17, 2009 at 12:13 am
This is it. It’s alive! Jobless And Proud.
One week later and David Jones will be on Newstalk tomorrow (Tuesday) morning at 7.40am. Do like the Angeles and stop whatever you’re at to listen!
UPDATE – switch on TV3 Tuesday lunchtime and you can see David Jones being interviewed. You’ve heard the voice, you’ve read the words, now see the man!
This Story Has Changed
This story has altered from being one of a man committing himself to paper and sharing his experiences… to one of people supporting people. At a time when I fear this country is being over-run by the new creed of ‘cute-hoorism’ it’s restored my faith and shown that there are a great many people out there who don’t subscribe to that. Who give.
My Observations:
- Efficiency. With very little time, there has been no messing around. But truly this project has run in the smoothest most efficient manner possible. I’m not praising myself there. I believe it ran so smoothly because everyone on the team believed in what we were doing. We were given free rein to unleash our creativity and show off how good we can be. There were no agendas about things, so sign off and agreement was reached pretty quickly.
- Everything seemed to be in tune with this little project. While all of this was going on, I was hearing news of friends losing their jobs. No, not 15% pay cuts. But job losses. It made the words of David’s book all the more meaningful. I’m hearing too many tales of people down the dole office being treated badly; the staff who work there don’t seem to know how to deal with people with MBA’s and former six figure salaries. I got to listen to the inspiring Lucy Gaffney speak on Thursday and she was telling how Newstalk (and other stations in the Communicorp group) now have a positive editorial policy. And all the time people were coming out of the woodwork offering themselves and their services for free.
- Exhausted in Dunshaughlin. All the while we’ve had David up and down (by bus) between Dublin and Dunshaughlin. We’ve done most of the web work remotely, ranging from Belfast to Cork, but David had to be photographed, recorded for podcast, and interviewed. The poor man is exhausted – but I know, exhilarated too! He’s a 57 year old who didn’t know what a blog was this time last week and has just now published his first post! He has shown a remarkable ability to learn so quickly, to take everything in, and importantly – not to knock it. Too often I’ve come across people who don’t get the web and they knock it because of that. But David has taken all things www in his stride.
I wish David Jones well in this next chapter of his career and yes I know that was a very poor pun indeed. I also wish these fine people lots of joy and success and I say thanks for being so generous, quick to respond, and for taking that asking call!
- Mega talented Rachel Earley for coming up with a kickass design, for putting her own portfolio site on hold to do this, and for being there for all the little iterations.
- David McDonald, the only one amongst us who has a clue what book design is about. His mention of ISBN numbers at an early stage instilled confidence in me!
- Gordon Murray for quietly answering every request that was asked of him.
- David Duignan for managing to capture the real David on digital film.
- Alex Gibson for recording him and making him feel at ease.
- Seamus from Corkmedia.net for making some intro’s.
Now goodnight, I have to be up early to tune in the wireless to FM 106 for the launch of Jobless & Proud.
If you have a blog, please link to the new site. If you have a spare fiver buy the book. It’s a good read.
Oh and we’re still looking for someone to skin the blog. If that’s you, please get in touch.
Adding an international dimension to this project, we’ve just got our blog skinner upper – Dennis Deery.
Tags: Jobless & Proud, Website in a Week
Business Game
February 5, 2009 at 8:55 am
Businessgame is a novel and free innovation aimed at schools, colleges, and anyone who’s interested in owning and managing their own business. In the Flash based game, you get to own a GAA store that sells county-branded merchandise. Through playing the business simulation game, you get to learn about retailing and running a start-up business.
When I was in school, we thought we were great because we had a school bank – a fully paper-based operation that ran out of a corner of one of the corridors. The business game is a couple of thousand giant leaps forward and is a must for budding entrepreneurs of any age. More info.
