The value of your IIA membership
You may be deciding whether to renew your IIA Membership right? Or maybe you’re thinking about joining. We know, in (sorry to bring it up) times like these, every decision to shell out cash is a hard one.
In January of every year we encourage our existing members to renew their membership. It’s a great time to join as well because you will get a full year of all that goodness.
What goodness exactly?
- Did you know that you can save up to €1035 on training costs this year as an IIA Member? With an average satisfaction rating of 85% for events the training is well worth it.
- Did you know that as an IIA member you can approach our working groups for advice relating to a range of issues from legal queries to web development?
- Did you know the value of IIA Resources & Services, if it were to be undertaken by you privately, would amount to the following:
- Legal support on specific queries with a minimum value of €300 per query;
- Training course materials and Case Studies valued at €4,200;
- Development guides and White Papers valued at €3,600.
It’s a solid business case and that’s just the hard numbers. Being a member of the IIA is important, it puts you and your business at the centre of Ireland’s digital economy.
- Members have access to a growing range of business intelligence resources developed for the Irish market including “Join the Conversation: The Guide to Blogging for Business” and many others
- All members have an opportunity to raise their company profile by participating as a speaker, in a working group, as a guest blogger or simply by adding company news or company feeds to IIA.ie.
Do you blog for your business? Tell us all about it
Calling all business bloggers! If you blog for your business, no matter what size, we want to hear more about your experience. We would like to gauge the effectiveness of blogging for business, start collecting data about trends, the costs involved, your target audiences and the benefits. We look forward to sharing the anonymised results of this survey and analysis of the data with you in due course.
Please take 10 minutes to complete our survey.
This is an initiative of the Irish Internet Association’s Social Media Working Group to gather information about blogging for business in Ireland. This survey was run last year (results available online) and formed part of the data for the guide “Join the Conversation: A Guide to Blogging for Business” Your response will be completely anonymous and the survey takes about 10 minutes to complete.
Did you complete the survey last year? Please take the time to complete it again; it will help us gauge developing trends in blogging for businesses in Ireland.
International Strategy Working Group Case Study: Pigsback.com
The IIA International Strategy Working Group have created another case study. This time IIA Member Company Pigsback.com is featured. Jonathan Kyle of IIA Member Company Greenjobs.ie interviewed Michael Dwyer, CEO of Pigsback last December.
Dwyer shares some interesting insights about how having founded Pigsback in 2000 it turned out that the Dot Com Crash was not all bad for their company
as it allowed us to bring the Irish business to profitability and it also let us ensure that our product offering and business structure were strong enough for overseas expansion.
A salutary tale for the times we’re living in!
He also talks about what the company learned from their expansion into the very different markets of the UK and Canada.
Access the Internation Strategy Working Group’s resources to download the PDF and other case studies from the group.
Get busy with it at BizCampNewry
I’m a big fan of Bizcamps I have to say. I’ve had great experiences from a knowledge and networking point of view at the two I have attended. When Nichola Bates from IIA Member company Grow Sales Online contacted me on LinkedIn to let me know about an upcoming Bizcamp in Newry I was immediately interested. I also love the logo. Slick!
So what can you expect at BizcampNewry? I’ll allow their own site to do the talking
BizcampNewry is a free business conference taking place in the Southern Regional College Newry on Saturday the 6th of February 2010! There will be talks ranging from entrepreneurs actively working to professionals ready to share their knowledge and skills.
If one of your New Year Resolutions was to get out and network or to do more public speaking or facilitation this is your chance! Register now online or volunteer to give a talk.
Sadly I won’t be able to make it; common sense dictates otherwise. It’s a week before I go on maternity leave!
Deloitte feel the power of Social Media
Thanks to our Google alerts I just happened upon this post by Simon Murphy of Deloitte where he shares insights about the development, release, collation and results of Deloitte’s 2009 CIO Survey. It is very interesting to read that he concludes that LinkedIn proved by far the biggest pull to the survey results followed by his colleague Harry Godddard’s guest post here on the IIA blog and inclusion in the November Digital Digest. The fact that we also push these sources out to various social networks was undoubtedly helpful in spreading the word.
