Make email better
This month’s Digital Digest went out this week. It’s just under a year now since we’ve been using the Newsweaver system and we are really happy with it. It was especially useful while we were organising Congress as we had different groups involved in different ways: speakers, shortlistees, demonstrators and, of course, delegates. It really helped smooth some of the processes of communicating important information about Congress.
So it is with dismay that I read in my Campaign Monitor ezine (and about 2 seconds later in an email from IIA Member Pixel Design – thank you very much!) that Microsoft are planning to go ahead with their plan to use “the crippled Word rendering engine to display HTML emails in Outlook 2010″ as Campaign Monitor and The Email Standards Project put it.
I think Microsoft are doing lots of great things and I love and use some of their products regularly and happily. But I also love my ezines. I’ve been writing ezines for about eight years now and trying to keep up to speed on what works and what doesn’t in email. I know that many of the beautiful email newsletters that we see today came about from painstaking developing and care for cross platform/ browser/ email client compatibility. Email marketing can be really effective but it has to be able to relate visually to everything else a company produces online. It must reinforce that relationship so that even if a subscriber signed up on your site a week, a month or more previously, they will instantly recognise your brand and style in their inbox no matter what email client they use. You can read another interesting perspective on this issue on Long Zheng’s Blog who points out that while Outlook 2010 may have problems there are other email clients that are equally questionable when it comes to HTML rendering. If you do any sort of communication with your clients via email you should care about this issue and if you use Twitter you should add your voice to the campaign at fixoutlook.org
And if you aren’t emailing your clients em… right. I don’t know what to say to you. Try this for starters maybe?
UPDATE: 29/06/2009 (Thanks to @denisecox) Microsoft respond to the FixOutlook.org Campaign and the Email Standards Project respond.
WCAG 2.0 Event roundup
If you didn’t manage to make it to the event organised by the IIA User Experience Working Group on Tuesday never fear! Help is here!
After attending the event, Aoife Ní Chionnaith of Clickstream wrote a great post on their blog which basically pulls together what she considers the most important points that the speakers made on the day. She also includes plenty of links to where you can find more information.
Also you can access the presentations (or decks as I hear all the cool kids are calling them these days 
) in the IIA Resources section. These are currently openly available but will be available only to members next week.
If you also attended this event and blogged about it please let me know (leave a comment) or if you don’t have a blog but would like to write a post for this blog, please do – we LOVE guest bloggers
Gonna be some changes around here
UPDATE 17.21 24/06/2009: Most of you should be seeing the IIA site again. However if you are not seeing content that you would expect to see, or you are having issues logging in or you are not seeing the site could you please let me know? Either IM me using the Meebo widget on the right, email me at members at iia dot ie or ring 01 5424154. Thanks!
UPDATE 13.03 24/06/2009: The main IIA Site may not be visible briefly as its new location propagates (i.e. as your server learns where our new server is when you type iia.ie into your browser). This is very unfortunate as we sent the Digital Digest today and we know some people can’t access further information. Again we are sorry for any inconvenience and would be much obliged if you could be patient. The site will reappear shortly.
UPDATE 11.45am, 24/06/2009: We are experiencing some small issues with logging into the main IIA website. We are working to resolve it and will let you know as soon as it has been sorted. This affects only members. Sorry for any inconvenience caused.
We are moving the IIA website (bar this blog) to a new server this afternoon. This might mean some service interruption on the main IIA site (www.iia.ie) between 4pm and 7pm GMT today. That means if you are a member and you are planning to post some info to the site please do it now or after 7pm. Even if the site is visible and available please do NOT post info between 4pm and 7pm. Thanks!
Basically we are moving the site to new server which should result in a zippier experience for everyone. While we have tested the site on the new server if you do notice anything unusual PLEASE let me know by emailing members @ iia dot ie. Thanks!
I Survived the Digital Marketing Institute’s Online Marketing Course
This is a guest blog post contributed by Rita Tobin of IIA Member Company t2 who are based in Carlow. Rita recently completed the Online Marketing Course with the Digital Marketing Institute. IIA members were offered a great discount on this course when it launched so I’m very happy to hear that Rita had, overall, a good experience. Over to Rita.
I recently concluded the 12 week Online Marketing Course being run by the newly formed Digital Marketing Institute. In their own words
“This Online Marketing Training course, created and delivered by the Digital Marketing Institute, is the only course of it’s kind that has been created FOR the digital marketing community BY the digital marketing community.”
