But is your business really using social media?
July 27, 2011 at 8:51 am
There’s a lot of talk about how many businesses are using social media. There was an article in Sunday’s Business Post about it last week – claiming victory for Ireland over England and the US:
The research also reveals that there was a rise in Irish companies using social media to win new business, with 44 per cent of firms successfully winning new customers online.
Although this was below the global average of 47 per cent, Irish firms lead Britain (41 per cent) and the US (43 per cent) in their usage of social media for customer acquisition.
It goes on to list all the different types of social media tools being used by Irish businesses:
Websites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are the most popular forms of social media used by Irish businesses. Firms are also availing of blogs, microblogs and online forums to connect and engage with customers. Nevertheless, firms also emphasised the need for a balance of marketing media, made up of traditional and digital techniques.
I can imagine some business owner, faced with this survey from Regus, ticking the boxes of all the tools he’s ever heard of. Or ticking yes because they have a Twitter account (not touched since March 2010) and a Facebook Profile with lots of friends….
On the same weekend, over the course of being out and about, I met 3 small business owners – all very different to each other and in very different lines of work – but all were expressing worry about the same thing.
- “I know I need to use social media but I don’t know how.”
- “I have a Facebook Page because my mentor from the Enterprise Board said I should have one, but I don’t really do much with it… I don’t know how to get fans.”
- “Don’t talk to me about the other things apart from Facebook and Twitter, I haven’t even got them right.”
And now Facebook rows in with the announcement on Tuesday of its new online education centre aimed at helping small businesses use the social networking site. It’s interesting timing as it underlines Facebook’s support for businesses to be a part of the social network (provided you do it according to their rules!!) which is in contrast to Google’s controversial shut down of business accounts on Google Plus.
Tips for Small Business Owners in Using Social Media
- Don’t set up Pages, profiles, accounts unless you are willing and able to dedicate resource to manage them on a weekly basis
- How often? Try and commit to posting on your Facebook Page 3 times per week for starters. Use Tweetdeck to live on Twitter and it will become second nature and not something you have to count the tweets about!
- Allocate a little budget (doesn’t have to be much) to Facebook ads to reach your target audience. If they are on Facebook and it is an appropriate channel to engage with them, you should grow your fan base pretty easily.
- Once you’ve got fans you have got to engage with them. Write a Facebook editorial plan and stick to it. Try and mix it up in terms of chat, pushing product, and chat again. Images work well, so go and find beautiful images that will start conversations. Be creative.
- At the same time as you’re using Twitter to chat to your followers, start using the Advanced Search feature to find people talking about your service/product in realtime. Choose whether it’s appropriate to engage with them.
That’s what you need to do for starters. Next up is how to extend that activity beyond Facebook and Twitter. How to listen to what’s being said about you and your business across the social spaces and how to respond and engage. Consider how you can move the social activity away from just being something you or your marketing person look after, to something that is second nature to everyone in the organisation.
More on that in another post. Please leave a comment if you want to see this soon. That’ll incentivise me to write it before this season is out. 
The Internet of Things
July 18, 2011 at 8:42 am
This is a really cool infographic posted by @jangles on Twitter (where all good things come from!) that reminds me of the kind of thing I’m studying in IADT as part of my Cyberpsychology Masters. Fascinating!
We are not jam jars…
April 27, 2011 at 11:31 am
So quit the labelling.
“We are extraordinary, brilliant, limitless people” – so says Caroline Casey of Kanchi at Ted Talks.
Caroline Casey is amazing. I would not be one bit surprised if she became President of Ireland someday.
Tags: TedTalks Kanchi Caroline Casey
No Dancing Flashmob
March 25, 2011 at 7:26 am
Great idea this one…thanks to @darraghdoyle for bringing it to my screen!
