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.

Combine it with the right hash tag and you can always check against other tweets to remind yourself on the bits you could not type fast enough to capture or to correct inaccuracies.

I have, like lots of people, found my blogging has suffered as my twitter activity has grown.  This is a pity as pithy, snappy tweets only give a fragmented, pieces missing view of a someones presentation or discussion.

I have decided to try use the tweets from the last few events I attended to piece together an overview, mainly as there were some resources I wish to test out and use again

The first was Audio Video Culture – Behind the scenes of video and audio.  The event was organized by the IIA Social Media Working Group, of which I am a member.  The idea behind the event was to show how different organizations are using video and also to give some practical advice on equipment and software.  This is the part that I was particularly looking forward to.

RTE kicked off the first session with some interesting stats on their iPlayer usage.  35% of people watch entire shows with an average stream of 18 minutes.  This is impressive when your consider that most people will be viewing it on a poor quality computer screen at a desk which is a completely different experience to that of slouching on a couch.  The speaker did point out that a large screen interface and faster streaming are in the pipeline which fits in with the general consensus that we will be replacing watching downloaded movies on our laptops to the plasma screen stuck to the wall.

Apparently 30 to 50% of their streams are from the international player, something that presents lots of licensing challenges especially as RTE get popular show such as Desperate House Wives before other countries.  Their solution is to remove certain shows.

Next up was Rabo Bank who play a good deal of attention to online video, audio and social media as they have to compete with bricks and mortar banks to build relationships with customers. Aoife Mahon & Gina McCrudden gave some nice examples of video testimonials, webinars and podcasts that they use.  Their podcasts alone have generated a listenership of over 35K while webinars have waiting lists of 300 people at times.  They also integrate other marketing activities into their plans, an example being the Fix Its competition with George Hook on Newstalk being used on the site.

Fred Caballero from Channelship set the scene for his presentation by talking about YouTube being the second search spot after YouTube, which was surprising considering the Google/Facebook supremacy stories but it could be for specific searches.  He also detailed YouTube’s 6.6 billion streams and 75% market share.   In particular I wanted to hear about what tools Fred used.  Below is a list of the particular good ones.

• Tube Mogul for distributing video.
• ScreenToaster and Camtasia Studio for screen recording and talking through presentations.  Especially good for the camera shy.
• Gotowebinar and Onlinemeetingrooom.com for hosting online conferences/chats.  The later is a really nice cost effective solution when you have people scattered geographically and want to share presentations as well as teleconferencing people in.
• Ustream.tv for live streaming of events.  Laptop, video camera and an internet connection was all that was used to broadcast the event and quality look pretty ok.  More powerful than QIK from what I have seen and it also incorporates twitter streams once they are correctly has tagged.  Justin.tv was also mentioned as a good alternative.

Finally the last presentation was from Donal Rice from the Centre for Excellence in Universal Design.  I have seen Donal present a number of time over a few years and usability has moved from a nice to do to a more structured need to do for some organizations.  His message has also become more commercial from opening points about grey surfers being the fastest growing market to level of normal diversity and disability in the marketplace.

Usability can tend to be associated with disability but some of his points on closed captioning and audio descriptors for YouTube videos related to people whose first language may not be English, working in noisy environment or who need to work in a quiet/silent environment rather than just people who are hard at hearing.

The pitch of increased usability being good for SEO made relative sense (kind of similar to advance tagging) and was creative in trying to enhance the level of usability investment.

These carrot items came just before the stick in terms of quotes from the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability and the Irish Disability Act 2005/Equal Status Act.  These are currently loose but further European legislation is expected where having an accessible website will be similar to buildings needing wheel chair access.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 are fairly detailed in terms of different levels of grading from A to AA but I cannot ever recall a web designer bringing it up with me on client projects.

I have been on the board for over 5 years and have witnessed the great work he has done in bringing the organisation forward.  I have also seen the web of influence and the network potential of such as job, especially for someone who is a self starter.  In this recession the Irish internet industry has a real opportunity to shine as companies looks for more cost effective routes to market.  With this in mind the CEO has carte blanche to make connections, create new initiatives, influence policy and really make an impact.

Fergal has set a high bar and the person who fills his shoes and continues with the development of the Association would need to tick most of the following boxes below:

1) Ability to secure and manage sponsorship and sponsors
2) Experience in building and maintaining a membership base
3) Ability to understand, work on and monitor financial reports and budgets
4) Ability to manage staff
5) Events organisation and management experience
6) Experience in managing an organisation with similar stakeholders and understanding of the political tensions/vested interests
7) Understanding and experience in working in the Internet industry.

As well as being a very satisfying job it is also great for establishing contacts, working with a good board and great staff, making a difference to members, being part of the internet sector in Ireland.

If you or someone you know fits the bill, please ask them to simply email vacancy@iia.ie with the word CEO Job in the subject line. The full job spec is available on the IIA website.

The closing date is the 21st of August 2009.