Social Media Working Group – Up and running
The following post is contributed by Brendan Hughes, Chair of the IIA Social Media Working Group. The IIA facilitate and support a number of working groups - information about all is available on our website. If you have a particular interest in any of them please contact me, Roseanne Smith, Membership, Marketing and Communications Manager at members at iia punc ie.
Last Wednesday night saw the first gathering in the Digital Depot of the IIA’s new Social Media Working Group. When asked by Fergal O’Byrne (CEO of the IIA) to chair the group I was happy to say yes as I see this an important development in the Internet landscape in Ireland. To my knowledge this is the first co-ordinated attempt to gather together social media experts and business people with a view to providing information and best practice advice for businesses. I am certainly not aware of any library or resource that is independent and can freely be tapped into – this is what we hope to deliver.
The meeting was attended by thirteen of the sixteen members of the working group (the other three had solid alibis and are still very much in the group). I’ll ensure that the full list of members is made available on the IIA site, but without mentioning people individually I’m very happy to say that we had a very impressive collection of people round the table. We had luminaries from the blogging community, academia, big business and small business, organisations serving big and small businesses, and people who are starting new businesses. What we had in common was a very clear belief that this “social media thing” is important for organisations, and an enthusiasm to get stuck into the detail.
Our task last night was to get to know each other and to tease out a little of our vision, scope and how we are going to work together. The vision has started out looking something like: “the group’s aim is to be the thought leader – developing and sharing insights – in the appropriate use of social media by businesses in Ireland”. We had lots of discussion, as you can imagine, around some particular words – “thought leader”, “appropriate use”, “social media”. This vision might be a little bold for a voluntary part-time group, but we’re going to stick with it for now.
Much of the discussion centred on how we would tackle our planned outputs. We intend to deliver white-paper documents on some of the key social media that are relevant to both small and large businesses in Ireland. Initially we are going to pick off blogging, social networks/online communities, audio and video podcasting, and RSS. On hold for now are collective intelligences (wikis etc), peer-to-peer networks, mash-ups, web services and instant messaging (and anything else that we haven’t thought of).
A question arose about how deep we should go on each of these and that discussion is still ongoing today. We are all agreed that the first and most obvious need in the market is for the simple guide to each of the social media mentioned. Once businesses understand what they are they will very quickly want to figure out what potential there might be for their business and what the rationale / business-case might be for engaging. We do intend to get stuck into all of this and I think we have the right people on board to make this happen.
In order to keep things manageable, I going to keep the membership of the group limited to the sixteen who are currently on board. We do however intend that the process should be outward looking and we will be inviting contributions from people outside the group. We are setting up a wiki to facilitate this. We’re going to try and use social media as much as possible in the operations of the group – in order to prove to ourselves at least how beneficial it can be. Our next meeting will be via Skype conference and we’ll be posting updates on progress over the coming months here on the IIA blog.
If you are interested in participating in the group please email members@iia.ie and we’ll put your name on the list if some of the existing members leave. And don’t forget to subscribe to this blog for the updates.
Bernie Goldbach of Tipperary Institute of Technology has blogged about the meeting describing us as social media plumbers who “understand the flow of conversations and how surges of information gurgle and sometimes spit in vitriolic ways.” Very nicely put, Bernie – thanks!
Comments
15 Responses to “Social Media Working Group – Up and running”
Leave a Reply
IIA on FB
Subscribe to the IIA Blog
What’s the IIA (t)wittering on about today?- iia: Longford County Enterprise Board will hold its Entreprise Week from September 6 to September 10 next. The wide... http://fb.me/yDvhv4gG September 2, 2010
- iia: IIA Member Blogs: Temple House Festival: Win a pair of tickets to rock out in Sligo! http://bit.ly/9npzgQ September 2, 2010
- iia: IIA Member Blogs: Handling SMS delivery receipts: Recently, we looked at how to send SMS messages using a standard... http://bit.ly/doDDLP September 2, 2010
- IIA News
- IIA Upcoming Events
- IIA Member News
- Wexford Insurances launch exclusive new HorseGuard policy.