Flashmob Friday – Sydney
March 18, 2011 at 1:09 pm
Hurray it’s the return of Flashmob Friday and a topical one too. Check out the Flashmob from Grand Central Station in Sydney yesterday. (You might want to skip to 2mins as it’s a bit slow moving at first )
Tags: flashmob friday
Ireland Town Social Game
March 15, 2011 at 9:14 pm
If you’re looking for something fun, interesting, and challenging to get you in the mood for Paddy’s Day, then you might want to check out Ireland Town! It’s a social game on Facebook that I’ve been working on over the past 6 weeks in my role as Social Media Project Manager for Tourism Ireland.
Like all good things, it began on the back of a napkin in Bewleys when Brian conveyed to me his vision for a social game involving key destinations in Ireland. I took that napkin home, wrote it up into the shortest brief ever known to mankind, and shipped it out to a couple of trusty developers. Internally wincing at the turnaround time I was asking for proposals back, and the number of words in the brief, things happened, ideas got created and work began on Ireland Town in early February.
Betapond, who I’ve worked with on a couple of projects before, were the winning development team and they have pulled an amazing rabbit with fluffyness, brains and that can speak 5 languages – out of their hats! 
Now we’re at the end of an exciting 6 weeks. You will be able to play Ireland Town yourself from Thursday (St Patricks Day) – but if you’re a fan of one of Tourism Ireland’s Facebook Pages, you will get an early start today.
My Role (as Social Media Project Manager on behalf of the client)
- During the specification process, working on behalf of the client to ensure their best interests are being specc’ed out in the documentation and formal agreements for the project
- Communicating timelines to all parties involved in the project internally
- Sourcing content… while designers design, developers code, and the money people negotiate, someone has to come up with content ideas, and run around sourcing, signing off, and delivering. For this project we have 31 destinations with 9 tasks at each one = a lot of content to come up with. Luckily we also have our copywriters on hand to jazz up the language.
- Wearing my design hat, feeding back client’s views to the developers.
- While development takes place, I turn my attention to preparing all the ancillary content such as creating the Facebook presence, with custom designed tabs, a schedule of content for the first 6 weeks, Twitter skins, etc. Working with our trusty video editor on promo videos for Youtube.
- Communicating progress throughout to the stakeholders within the organisation. Ensuring their questions are answered, ideas are fed through into the development process, and requirements from them are clear.
- Did I mention there are 5 non-English languages?
I Love My Job.
I love the start of projects where it’s all about ideas and ‘What Can Be’. I love the middle of projects where everyone’s working together towards the same thing. I even love the crazy end of projects where days are long, and work is a heady balance of calls to mobiles and landlines, 3, 5, and often 7 way skype chats, emails flying, last minute things being dropped in…
Thank You’s
- To the makers of Basecamp, Dropbox, Skype, and Conceptshare – you are my saviours… Where would we be without you?
- To Aileen, David, & Lisa – thanks for poring over the spreadsheets and injecting fun into them! If you’re going to the Blog Awards this weekend, give them a big cheer – they’re shortlisted for the Best Sports & Recreation Blog.
- And of course, last but definitely not least, to Heidi who always ‘gets it’ and manages to do cutesy but cool at the same time – A Massive Thank You Indeed. If you want beautiful design from someone who knows what you want more than you do – talk to CookieWeb.
Go on – play Ireland Town the newest social game on Facebook. Enjoy. And happy St Patrick’s Day!
Tags: facebook.com/irelandtown, Ireland Town social game, St Patricks Day, St Patricks Day 2011
International Women’s Day is for life… not just today
March 8, 2011 at 6:04 pm
Happy international women’s day to one and all. I’m delighted to be a part of “100 Voices in Business” put together by @KrishnaDe. She asked put the word out there through her AMAZING online network to ask women in business what tip they’d give in 140 characters or less. There are some great ones in here – take the time to read every one.
Or if you could just skip to tip 94 where my one is!
What kind of Nerd are you?