Generally whenever people use the words FOR and BY to describe something I immediately think of every shoddy short film I’ve ever seen that has been made BY young people FOR young people. However on this occasion they are spot on. It has been created by the digital marketing community for the digital marketing community.
The course is taught by industry professionals, many of whom are minor celebs, in the world of SEO and online marketing, in Ireland. The students on the course were predominantly from marketing backgrounds but work for a diverse range of companies and organisations from
I sat this course for three reasons
- Everything I had learned to date re SEO and online marketing was self taught and I wanted to know that what I had learned was accurate and was information I could trust.
- Here at t2 we wanted to improve the services we offer to our clients.
- I wanted to create a role for myself within t2 as an online marketer.
Upon completion I was very happy with myself. I learned loads. Admittedly there were parts of the course that were not particularly relevant to me e.g. affiliate marketing and display advertising but I do still feel it is important to understand how they work.
Did I mention I loved it?
I loved it.
It was a great opportunity to pick the brains of experts like Martin Murray and Anthony Quigley. I found the modules relating to SEO, adwords, analytics, interactive design and email marketing hugely informative and relevant. I have incorporated many facets from these modules into our daily business practices. Shenda Loughnane also gave a very practical lecture on display advertising. Unfortunately I missed Krishna De’s lectures on social media marketing but by all accounts it went very well.
There were a couple of modules along the way that did feel a bit like a sales pitch but I guess that is only to be expected due to the fact that it is being presented BY industry professionals FOR a group of people that want to promote their business or organisation online.
In general all the lecturers were great. The only major quibble I had was one announced one night that he doesn’t bother with his own online presence at all as the quality of sales leads that come in from his own website are poor. I felt in that throwaway statement he had, in essence, undermined the whole point of the course!
There was a bit of a kerfuffle over the assessment. Initially it was meant to be a presentation and a written assessment, then we were given a choice over whether we wanted to do the presentation or not and finally we were told there would be no presentation. It was a bit on the messy side but it was the first time the course had been rolled out and I am a forgiving soul.
All in all I highly recommend it and wish all the guys at the DMI the best of luck with rolling out the course in Cork and Belfast. See the Digital Marketing Institute for more details.
Rita Tobin
Rita really took a lot of her learnings on board and she created for t2′s blog the following video with Anthony Quigley which explains why Search Engine Optimisation and blogging are best buddies.
Fancy your own Facebook vanity URL?
UPDATE: From today (29 June 2009) Facebook pages with 100 fans or more can get their own vanity URL. We need a lot of help so please fan us up on Facebook today
Eoin Kennedy, IIA Vice-chair and Social Media Working Group (SMWG) worker has a great post on his blog about the key activities a company should focus on when setting themselves up on Facebook. This is a checklist that was developed by Matt Matheson of Thinkhouse (and fellow SMWG member) for the SMWG’s recent breakout session at IIA Congress 09. It is well worth checking it out, if only to satisfy yourself that you are doing a few things right.
A new addition to this list could of course be a Facebook vanity URL. A vanity URL is best explained as follows: www.facebook.com/yournameorcompanynamehere. These went live on Saturday and there was a land grab with no small amount of controversy in Ireland anyway. I managed to get my second choice for my personal Facebook page although my name does not seem to be associated with anyone else. I don’t care too much about my own personal brand but I do care about the IIA. The IIA are a real latecomer to the Facebook party and recent changes to how a company can represent themselves and use Facebook have tempted us to get involved. (Oh yes and of course a small matter of a keynote speaker but we didn’t want to seem TOO reactionary!) We also haven’t promoted our Facebook page much yet.
Photo right owned by jasonlam (cc) However I was a little ticked off that we couldn’t secure a vanity url for our Facebook page because we don’t have a 1000 fans! A quick gander at some of our members who have Facebook pages for a LOT longer allows me to feel that my irritation is justified. The Institute of Designers in Ireland, a member organisation too, has a very healthy 260 members at time of writing. Blacknight have 189 fans, the Flowers Made Easy Group has 184 members: I could go on. My point being that not many of these Irish companies groups or pages have 500 fans or members never mind 1000! (Okay so Barry’s Tea have over 3,000 but who doesn’t love a nice cuppa?) How are we going to ensure that we get our vanity URLs, people? The IIA is up against the Iraqi Interim Authority and the Indian Internet Alliance here and some others besides!
So in the vain hope that the powers that be in Facebook might read my humble wee blog post please reconsider and drop the required number of fans to a more realistic 250 fans, even just for Irish online businesses. Otherwise who’s going to pay for all those social ads…?