- Member Offer: 10% discount on Lucey Subscriptions for IIA clients
- Bewley's Hotels go mobile with Bookassist Webapp
- BlogTalk social media event in NUI Galway 26-27 Aug: learn and connect with gurus from Facebook, Google, XING, and imagine the future of social networks
- Realex Payments announce deal with Boylesports
- Roomex.com Launch New Hotel Reservation Website!!!
- Daft.ie Releases iPad App
- Shop with PuddleDucks on their Facebook page
- One Site, Six Properties, One Thousand Euro up for grabs from Globrix.ie Irelands best property search engine
- New white paper - Generating Demand for High-Tech products
I applaud your effort organize social media for business clients and put some real purpose behind the effort. My clients are either resisting participation in blogs and other Web 2.0 strategies or, they are simply seeing it as a way to gain optimum search engine rankings overnight. My blogging efforts on the topic are minimal since my specialty is local web site marketing, I find it very interesting that the issues we see in web search engine optimization locally are echoed on national and international levels. Keep up the good work.
Scott
[...] blog report of the first meeting of the Social Media WG is available on the IIA [...]
Sorry to miss the meeting! This is a crazy time for us as we’re getting all the last bits and pieces ready for our busy season. Hope to be more involved soon.
Congrats Brendan – good start and great membership for your group.
keith
@ Scott – thanks! I’m very interested to see that the issues that crop up in Ireland have resonances in other locales. Keep reading this blog and you’ll be able to keep up to speed on our progress.
@ Kieran – we’ll forgive you if you bring ice cream to the next meeting. Good luck with the season, everyone is hoping it’ll be a bumper one because that means more sunshine for everyone.
@Keith Shirley – thanks for battling the elements and traffic last week and for the great write-up on your blog. I agree with you about the “fear” factor and have written about it on my personal blog now and then. However I think as more businesses adopt social media, the power held by bloggers of note will wain. Like traditional media there will always be those whose opinions are respected and indeed sought but they will retain their status through respect for their expertise, measured approach and opinions. I would also say “Feel the fear and do it anyway” to any business person considering beginning a blog. Even an hour a week will earn you a huge ROI.
@ keith bohanna – on behalf of Brendan – thanks for the support!
Roseanne
[...] do know from conversations I have had at the IIA Social Media Working Group and from many other conversations at conferences and with business leaders, along with my own [...]
[...] or email. Thanks for visiting – Damien.I think the IIA Social Media Working Group which has just been formed has come out just in the nick of time. “Social media” is the new hot thing (despite [...]
[...] “Web 3.0: Where Next for the Internet?” I’m just starting to get my head around what Web 2.0 means for me and others in business, but I reckoned that it would be no harm to keep an eye on what’s around the next [...]
[...] IIA Social Media Working Group has some deadlines coming up soon and I really want to make the most of the opportunity to [...]
[...] featured comment from Damien, Eoin and myself (in the context of my work with No Nonsense and the IIA Social Media Working Group). Photo owned by shashiBellamkonda [...]
[...] will see the IIA Social Media Working Group tease out the opportunities presented by social media for Irish businesses. We plan to launch our [...]
[...] will see the IIA Social Media Working Group tease out the opportunities presented by social media for Irish businesses. We plan to launch our [...]
[...] will see the IIA Social Media Working Group tease out the opportunities presented by social media for Irish businesses. We plan to launch our [...]
[...] been set. I’ve got 1 week to update the sections on SEO and publicising your blog for the IIA Blogging whitepaper. A major part of it will be from the comments people made on the draft copy that was made available [...]
[...] the afternoon of the first day the Social Media Working Group held three breakout sessions. Quite a bit of effort was spent in preparing for the breakout [...]