February 2, 2011 at 10:58 pm
I’ve been busy lately – working hard, kind of in the middle of the left and bottom sections of this diagram. Apologies for not posting in a few weeks. I promise I’ll be better…
Thanks to @brianharte for bringing this to my attention.
Prime Target For Making Money
January 4, 2011 at 11:51 am
My new favourite thing is infographics. Here’s a lovely one I came across on the We Are Social blog about online Mums. (Can’t link to it as the site is down)
As one of them myself, I can confirm that the numbers are true – we spend HUGE amounts of time online, especially in the early months of pregnancy when you want to find out everything there is to know, and in the early months after baba is born. You’re not getting out much, and you do get some moments of downtime when baba is asleep.
It makes me wonder about how much money the peeps at Rollercoaster.ie are making?
Lots I suspect. Rollercoaster is the most popular parenting site in Ireland, it’s been around for a long time and they have a lot of paid advertising. Yet the site is crap. So bad in fact that I used it as the case study in an assignment I had to do for college last year about online norms. (I compared it with Boards.ie which has very explicit norms about how they expect you to behave. I was actually cyber-bullied by a man on Rollercoaster and was not happy at all with the way the issue was dealt with. Design, functionality, the whole thing sucks – yet is visited daily for its discussions and buy and sell noticeboard.)
Everyone knows that successful online communities comes down to being where the cool kids are. Long ago in days of old, before Facebook, Friendster was the social network of choice for the hip and cool in the US. Friendster doomed itself to failure when it changed some of its rules which pissed off the Influencers, which led them to leave for other sites (hello MySpace), and ultimately caused its own demise.
I’m thinking – with parenting sites, why oh why doesn’t someone set up a COOL parenting site that has HOT usability, slick design, and is run as a proper community with policies to protect and to detect when it’s being abused? You’d have to seed this with the cool kids of Rollercoaster, they’d be easy to find. Approach them directly and offer them cash to come over. The price wouldn’t be high. Seed it with knowledgable, active Mums. Promote it with midwives, health nurses and all the other frontline to get new mums on board. Then sit back and watch it grow.
Ireland is going through a baby boom right now. Read more. There were more than 75,000 births registered in 2008. If you got even a small proportion of them spending 95 minutes a day on your site, you’d definitely be on to a good thing.
I’m asking Mammys and Daddys who work in the web – what’s going on here? Why hasn’t someone done this already? Want to?
UPDATE: thanks to Martina Skelly (@activateireland) for showing me this, Parenthood.ie – a new parenting site that looks and works well, good content, updated regularly, only thing is the forums aren’t really populated. They simply must invest in luring people away from where they are, you can’t expect them to just find you.
Anarchy in Dublin 3….
December 12, 2010 at 8:29 pm
Last night I realised that I am now in fact an Anarchist! I always thought of those people as black jumper wearing, nail biting, nobodies, but I am now one of them.
Why do I say this?
Because I firmly believe that we need to make a paradigm shift in the way this country is run. When Lehman Bros bank collapsed, I thought it might have been an opportunity for the world to shake up the banking system and realign it to represent what is needed today, utilise technology to match those with money and those who need it, and remove a lot of the fat.
But that didn’t happen.
Now I am certain that a paradigm shift needs to occur in Ireland to ensure that what is happening now NEVER gets a chance to happen again.
What do I want to see?
The best people for the job in each of the main depts – Finance, Health, Education, Justice. A system that’s based on a model of social principles, and commercial efficiency. Not one that is based on old school party politics. I support many of the things that Fintan O’Toole asks for in his petition – you can read and sign here.
I was told last night that what I describe is Anarchist - – if that is so, let that be my new belief system. This revolution will not be televised. We know that. But it sure as hell can be Facebooked, Tweeted, Flickrd, blogged, and of course Youtubed. I’m ready and willing to my bit if I’m asked. But there seems to be a lot of talk, and nobody doing the asking.
What do you think?
Tags: Anarchy Ireland, Ireland IMF Scandal, Politics Ireland