If you are an Irish company with a Facebook page join the IIA on Facebook and tell us all about what you are doing on Facebook. We LOVE social media case studies
Of course I’ve just realised what I have to do next: set up a protest group on Facebook – Give Irish businesses vanity urls too or some such.
Mycharity.ie Social Media Case Study
This week’s Social Media Case Study is written by Niall Devine of MyCharity.ie. He is also a member of the IIA Social Media Working Group. In his case study he writes about some of the social media they have used and the decisions they made about how they would implement and what they learned from those decisions. He writes also about how recent change to a popular platform (Facebook) made some aspects of their social media forays difficult but happily not impossible for MyCharity.ie.
Background – what do we do.
Mycharity.ie provides online fundraising services to charities. We will enable and process more than €2.5M euro worth of charity donations to our 250+ charity customers. It is key to our business that our customer base (the charities) know that we exist and what we do. It is also key that the charities “customers” i.e. fundraisers and donors know that that we exist and what we do.
Viral Marketing – it is essential for us – how do we make it work?
We are very lucky in the way that our business works. Through email, it virally markets itself. If someone creates a fundraising page (sponsorship card) on the mycharity.ie site for a charity, they then email all their friends with the link to the fundraising page looking for sponsorship. All their friends now know about the site and what it does. Multiply 5,000 fundraisers a year x say 50 friends per fundraiser and you can see the 250,000 people viral marketing affect.
Viral Marketing – using social media
While we count ourselves as very lucky in the way that our business works from a viral marketing point of view using email, we recognise the huge contribution that social media can make.
Video
As we all know search engines and their ranking mechanisms like video. So mycharity.ie commissioned a video from Media Concepts Ltd (a video production company) and placed it front and centre on our home page www.mycharity.ie. The text about our video says “Click here to see a short promotional video about who we are and what we do, and what our customers say about us.” It does exactly what is says on the tin and saves us having to answer the phone all the time to explain what we do saving on office admin overhead. It works very well for us as an SEO ranking tool. It cost us approx €2,000 and was well worth the investment. We can’t quantify exactly in figures what is has done for the business, many of our current customers tell us they watched it and were impressed. It all helps with getting new customers on board.
Blogs
Search engines also like blogs because they create new content all the time (if maintained) and if the information is interesting and relevant it will create lots of inbound links to your site. Let’s not forget that people also like new content that is interesting to them and relevant. The search engines are just set up to reflect what people like.
So mycharity.ie has implemented WordPress Multi User on the mycharity.ie site. We have yet to upgrade the live site with it but it is coming soon. We can’t speak of what has actually happened yet, but we can tell you what we anticipate will happen.
We are giving ourselves our own blog, and we are giving all our charities their own blog for free. We will put our latest daily news, musings, funny stories etc on the blog and if people like it they will tune in. We will also use it to garner our customers thoughts and opinions on various questions that we may have, such as what services would you like to see next on the site etc.
We are also giving all our customer charities their own blog to do exactly the same as described above. But the key for us is that ALL the blogs are hosted on our site. All the inbound links and all the new and updates information will be found on our site, and hence our search and ranking, and the traffic to our site increases. It’s important to point out that we are not “stealing” traffic from our customers sites. They are of course free to implement their own blogs on their own sites. But by us doing it for them (for free remember) we get the benefit of the traffic and increased search engine ranking.
Social Networking Sites
These are very powerful if you can make them work for you, and we are doing our best to make them work for us. Lets explain what we have already done and how we did it, and then explain what new stuff we are doing now and why.
Old Facebook – Facebook changed in terms of its look and feel in October of last year (2008). Unfortunately we started to build a facebook application for the mycharity.ie site in September 2008. We ended up chasing a moving target. The application was designed to allow users of the mycharity site to post a mini version of their fundraising page to their facebook profile. The idea being their friends could see it and donate to it. We chased the ever moving facebook and eventually got there. We used a designer for cost purposes based abroad. We got the application built for approx €1,200, and it did what we asked for. However the language barrier and time zone difference proved frustrating much of the time and we had to put in many more hours into the project than we wanted to. Also their knowledge of the abilities of Facebook as a site wasn’t brilliant so we had to tell them what we wanted rather than them telling us what we could, should or might do. We soft launched the application to the charities on the mycharity.ie. It’s free at the moment because it’s not viral enough as far as we are concerned (more on that in a bit). It’s actually the users (the public) that are asking for the FB functionality to be switched on for a given charity rather than the charity themselves. The requester recognises the benefit to them to their fundraising efforts.
