The three speakers were Ciaran Doherty, e-marketing manager, Tourism Ireland, Colm Hanratty, editor and content manager, Hostel World and Blathnaid Healy, Content Manager, WorldIrish.com.

The Tourism Ireland experience with social media is a really good template for larger organizations looking to expand their international presence.  They stuck to the main platforms with a particular focus on Facebook where they have in excess of 20 separate pages and now have over 750,000 likes.  This is really impressive growth over 3 years and with that comes the structures needed to handle that volume of content generation in multi languages and engagement.  In the centre of the Tourism Ireland customer engagement world is their enormous database and CRM, with email, website and contact centre forming the next radius.  Social forms the next layer with less controlled platforms such a Trip Advisor forming the outside layer.  With this in mind it makes perfect sense to utilise their call/contact centre to help manage the engagement and social outreach in conjunction with local offices.   The local offices are crucial in ensuring the local context and the example used was that German audiences really like sheep to the point of dressing up as sheep for the St Patricks Day parade.  ’Industrialising the conversation’ is one term that Ciaran used to describe managing the scale of content needed.   Lots of KPIs and measures are in place to test the quality of interactions and language used by the call centre staff to ensure quality but also to achieve a level of personal interaction.  On app development, the organisation generally builds one app for deployment and localization for all markets.  Their early experience has taught them to avoid Like-gating, where extra layers/barriers are put in front of the customer before they get to use the app, due to the high drop off rates.  As expected there are processes and guides for all theses interacting with social media and content is seen as a process with full editorial calendars developed in advance.  As Tourism Ireland do not have direct access to the final parts of the sales funnel – ie they promote Ireland as a destination but don’t sell products, measurement is tricker.  Historically they have used likes/interaction as a measure but are now trying to pioneer SEAV (Search Engine Advertising Equivalent) which is a hybrid version of advertising equivalent that is sometimes attached to PR/media activity.  Tricky thing to do.  Ciaran gave lots of practical tips at the end of the presentation which should be visible below but I particularly liked the terms and approach to ‘Interaction Management’ covering ways to handle community responses from discussion ending comments called ‘Dee-Dum’ to ‘Focus’ where they bring conversation back to the main point.  They also break interactions down into various headings and appropriate actions from comments/develop or respond to off topic spam/delete.  Great to see a well thought out approach and lots to be learnt from them.

Ciaran presentation is on here on prezi.   I missed the beginning of his talk but you can get a reasonable narrative with the audio below.

I delivered the course below last year

I am slowly working my way through Don Tapscotts book “Grown Up Digital”.  He identifies 8 norms amongst digital natives (dying term) which remain constant in a world of change.  I will post a full review of them when I finish but whats most interesting about them is how he weaves them into every aspect of life from college, being marketing to and work.  The books is well worth a quick read.  The 8 norms are:

I uploaded the presentation to slideshare so you can see the main points below

Overall it was mainly hints and tips to stimulate a conversation for people networking later on.  The slides were designed to look like tweets and thanks to Paul Murgatroyd who tweeted them as I was presenting.

The second part of the presentation was around using social media to enhance your business networking at events.  My experience of business networking is that most people drift into old habits of finding people they know when they arrive and hope they bump into people who will matter from a business perspective.  Social media allows you to get great insight into people, start a conversation with them and make arrangements to meet.  This makes a big difference in that the meeting at the event can be much more focused on deal making or other rapport where face to face is important.

I found it hard enough to find anything online about this so here are the few bits that came out of the session.

