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.
“It’s the best damn marketing tool”
Thanks to IIA Member Oracle‘s Frank Bradley for bringing my attention to the following short video.
I’ve been blogging since 2003 (not here on my personal blog) and much of that blogging was, I presumed, never read by anyone. But every once in a while someone would mention my blog to me in conversation or I would receive a comment and it would all click into place and inspire me to keep going. As more people use social media tools and more of those tools help us broadcast our content (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed) and help us collect, sort, digest and engage with others’ content there will be less blogging in the dark. Some fear that there will be just less blogging and I understand this fear. However I think that a blog should be the backbone of your social media presence, allowing you to expand on the ideas that attract people to you (and your brand if you’re representing a business) in other social media. It also allows you to develop ideas and conversations in your own space.
However reading about Disqus, “a real time comment system”, makes me realise that services like this will give commenters just as much control and ownership of their content as the bloggers who inspired the comment. This acknowledges the importance of commenting and rightly so. It’s been a while since I used a comment management system. I tried one maybe two years ago and it was very clunky but I must give this a go again.
Anyway over to Seth and Tom!
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.
Bloggers do Congress
Many of the delegates at IIA Congress 2009 shared their impressions, notes and photos of the Congress and now I’d like to share them with you! Please leave a comment if I have missed your review, photos or other media about the event and I would be delighted to add it.
Krishna De shares some really evocative photos of both the Congress and the Net Visionary Awards - have a gander you may see yourself there! Speaking of which you might like to check out the “official” IIA shots on Pix.ie
Keith Shirley gives a very measured review of the two days and his feedback is appreciated. He was involved in our breakout sessions as a members of the Social Media Working Group and he also stepped up as a Social Media mentor on Day 2 so big thanks to him!
Conor Lynch includes a Qik interview with a participant of the Social Media Breakout Session in his review
Eoin Kennedy’s review includes some of the content from the Social Media Breakout Session which should help you with your Twitter strategy for starters.
Gita of Agile Technologies includes reviews of the 3 breakout sessions she attended and are well worth a look.
Fred from Channelship managed to interview two of the plenary speakers from the Congress and I’m including the vids below for you. You can hear the complete speeches from Colm Lyon, Realex Payments, Trey Harvin, dotMobi, Ronan Harris, Google and Colm Long, Facebook as MP3s on the IIA site.
Social Media Case Study – PaddypowerTrader.com Blogs
Continuing the Social Media Working Group’s series of case studies is Michelle Daly from Paddypower was the second of our two case studies at the launch of “Join the Conversation: A Guide to Blogging for Business” Please find her presentation below. Thanks to Brendan Hughes, FBD.ie and chair of the IIA Social Media Working Group for recording and preparing the slide show below.
Winning blog post(s)
Big thanks to Ann, Dorothy and Ivan who all entered our recent blogging competition. I thought their entries were all great: Ann’s had a lovely personal touch, Dorothy’s was creative and fun and Ivan’s was totally on message for his blog as well as sharing some great reasons with his readers about why they should come along to Congress.
In light of this and the fact there was only three entries AND because it’s Friday and I am feeling magnanimous I would like to give each of the entrants one ticket rather than award a pair to any one winner. It’s my compo and I’ll make up the rules as I go if I want to 
Congratulations and see the three of you next Thursday!
Social Media Case Study – Puddleducks on blogging
This week’s case study is the slideshow presented by Aedan Ryan at the launch of “Join the Conversation: The Guide to Blogging for Business” in April.
Thanks to Brendan Hughes, Chair of IIA Social Media Working Group and Technology Manager with FBD.ie for preparing the slideshow.
A short aside – Making an audio recording is a handy tactic if you would like to reuse your presentations on your company blog. You can easily attach a good quality digital voice recorder to a sound desk to record your voice. (I have an Olympus DS 30 with a Sony ECM-MS907 Mic) You can go even simpler and just record straight to your recorder. I noticed Alan O’Rourke of Spoiltchild using iTalk on his iPhone at an event recently – this app is free. If you are doing the presentation at an external event make sure you have the permission of the organisation for whom you are presenting before posting the presentation on your blog.
Wait til I tell you: win a pair of tickets to Congress 09
I know many of you have attended far more IIA Congresses than I have. In fact you could probably describe it better than I ever could.
So I thought, “Hey why not share those descriptions with a wider audience?” Tell us in a blog post about your experiences at a previous Congress and link back to this post (so I know about your post and can read it!) We will award a pair of tickets for the two day event to the best blog post on this topic.
Your post can be about benefits you or your company got from attending a previous Congress, interesting/ inspiring people you met at Congress, something funny that happened on the way to, from or at Congress, photographs (with HIlar-i-ous captions of course ), video, audio, or video mash-up indeed. Whatever you fancy!
The competition is open until May 13th and the winner will be announced on May 15th.
I also have another competition coming up tomorrow that might be more to your taste so please stay tuned (or better still subscribe to the blog feed.)
Villa81 join the conversation
Thanks to Emmet Ryan of Villa81 who made this video which sums up the launch yesterday of “Join the Conversation: The Guide to Blogging for Business“.
Business Blogging in Ireland – Survey Results
At the start of 2009 we undertook a survey among Irish businesses that already have blogs. We asked them a number of questions to try and understand the objectives of their blogging activities, what results they were seeing and how much time and effort they put into managing their blogs.
We will be discussing the results in detail at the Business Blogging breakfast briefing on April 22nd, but in the meantime here are the high-level survey results:
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