New Facebook – This is where it’s at. Now that FB have more or less finished messing about with their site we have a non moving target to hit. Always helps! We have engaged an Irish company to develop further FB functionality for us. No language barrier, no time zone issues, and they know so much about what FB does and is capable of, that they are able to suggest to us what we should and can do. It’s in development at the moment. We hope the new application will be far more viral. At the end of each process on the mycharity.ie site (sponsor a friend, donate to a charity, create a fundraising page) the user will have the option to “share” what they have just done on the mycharity site with their friends on facebook (and Bebo, Twitter etc). “Sharing” might be a message on the users Wall saying “I have just donated €20 to Jane Smiths Women’s Mini Marathon Fundraising page in aid of the ABC Charity”. The message is posted to the users Wall on Facebook for all their friends to see, and hopefully follow suit and donate. Many FB users would have 200+ friends in FB. So once again the viral affect of promoting mycharity.ie, the charity and the fundraiser is huge.
The cost of getting the development done is Ireland is higher but the expertise, if you find the right company, is well worth the extra cost. They will also be able to tell you if your business / business model is likely to benefit from this kind of marketing…or not as the case may be.
In summary
So mycharity.ie uses email, video, blogs, and social networking sites to good effect to promote itself. We will in the future bring the ability for users to post pictures and or videos to their fundraising pages using www.flickr.com and www.youtube.com . There are other aspects of social media such as podcasting that we may yet use. Imagine you got an email or a message on FB from a friend with an audio file of their verbal request for your donation to their fundraising effort. Personal, fun and very different. Might just get you over the line to make a donation. Our strategy is to look at everything to see if we can make it work for us. You should too!
Bing bong: new search engine comes a-knocking
No doubt many of you heard on Morning Ireland that Microsoft have a launched a new search engine called Bing. You may even have seen the chair of our Online Marketing Working Group talking about it on the RTÉ News. While Microsoft are touting it as a “decision engine” (as in “It’s time to Bing & Decide”) which will give you the right answer and not more confusion, others are wondering whether it will be a Google-killer.Whatever else their big bucks marketing and PR campaign which rarely goes unmentioned in posts and online articles seems to be working: if you’re on Morning Ireland, you’re mainstream!
Now while I’ve been fluting around with it and the other new kid on the block, Wolfram Alpha, only a tiny little bit I wonder how they will manage to break the ubiquity of the Big G. We’ve been busy here in the IIA over the last month with Congress and the Net Visionary Awards and when I did have the urge/ time/ need to search, trying out the search in a new engine was not top of my priorities. Add to this that Google is in my face every time I get a Google alert, check my mail or my feeds etc. etc. And I’ve got the Firefox toolbar and it’s my default search engine in my browser. It’s amazing I even heard about any new search engine!
In the article linked above about whether or not Bing will be a Google-killer, the author, Jordan Golson, makes the very valid point that it’s not neccessarily that there is anything wrong with any given search engine but that searchers do not know how to search to get the results they want or the right results. I can avow to this when I think of the numerous phone calls I receive in relation to certain member companies. I inwardly grimace when I hear some member companies running an ad campaign on the radio knowing that I will be fielding calls from their potential customers. Obviously the IIA does not want to be getting your calls; we do not want to be appearing in search results for our members’ products or services. So if on the one hand the searcher knew a little bit more about how to get the results they want and what to do with the results when they get them that would improve search on any engine. However I do think that Bing’s preview will hopefully steer people in the right direction and away from our phone!
These developments in search highlight the fact that now that consumers have a new improved way to reach your site it becomes ever more important to develop your site as a searchable site. Search algorithms are constantly developed to make them more and more “human like” so that the most popular content among real humans (you and me, like) is served first for certain keywords. That’s not necessarily the most often changed content: the algorithms have become far smarter than that. How often do you change a blog post? An example? Do a search on Google for “dreech” Or ahem indeed bing it! I have never changed this content (I know what you’re thinking – maybe you should change it drastically and delete it!) but the IIA blog is still considered the most useful site for that keyword. This may be because anyone else writing about the word dreech doesn’t update their site all that regularly. But I’m no SEO expert so I would welcome any comments on the topic. I’m sure the boss will be delighted that we are coming up no. 1 for the word dreech….
You might like to check out some of these other articles about Bing too:
TechCrunch: Bing Versus Wolfram Alpha: A Tale Of Two Search Engine Launches
ReadWriteWeb: Microsoft’s Bing is Now Mobile, Too
Mashable: Bing: Microsoft Launching New Rival to Google? (Look at the retweets on that item!)
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