Before the Session

• Get hold of the attendee list and find people you wish to connect to.
• Search Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and if they have a blog.
• The website will probably short circuit this for you.
• Follow the person if on twitter
• If appropriate retweet, favorite posts they have put up – they will see this.
• Respond to their posts and start a conversation.
• If they have followed you back and you have established a relationship then direct message them to meet up on the night.
• LinkedIn will give you even more in-depth information on them which you can check for common areas and possible conversation points.
• You can also utilise LinkedIn to get an introduction from a trusted source.
• If they have a blog be up to speed on the topic areas and share your insight with a post or perhaps a link from an article on your own blog or blogroll.
• Similarly with Facebook

Paul Murgatroyd, Oisin Geoghegan (CEO), Fingal CEB and Eoin Kennedy, Knudger.com

After 11 years working on a variety of communications projects for large and small companies from product launches, profile building to event management and of course the odd crisis or two, I am also heading to the west of Ireland to set up home in Mayo.
Leaving a extremely good job in a recession to face considerable uncertainty may seem like an odd thing to do but the reasons lie only partially in new challenges and owe more to establishing a better work life balance.

10 years of my wife commuting from Dublin to Galway where she works was always going to be a challenge but add in two fantastic babies and it changes the complexity a huge amount.

The idea of county living has always appealed to me but the sacrifices were too great. I enjoy isolation but also enjoy being in the thick of things. Technology, collaboration and a more positive appreciation of remote working are now starting to breathe life in to the once fabled notion of teleworking and the assumption that it meant being cut off. Now with a decent internet connection location is pretty irrelevant for the vast majority of the work I will be doing.

Starting from next week I will be focusing a lot of my efforts on a new social advertising model start up that I am lucky to be involved with, while the remainder of my time will be in ad hoc consultancy and training to pay the bills (sounds like a lot of people I know).

I will share the details of this project once the initial beta test is complete but I imagine my blog will change for a while as I document the challenges of a city boy moving to a rural location where the nearest shop is three miles away.

In the meanwhile I would like to thanks all the staff of Slattery Communications and Padraig Slattery in particular for providing a rewarding, challenging and enjoyable workplace. I wish them all the best as they embrace the social media challenges ahead.

I will be in Dublin for the next two months and still engaged as chair of the Social Media Working in the Irish Internet Association.  In reality, physically I will move to the west of Ireland but will probably still be back up in Dublin a couple of times a month.

Coffee anyone….anyone….

QR codes (or quick response codes) are basically an image like a bar code that scanners and QR codes applications on camera phones can interpret.  Once you scan it (I used a free QRcodereader on iTunes) you are brought to an online space (website, email address, social media) where you can find out more information.

Most current uses that I can see of QR codes are to make it easier to find web addresses especially ones with long urls but there are load of potential applications.  QR codes are already being used by the Irish media on news paper such as the Metro Herald with the DRG group and Social Media.ie did a nice post on some extra uses. Now that smart phones are reaching critical mass and as the creative industries start to deploy them we will see lots more applications.  One nice one could be virtual/real treasure hunt where people need to find QR code on a posters that bring them to another location until someone find the prize.   Here is an example of one in New York.  Either way another nice one for the toolkit.

You need to generate a QR code first but there is useful guide available on QRcodes.ie.  Here is one for this blog

(Edit on 17th June). When you start to look for something, you see it everywhere.  Nice offer of generating a QR code from Worky that can be used on a business card.

(Edit 28 June) Digital Times ran an interesting piece on the inclusion of QR codes in the Food Lovers Guide to Ireland.

Bought some grapes yesterday and was very pleasantly surprised to find that the QR code brought me to a video on recipes and ideas on preparing grapes.

QR codes on Dunnes Stores Grapes

(Edit 30 June). Went to the Bloggers International event last night in Portlaoise and spotted another nice use of QR codes.  Great event and nice video link ups with the UK.   As usual I alway pick up some gems at these type meet up.  As part of the event they invited some people to do elevator pitches that they recorded.  One of the companies who pitched held up a print out of a QR code for their website.  Simple and clever.  Will post the video once its available.

(Edit 1 July ) Nice article today by John Kennedy in Silicon Republic and QR codes.  Had never really thought about supermarkets using the QR codes to sell the ingredients for meals.  You scan a big QR code at store entrance that gives you list of ingredients for a meal, directions on where to find them and video of how to cook them.