The survey results are well worth a read and with my nerdy social research background I am very happy to read on Simon’s blog that Deloitte plan to run the survey again next year. Nothing like the promise of some longitudinal data to get the heart racing of a cold Tuesday morning!
Beware the scammers aka Internet Register Ireland
<heavy sarcasm>I was delighted </heavy sarcasm> to receive my reminder from Internet Register Ireland this morning dated Dezember 2009 [sic.] as it reminds me that it’s time for me to warn you all to beware these scammers. We’re obviously not alone as there has been an increase in trackbacks and comments on our original post on this matter. As one of our commenters points out at least it’s on Recycled Paper (you gotta love those Germans! 
) and this is what you should do with this letter on receipt: recycle it.
If you ever receive a letter or an email inviting you to join a directory, do a link exchange or other such activities always, always do a search about the company. Don’t just visit their site: it may look fine to you, it may even look spectacular but all that glisters is not gold. You may do a search and find mixed reviews on blogs and discussion forums or other social media. These reviews may or may not help you decide. Remember what these sites are offering you is exposure so you need to find out what kind of exposure you will be getting from them for your money and they should be prepared to use all the stats in their power to convince you. However you can also check how their site measures up on sites like Alexa.com, which is okay. (Know of other similar services? Please leave a comment below!) You can check out their Page Rank but more importantly brush up your understanding of how Search Engine Optimization works. There are stacks and stacks of resources out there – not least from Google Webmaster Central itself. If you owned a shop in a shopping centre or were attending a tradefair you would do everything in your power to make your shop/ stand em stand out from the others around you. Search Engine Optimisation, Search Engine Marketing and canny use of Social Media can get you noticed too. We run training events on all of these topics and plan to roll out lots of them in 2010.
For your information I am including a scan of the letter so you know what to keep an eye out for.
A big wave to you all
You may or may not have heard of Google Wave. You may or may not think it’s the next big thing. One thing is for sure – it’s no use if you have no-one to communicate with on your wave! So I have a limited number of invitations to Google Wave and would like you to have one! I have set up a Google Wave for IIA Members and would love to add you in there too if you are a member.
If you would like an invitation email me at members@iia.ie or email me your Wave address and I will add you to the IIA Wave.
Neville Hobson originally gave me an invite so props to him. He also recommended this great guide which I have been dipping into now and then. Brian Greene also recommended this guide and his company (IIA Member Company Doop Design) have also created a repository of Wave and other cloud resources over at Wavelinks.ie. Add it to your RSS reader and never miss a trick!
If you have seen an innovative use of Wave please share in the comments below. I wrote an article about Google Wave for my monthly column in Beo! where I wondered how this proposed email killer was going to kill the technology that is the first port of call for most. I keep forgetting about Wave because unlike all the other social media I use there is no pull via email. I would also love a way of using it on my iPhone which is another way in which I get sucked into using new apps.
Similarly the fact that there is no easy way to currently share Waves (I know, I know it’s beta!) makes it difficult to draw others’ attention to their use. See above the convuluted (and email based!) manner in which I had to ask you to join me on the IIA Wave. A link would be so much more graceful.
Personally I really liked this example (see vid below) of how to use Wave. Very pertinent to many of us working on our online offerings!
Hello 2010! How’s it going?
Just a super quick post to wish you all the best in 2010! A couple of things were brought to my attention while I was on leave and I thought the quickest thing would be to share them with you all here.
- Firstly IIA member Pixel Design thought some of you might be interested in Dublin County Enterprise Board’s search for Irish Digital Talent to represent Ireland at a Campus Party Europa Event in Spain in April.
- Secondly I thought it was worth reminding you that one of our members is conducting research about social networking for a masters thesis. Please complete her survey if you have a few minutes to spare.
- And there should be a thirdly. Ah yes! If you are an IIA Member, your membership is now due for renewal. We are doing a special 10% for members who renew online by credit card. Email me at members at iia dot ie for the voucher code.
Guest post: The thorny business of measurement and who blinks first.
