I popped into a great event last week run by Microsoft (for my own nefarious purposes – me and my telly obsession were interested in the home server/ media centre aspect)

Enda Flynn, who organised it, tells me they are livestreaming MIX 11 this Wednesday and it sounds like it could be at least as interesting and twice as much fun! If you are developing and are device agnostic I would totally recommend that you pop along to hear about the cool things that are being done with Microsoft devices and interfaces. Okay I’ll shut up now because I’m beginning to not know what I’m talking about. Over to Enda:

Microsoft, Developers, UX, Web, Pizza, Beer, Surface, Slates, Prizes.

MIX is a gathering of developers, designers, UX experts and business professionals creating the most innovative and profitable consumer sites on the web. The conference takes place in Las Vegas, but will be streamed live online http://live.visitmix.com. Join developer peers for Dublin’s MIX 11 live stream gathering, hosted in Microsoft’s Sandyford office.

Once the keynote concludes, you should have pizza and beer in your hands and you’ll be invited to put questions to the local development team, as well as getting up close and personal with some interesting touch devices – including a Microsoft Surface. [Me: this is sooooo cool!] Alternatively you can always network or play Kinect

There’ll be great prizes on offer for both in-person & virtual attendees. #MIX11IE is the hashtag to join Twitter conversation.

When: 4.30pm – 9pm, 12^th April 2011
Location: Microsoft Atrium Building (Building 3) auditorium, Sandyford Industrial Estate, Carmanhall Road, Dublin 18.

Register here

We are no shortage of all shades of busy here in IIA HQ and plan to keep it this way in 2011. Darren, who looks after our events & training, has just sold out the third intake of the IIA Diploma in Digital Marketing in association with Irish Times Training.

Meanwhile I’ve been having some great chats, catching up with members on the phone, reminding them to renew their membership for 2011 (I’m a bit of a stuck record on this every January!) and to tell them about our Meetball Networking event on January 26th 2011 at The Tower Bar, The Church, corner of Mary St/ Jervis St., Dublin 1.

This free business networking event is for IIA Members and non-members so if you’re not a member of the IIA it’s a perfect opportunity to come along and find out all about the association.

We already have a rake of registrations including our two new board members, David Kerr of Bonkers.ie and Jermain Williams of Dialogue. So come along and meet them, other board members and working group members too. Register for free online now.

We are using EventElephant, an IIA Member Company, for these registrations and so far I’m very impressed with this online event organisation service. Apart from the easy to use site, two offline aspects of this that I think are slick are

• the ability to download attendee badges for print and
• if you have a barcode scanner you can use this to register attendees; they even link to a number of recommended scanners.

A number of IIA members have also bravely volunteered to demo at Meetball:

Owjo.com

SagePay

The Digital Hub Development Agency

Mason Hayes + Curran Solicitors

There are two demo slots left so if you think your company could do with a boost or if you have a new service or product offering get in touch with me, Roseanne, at members@iia.ie or ring 01 5424154 or Skype me at clogher.

Or pop your question in the Meebo chat box on the right and I’ll IM you back – thanks!

Register online for Meetball and we’ll see you there!

It’s nearly 2011. If you haven’t renewed your company’s IIA membership for 2011 we really hope you will. In fact for your sake we really hope you do before 31st January 2011 because we are giving every company who renews before then 25% off one training event in 2011. You will also be included in a draw for a pair of tickets to the 2011 Annual Conference which will take place in May.

All of this applies to companies who join before the end of January too.

It’s not like you even needed this extra nudge with all the value and benefits that come with membership but we like to help you renew early so that we can concentrate on maximising that membership for you during the rest of the year.

Last week saw the announcement of this year’s eircom Spiders awards at a star studded event in Dublin’s Burlington Hotel. Okay there was one celeb, Alan Carr, but many stars of online but I’m biased! I couldn’t make it this year: I was meeting with some rising stars at a Fingal County Enterprise Board Networking Event and giving them the skinny on Twitter for Business.

I was delighted when I got home and checked through my twitstream to see that some IIA members were among the winners this year. Congratulations from all of us here in the IIA to:

Strata3 accept their award from Independent Trustee Company

• Pay Less Tax won the Best Financial Services Website Category sponsored by CMC Markets;
• Hostelworld won in both the Best e-business Website (sponsored by WebFactory) and in the iPhone App category (sponsored by Arekibo);
• EventElephant were joint winners with Hostelworld in the Best e-business Website category with HostelWorld;
• Strata3 went home with the Spider for Best Web Design & Development Agency sponsored by Independent Trustee Company.

Check out the complete listing of winners on the eircom Spiders website.

In a recent email to members we announced the date for this year’s AGM. It takes place on 17th November 2010 and all the details are in the Events sections of IIA.ie. Members are welcome to attend but must register. Myself, Joan, Darren and the Board (including two new board members!)  look forward to catching up with members there.

Please make your nominations for the IIA Board before FRIDAY 8th October

Nominations for the IIA Board are open but will close on Friday 8th October.

Members of the IIA are entitled to get involved in this process by either nominating or seconding an individual from a member company who they think would be a good addition to the IIA Board. As a member of this association participation  in this process is very important as it ensures that the IIA continues doing the work that the members feel is necessary to connect, inform and promote business online in Ireland.

You can read about the entire process of the IIA Board Elections by clicking here.

I will be reminding voting members to vote between Monday 18th October and Wednesday November 3rd.

Only the voting member in each member company will receive this reminder. You can find out who your voting member is by logging into the IIA site. Please do check this as your voting member may have moved on or have changed roles. Email me, Roseanne, at members@iia.ie if you require any changes to be made.

To nominate or second an individual or find out more please email board2010@iia.ie

Please feel free to contact me, Roseanne Smith, Membership Manager to discuss this or any aspect of your 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.

Join now!

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.

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.

Last year I delivered a special virtual hamper to all of our members. I said it would be annual so the time has come again to gather up all your goodies and share them with your fellow members. Your gift can be a discount on a product or service, an hour consultation, a free trial, whatever you would like – just use your imagination.

Send your special offer to members at iia dot ie before Friday 4th December at 5pm and I’ll wrap it up, shake some elve dust on it and send it on it’s merry way.

Thanks!