Net Visionary Awards 2008
Oh what a night! Winners grab your badges
The IIA and Enterprise Ireland Net Visionary awards are over for another year. Congratulations to all of those who went home with a bit of crystal tucked under their arm. Also a big congratulations to all of those shortlisted – you should be proud: you were nominated by your peers and the judges chose you as examplars in your field.
Many thanks to Peter Knight from Edenweb.ie for creating these badges and the shortlist badges too.
Winners please feel free to proudly display the following badges wherever you choose!
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Just the job
A big IIA welcome to Bariant Systems who develop and deliver Jobscan.ie. Jobscan is a job management and cost control system which streamlines the management of jobs from enquiries to delivery. I’d be really interested if it did the jobs as well 🙂 The Jobscan site explains more clearly for whom and for what the system is intended and promises to “allow you to effectively manage your business and gain the competitive edge. ” Not a bad offering in these times of cost cutting.
Guest Blogger, events
Dynamic conference feedback – without the gizmos
A guest post from Chris Byrne in Sensorpro about a new way to serve feedback surveys at conferences.
For the Irish Internet Association (IIA) Word of Mouse conference, we needed a slick way to get attendee feedback. As a survey vendor, it’s a simple task to deploy a survey with all the bells and whistles you would expect, like via email, popup, link, twitter post or embedded in a blog – but on this occasion we wanted something a little different. We wanted audience reaction in real-time without the expense and hassle of gizmos. So how about Bluetooth then? After all, many in the audience had a gizmo already – a Bluetooth enabled mobile phone (or cell phone, if you prefer!) Thanks to a snappy response from Shane at Mobanode we had our survey deployed on his Bluetooth box in minutes. As soon as we hit the “fire” button, the survey was deployed to 23 phones with just 1 rejection – not a shabby response rate! Roseanne from IIA was live twittering – so she had the twitter world peeking over her shoulder. Not only did this method garner dynamic feedback from the immediate audience – but also picked up twitter eavesdroppers with the browser link. If you want to try event feedback that is different, is relevant and a gizmo that actually works – then try this.
Edit 23.10.2008: Speaking of feedback, Aedan Ryan from Puddleducks.ie also attended the event in Limerick and wrote a review on his blog.
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Cadamedia remind us about increased VAT rates
Generally I try to keep things upbeat but there’s no getting away from that budget, is there? Cadamedia, a web design company based in Wexford and IIA member, have posted a timely reminder on their blog about how one aspect of this budget could seriously affect companies who aren’t quick off the mark. They remind their clients with online shops that the VAT rate has increased so changes will need to be made on their sites. All members who have online shops should ensure these changes are made as well.
And you may be wondering what brought Cadamedia to my attention? Their RSS feed is included in their profile in the IIA website. If you are a member you should add your RSS feed to your profile on the IIA extranet as well. If you need help mail me at members at iia dot ie.
Grabbing RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds and adding them to your RSS Reader from other sites of interest to you is a great way to keep up to date at a glance with what’s going on in your sector. If you don’t already use a reader try Google Reader or I know the latest versions of Outlook and Thunderbird have RSS readers too. (Please feel free to suggest others you like in the comments below.) If you write a business (or any other kind of) blog it will supply you with endless inspiration for blog posts and will allow you to join in the online conversations in the blogosphere with ease. Just like Cadamedia’s RSS feed did for me here!
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Poke, poke, in case you need reminding
I am fully aware that many people feel that they have been asked once too many for their vote in the 2008 IIA & Enterprise Ireland Net Visionary awards. However it would also be remiss of me not to remind those who might be new to this blog and the IIA that there is an opportunity for them to make a real difference in these awards by voting today or at the very latest tomorrow when voting closes at 6pm. Will one vote make a real difference? Some of the categories are very close so the answer is a big fat YES!
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If you are in Wexford tomorrow
Yesterday the IIA and Wexford County Enterprise Board ran a very successful event in White’s Hotel in Wexford town entitled New Online Media: Its Impact on Your Business. If you feel like you haven’t had enough of us and you are in the New Ross area tomorrow don’t miss Fergal O’Byrne, IIA CEO, speaking during the New Ross Spirit of Enterprise week in the Brandon House Hotel New Ross between 9am and 1pm. Fergal will be speaking about Growing your business online and other speakers include Blaise Brosnan, Tony Kerins, Ronan Brazil and Paula Ronan. As the New Ross Chamber’s description of the speakers tells us that Paula is a committee member of the New Ross Pantomime Society it should all be entertaining as well as a wealth of information about giving your business a boost. More information from info @ newrosschamber dot ie or ring 051-425077.
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In times of need
Considering the gloomiest budget ever was announced yesterday it’s nice to know that the people who know more about money than the rest of us are joining the Irish Internet Association. The IIA are delighted to welcome Baker Tilly Ryan Glennon into the association and sincerely hope they have some hot tips to share with the rest of us. If they do tell us to get on our bikes they are not being rude: as far as I can make out us cyclists seem to be the only people who will be getting money back from the Government. Barry Meehan, owner of Worldwidecycles.com will be happy today!