(Edit 6th July)  these edits could go on for a while.  Really interesting use of QR codes by Tesco in South Korea where they printed large print outs of their shelves at train stations where people could scan and order food using the printed codes.

The Sunday Business Post Computers in Business magazine led with QR codes last week citing really good examples from property company Sherry Fitzgerald.

(edit 25th July) Previous focus has been on what people do with their QR codes i.e. simple point to a website or some creative execution of it.  Now according to Mashable, “a 30% tolerance in readability” means people can be much more creative in desiging the QR codes themselves.

This is the invite from the DIT students and congrats for being so inventive.

Adgrad invite from DIT featuring QR codes.

Still even at this stage there are some lessions to be had from it and likely SEO issues.

Here is a quick example.

Empty bottle of Evian water

Once in the application I took a photo of an empty Evian bottle in my kitchen.

Empty Evian bottle being scanned by Google Goggles application

This is how it looks as the application scoured the image for something identifiable.  This stage only took a few seconds as the boxes floated up the image as a visualisation of it scanning for something recogniseable.

Search results from Google Goggles following photo of Evian bottle.

The results are pretty basic but it did recognise the logo, name of company and service and who it represented.

I clicked on the Evian logo result.

Organic listings from Google Goggles search

Interestingly the top result was not the Evian website but looks like another who registered an image as evian logo.

To me this and voice activated searches looks like a serious contender to typed searches especially in situations where you are looking at something visual and text just does not work.  The ability to identify a building and its history by simply taking a photo or finding out the name and background to a painting in seconds is something that could be almost impossible with text alone.  These are the popular uses that have been well discussed but there could be lots of marketing applications.  Think  about some really interesting competitions or posters that bring people to additional sites for more information.  As Facebook, Flickr, Pix.ie, Instagram have all shown people are often happier to take and share photos than  utilise text.

The bigger more immediate challenge will be optimising sites, images logos, company premises photos and key personnel so that when a customer does a Google Goggles picture search that there is a good library of comparison images and optimised text.  As the Evian example shows you need to thing about how Google Goggles will display and analysise images in order to optimise organic searches.  I would imagine there are lots of tagged images on their site but perhaps none or few that are tagged Evian logo.

Some simple top line observations.

• increased need to have broader range of images on a company website or social sites.
• think about your company from a customer view point – literally what they see, where and hence what Google Goggles sees.
• optimising for Google Goggles with particular tags.
• think creatively about promotions that could utilise the service.

The service is still fairly rudamentary but I can see that changing rapidly.  The results are way off or fairly basic.  It does recognise faces but the matching results seem almost random but similar to iPhoto Faces with better processing power combined with intelligent intuitive software then the abilty to identify someone from a photo and get psychological insights from an analysis of their social channel usage could be a few clicks away.  A wonderful service or scary invasion of privacy but looks like its arrival is not far away.

My other experience with testing Google Goggles was more personal.  I took a photo of a Peppa Pig DVD which brought me to Peppa Pig You Tube videos.  I am now plagued with hourly requests by my daughter to play episodes of the programme she has never seen before.  Very odd to see a 2 year old holding an iPhone in a tree house glued to a TV cartoon but thats the world of instantly accessible information, on any device, in any place whenever they want it, that they will grow up with.

On Facebook there are a host of pages dedicated to the festival  including a cheeky infographic by Mashable on how social networkers celebrate St Patricks Day.   However there was a gap in easily allowing people to express their pride in being  Irish.  Enter the arena ‘Shamrock Urself’ a voluntary social media initiative aiming to restore pride and positivity in Ireland by giving Facebook profiles a St Patricks Day make over. The initiative allows Facebook users to add a Shamrock stamp to their profile pictures through a specially developed application but people can interact at different levels from just liking through to sharing videos of them shamrocking themselves (think Facepainting etc).

The organisers have also approached businesses to get them to shamrock their pages and some nice tips on how to change a page profile by the DMI.  The campaign is mainly being run on Facebook but there is a supporting twitter account also.