A guest post from IIA Social Media Working Group Member Eoin Kennedy of Slattery Communications. You can check out Eoin’s blog here. (I particularly like his most recent post at time of writing about the implications of using multiple usernames across social networks.)
IIA Member Company SimplyZesty recently ran another successful measurement camp. The session itself was attended by less than normal but ran to a familiar structure with two presenters followed by a group activity based on three case study scenarios.
Overall although online is much more measurable than traditional media the demands to quantify it financially have not been met to date. The first wave of measurement has been around physical numbers i.e. numbers of followers, number of posts. These give a topline indication of engagement but translating this into actual worth is tricky. How much is a follower/friend actually worth? Sure it’s great to get some “thumbs up” and “love” but what are these actual measures worth? For property owners such as bebo this poses real challenges. Engagement models are generally built around the pushing and advertising of the page profile but savvy brand holders want more. The burden of responsibility is getting pushed back to the property owners as marketers want more metrics to gauge success while platform owners need agreement on values attached to elements so that they can build charging models. Currently the CPM (cost per thousand impressions) advertising model is the main charging structure used. If the platform owner is charged with the financial delivery then they need to have full control over the creative, which again would pose problems.
Philip McCarthy now ex Bebo gave a good overview of some campaigns that they have run and admitted that measurement is still at an early stage. Bebo does engagement very well but an experience with Coca Cola Burn posed interesting questions about what he should have charged. Current values are around 3 euro cost per thousand which would indicate a value of €60k for the Coke campaign that achieved 20m impressions. The campaign achieved 17,000 visits to the site, 126 comments, 7 photos, 70 quizzes, 679 skins used.
Engagement is something that social media does really well and according to Philip there must be a value to it.
Philip debated using traditional rates that are charged for advertorials, something that is pretty much set and understood with traditional media. Basing digital charging models on established off line models has merit in that brand owners understand them but is probably not the best starting point.
The establishment of a base line measurement was discussed that could be used across other media but no one has yet taken this step to any great degree.
Where this gets particularly difficult is in getting values on things like thumbs up, love and other signs of engagement used on different social networks. It’s great to get them but what do they really mean and what value could be put on them?
One of the areas discussed that could help on measurement in the real world was the use of redeemable bar codes. The idea being that rather than a virtual present that people could send a ‘printable’ bar code or even one that could be displayed on a phone. This could be taken to an outlet and redeemed. This could help track social media activity to actual sales. For example a coffee shop could build an app that allows users to send a coffee to friends. The friend could print out or show the barcode that would be scanned through at an actual coffee shop. By doing this the coffee shop could measure the actual sales generated by the voucher and social media activity. Some good work in being done in this area by IIA Member Company Zappa but problems still exist for terminals to read bar codes on screen.
The overall feeling from the event was that some leadership needs to be established in measuring the value of online campaigns and that the current metrics, while good, are not financially based enough for brand owners. The UK Measurement Camp has also suffered from similar problems.
My own observation is that once criteria that are reasonably sound are established Klout, TweetLevel for Twitter, or Technorati for blogs could start to become industry standards. At some point someone needs to take a brave step. The online community will undoubtable respond and some progress could be made.
International Strategy Working Group Case Study: MUZU.TV
The IIA International Strategy Working Group have released another great case study. This one focuses on MUZU.TV which frequent readers of this blog and our site will know were chosen as the 2009 Overall Net Visionaries. You can download a PDF of this case study from the Resources section of IIA.ie. One of my favourite parts of this case study was the response to the question:
What is the advice you would give companies starting out on Internationalization?Buy a suitcase, register for air-miles.
There is plenty of other insights into the strategy of this fascinating company who were “born global” as Caelen King from our previous ISWG Case Study on RevaHealth.com described his company.
This case study was compiled by Jonathan Kyle of IIA Member Company Greenjobs.ie. (who incidentally also won a Net Visionary award for 2009 Internet Entrepreneur!)
Maeve Kneafsey, IIA Chair & Frank Ryan, Enterprise Ireland, present the 2009 Net Visionary Award to Ciaran Bollard & Mark French of MUZU.TV
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