But I digress. To quote themselves, Baker Tilly Ryan Glennon have a lot to offer those in need of Accounting and Business Consultancy:
With substantial experience in both the public and private sectors, Baker Tilly Ryan Glennon offers a comprehensive range of Accounting and Business Consultancy services to our clients across the island of Ireland.
In all areas of the practice, we provide partner clients with pragmatic, expert led, personalised advice and insights that help them succeed, grow and prosper.
And they do indeed have some information about yesterday’s budget of course. You can download their perspective on it from their site as a PDF.
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In answer to your question #1
I get all sorts of queries by email and by phone from our members and I often think that, anonymised, they would make interesting reading for others. So as the first in a very occasional series I am publishing a reply I sent to a query from a member who asked me how best to promote his blog and his Twitter. Here’s my reply and I welcome any futher comments of course!
There are no hard and fast rules to getting your business blog noticed so here are a few tips to get you started from some experienced bloggers that I have heard recently at the various events I have been attending.
- Set up Google Alerts for the keywords that you are interested in. Include names of your staff, company and product names and names of your competitors. You may need to tweak this over time. The resulting alerts will keep you posted about what is going on in your particular sector and will allow you to monitor your brand. It will also give you great blogging content and show you which other bloggers are writing on the same subject and what they are saying.
- Comment on other people’s blogs but please do it in a helpful, non-sales manner. Krishna De suggests that you read the post entirely, decide whether you agree or disagree, if you agree add any further information that you might have, if you disagree explain why. Only add a link in the body of your comment if you have written on this subject yourself and if your link will add further to the discussion. Don’t forget you will be adding your URL in the URL field in the comment dialogue anyway so if anyone does like what you have to say they will find your blog that way.
- Set up Twitterfeed from all your RSS feeds to your Twitter www.twitterfeed.com
- Monitor what’s being said about you on Twitter at http://search.twitter.com – pick up a RSS feed for your queries and add it to your favourite reader. You can create a RSS feed for all the keywords that apply to your company
- Have a look at Friendfeed.com – not to everyone’s taste but if you are using a lot of social media it’s a way for people to see all you are doing in one place and of course they can grab an RSS feed that will encapsulate all your social media activity. You can also find other people and leave comments on all their social media activities there too. My personal Friendfeed is www.friendfeed.com/enormous and you will see that I am in a group about Social Media in Ireland and no doubt there are all sorts of other groups too.
- Always remember social media is all about conversations so be chatty! Ask questions, follow comment streams that you comment on and pop back in if you think clarification is needed or if you have more to add, don’t interrupt (i.e. leave comments that are a propos nothing at all) and be polite.
- Share anything you find interesting on your blog or in Twitter – it will always be new to someone. Most blogging platforms have a Blogthis link which you can add to your links bar. URL.ie have a toolbar shortcut which allows you to share a shortened link to whole suite of social sharing tools. And it’s made in Ireland 🙂
- If you are thinking of approaching bloggers about your own product or service PLEASE offer them a free trial/ subscription/ sample and be willing to take the good with the bad. In other words if you ask bloggers to review your product, just because you are giving them something for free doesn’t mean they will only write good things about it. Only consider doing this if you feel like the above approaches are getting you absolutely nowhere and only ask bloggers who have previously written on your sector i.e. don’t ask a mammy blogger to review your cool new app/ product/ service etc. unless it helps cut down on her laundry 🙂 (Bloggers please comment if you think more needs to be said on this topic because I know it’s a minefield and all input would be gratefully received.)
- And as I have done with this email reply, use all content you create as content for your blog in an appropriate fashion. And remember it doesn’t always have to be text: use audio, video, pictures to get your message across.
(Ideas robbed with thanks offa Deborah Hadley, and Sabrina Dent, both of whom I heard speaking at PodCampIreland. Also thanks to Krishna De who delivered two presentations for the IIA recently in Dublin and Limerick.)
Membership
Moving pictures speak two thousand words
One of the IIA member companies, Prosperity, recently ran an event featuring Martin Bailie from Glue in London. As a picture speaks a thousand words and a moving picture twice that I will allow their four and half minute video to tell you all about it.
Membership
Not a patch on Patchcom
A big IIA welcome to Patchcom Services who joined the IIA recently. Patchcom Services, established in 2002 provides IT Services to growing businesses throughout Ireland. Their experience spans a broad range of technologies with a focus on IT to support work and home life. I also had the pleasure of meeting the main man in Patchcom recently, Patrick O’Connor, at the last OpenCoffeeClub in the Digital Depot. It was clear from chatting to him and listening to him answering other OpenCoffeeClubbers’ questions about hardware and systems that he knows what he’s talking about. Also, interestingly and because I know my fellow countryfolk love the whole connections thing, Patrick has recently taken a city centre desk in the new co-working space set up in Dublin’s South William St. I have written about this before because one of our other members, Eamon Leonard of EchoLibre set up this space. It seems to me to be perfect synergy: all your technology needs in the one space!