I was asked to give a hand, along with many other people, so it will be interesting to see the take up (mainly social media outreach and word of mouth) and what impact it can have on Irish pride and solidarity.  It a big ask but why not?

Facebook places has been running in Ireland for a week today and I do like it, but I also think it will cause people to review who are their friends on Facebook.  

Most people have modest numbers of friends on Facebook but still probably more than Dunbars 150 .  This is a theoretical number but its widely recognised that many peoples friends on Facebook have very tenuous links to real friendship.  This has happened for lots of reasons but generally people randomly accepted friend requests as they arrived and never really queried them.  I think the first few weeks of Facebook Places will see people rethink who they have in their friends list.  

With Foursquare the pool of friends was fairly small and generally people were quite careful about signing in at home.  Normally people would manipulate the map to show their house in a different area.   The profile of people using Foursquare is very different to the vast number of people on Facebook.  Foursquare also started from the premise of sharing your location with people and hence you entered with eyes wide open. Facebook did not have this beginning so its a new phenomenon and so likely to be disruptive.  

Withìn the first week of Facebook places I have been surprised by the amount of people who have checked in at home.  Perhaps they don’t care or don’t realise that this gives a pin point location of where they live and for the very curious what their houses look like with street view.  

I am personally not comfortable with Facebook or many friends having that sort of intimate detail.  One of the things I have also noticed is that I am getting much more responses from people verbally and via email, text and Facebook itself, commentin on where I have checked in.  Some of this is curiosity with a new tool and will become as invisible as other wall posts over time.   

 However I think that as people get notes and approaches from friends showing not only that they know what they have done but where they are, that people will start to cull people who they acquired as friends but with whom they do not wish to share every movement.  There is of course a more sinister aspect with potential stalking.  Afterall if someone is your friend surely they can pop around to see you at home! 

 Experience with Facebook Places to Date. 

I have not drilled too deeply but some thoughts on Facebook places to date.  

• Its not as rich as Foursquare but has some nice handy features including the ability to tag others and post photos which should prove to be quite sticky.
• Similar to when Facebook launched its image editing software is not perfect but it has big enough community to make it impactful. 
• Unfortately it allows you to tag people who may not there but that will probably be tightened up.
• There are still the age old issue of allowing check ins to places you are not actually near.
• Facebook does allow you to link your company page with Places.  I like this.  It can be cumbersome but at least some controls are in place here.  I can imagine this being a big driver for venues with large traffic volumes from venues to coffee shops.
• I like the ease of taking and uploading photo of places you are in and think people will actually use it.
• Some people seem to receive push alerts when you check in but appears fairly random to date.  This could get very annoying.

This book is really designed for sales professionals who are ignoring, dismissing or afraid to tune into social media.  It also serves as a nice reminder to those working in social media to take a step back to ensure their activities are actually grounded in business objectives and they are taking a strategic approach.

This book is roughly divided into three sections: first, a look at sales from an historical perspective through to modern practices; second, a quick tour through some of the main platforms and tools; and finally a highly narrated case study of an SME taking the 30-day social media challenge.  I found myself rushing through the earlier sections with interest to see how the authors would tie the concepts in an easy-to-digest case study on how to implement a social media sales strategy.

The opening sections are an interesting insight into how little the sales process has evolved since the late nineteenth century oil snake salesman, with more recent additions being quotas, territories, role plays and a general professionalising of the American salesman.  In essence, the authors contend that fundamental changes are needed to harness the power of social media.

They are at pains to point out that hardnosed salesmanship tactics won’t work in social media and that research, expert positioning, tailored approaches, adding value, listening and community engagement need to be blended in with the ethos and sensitivities of social media. 

They describe the changes to consultative selling and some of the current changes in sales/buyer roles where customers are now in the driving seat – they can decide how they will communicate with a company, have access to vast choice, expect tailored offerings, can decide when they will buy, and have access to a “big megaphone” allowing them to badmouth a company to a wide community at the touch of button.

They also discuss how online buyers now buy from each other (think eBay) and provide data to each other (think online reviews) to support the assertion that sales people can no longer ignore social media. 

One of the nice things about this book is that it collates some tools and structure to help put a framework around social media.  They put forward the ‘New Handshake approach’, which advocates a four-prong system of People, Purpose, Plan and Technology.  In essence, this involves thinking about the people barriers in changing sales approaches; identifying and quantifying what you want to achieve; approaching it in a programmatic way; and, finally, looking at the technology.  This in itself is useful as people generally jump into the tools and platforms head first and find it unnerving or, worse still, drift in limp online efforts.

The book also provides a light but handy eight-question checklist to rate a company’s social media readiness, which once again emphasises the planning approach to social media.

The different types of social media available are detailed in the book and  I found the description of platforms I am comfortable with quite interesting in that the authors take a step back and link them to solid netiquette and what is and is not best practice.  This area in particular felt like common sense, but social media in the hand of a hardnosed sales person could very quickly backfire. 

By its nature a book of this type cannot cover all the complexities of these platforms and is quickly out of date so taking a top level approach makes sense.  The authors have gone for tools that are immediately and easily accessible to sales people and spend and therefore discuss expected platforms such as blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. 

This book is a good starting point for any company that has a very traditional sales approach. It’s sensitive to the pressures, prejudices and realities of a sales environment, while giving a robust account of the changing dynamic of modern day communications.  For seasoned social media professionals it’s worth a read, both as a reminder of the need to have a strategic view and approach and as a handy insight into how sales-led organisations work and struggle with social media.

I reviewed this book on my laptop with Kindle for PC.  It’s certainly the fastest way to get the book, but screen flicker, difficulty in sharing and lack of page numbers mean I’ll be less like to revisit often, which is a pity, given some of the nuggets.

 The print edition of thei review can be found on Marketing Age magazine.

 However the one thing that really grabbed me was the bold call to action at the end, which stated

“search online for Dyson City”.  

So what’s interesting about this.  Well at one point these ads would normally have finished with a fully owned and controlled website address popping up, where the company could be pretty sure of what people would find.  In this instance its a real vote of confidence in its seo and the organic search listings.  Not surprisingly the official Dyson site appears number one but below it is a heavy mix of review and news sites.  Personally I think its a brave move by them and a pretty open approach to ‘hey, we know people will search for us and we have nothing to hide’.  If they had gone the usual route of ‘visit this URL’  I would have seen the image they wished to portray and then have had to do an additional search to get other validation on it.  This way you see it straight away.  Am I attributing too much to Dyson that they potentially see the value of reviews and news as being equal to its own controlled online assets?   

I can think of plenty of brands/products for whom this would be very dangerous and you would need to have a proactive search marketing strategy in place so the first few pages were not all negative (think Irish Pork for which the crisis still tops the charts).  This is probably a reflection of where things are going with social media.  Do you point to all your social media platforms or just accept user behaviour and give them a simple term to search for.

I have observed a lot of companies from big movies to hair dressers promoting their facebook profiles instead of a website.  Some are more clever with their own facebook url while others go the generic route of posters saying ‘Find us on Facebook’.  I pretty certain that most who use the generic route have just not gotten around to registering one rather than being hugely confident people will find them straight away but it does pose an interesting debate – is the day of pushing people to one location numbered?      

All of this probably fits nicely into the dominance of search and the current url addressing system evolving.  Either way I hope the Dyson guys took this decision based on smart thinking, analysis and an understanding of user behaviour rather than just a hunch.

Some obervations from this.

• Long urls are hard to remember – use simple terms.
• Make sure you test the keywords you use with google keyword checker
• Encourge user review of your product.
• Ensure you have a reasonable news flow and online coverage.
• Think about people first and their behaviour – what they do rather than what you want them to do.
• Invest in SEM