search engine optimisation
Mo gheansaí, do gheansaí, a gheansaí
Damien Mulley is running another innovative competition to find the best Search Engine Optimiser in Ireland. The competition has become known as the Geansaí Gorm Competition. (although I think it is being spelt “geansai gorm” without the accent. I’m sayin nuttin! :)) This phrase was chosen so as not to pollute the rankings of actual businesses because it was unlikely that there are many trying to sell geansaithe goirme online (bang goes the Spailpín Fánach’s line in blue jumpers…)
The competition runs until 3pm on December 1 2008 so if you are really good there is still time to get ranked in Google for geansai gorm. I’m really looking forward to seeing the resuls. I’ll be keen to see how much social media helps the winner or whether the purchasing of AdWords helped. I’ll keep you posted on the results.
Now I’m off to sell all the mentions above of geansai gorm to the contenders… 😉
Uncategorized
First National Computer Emergency Response Team launched
The first national Computer Emergency Response Team was launched yesterday, 10 November 2008. The CERT service will be run under the auspices of the Irish Reporting and Information Security Service (IRISS) www.iriss.ie.
The Irish Reporting and Information Security Service (IRISS) is a not for profit organisation staffed by a group of volunteers made up from the best information security professionals in the country providing the following services;
- Incident Reporting
IRISS provides clients with a resource whereby computer security incidents can be reported anonymously and in confidence. - Alerts and Warnings
IRISS provides advanced alerts and warnings on potential vulnerabilities and threats facing their information technology infrastructure. Where possible these alerts will be tailored specifically for the Irish audience and also to meet clients’ requirements such as non-technical alerts for owner managers of SMEs and more detailed technical alerts for IT specialists working for larger firms. - Conduct Research
Research and surveys will be conducted on information security matters within Ireland to get a better understanding as to what is happening in the Irish Internet community. This should provide meaningful statistics to help drive home some key messages to companies and raise security awareness levels using statistics pertinent to the Irish market. - Sanitised Attack Notifications
IRISS provides an alerting service to companies regarding attacks that are actively happening to other Irish companies so they can better prevent the same attack happening to them. - Provide Guidelines and Advice
IRISS will provide clients with information, advice and best practises on how to secure and manage the information technology platforms their businesses are dependant on. IRISS also supports a number of online forums where clients can raise issues and queries with our experts or others within our community.
You can sign up for the service at no cost at https://www.iriss.ie/FWA5EIRE/Resources/Signup.aspx.
Social Media Working Group
A very social (media) week
As Brendan Hughes mentioned in the previous post, the IIA Social Media Working Group welcomed input from Neville Hobson this week at an open meeting. I live tweeted some of the meeting but unfortunately the free wifi in the Digital Depot where we held the meeting broke down – bad timing or what! One of the things I love about live tweeting on a purely selfish level is that it gives me a chronological re-cap of the event that I am attending so excuse me if the following bounces about a bit.
We had asked Neville to join us to talk to us about his experience of the business case for Social Media. Neville provided some insight into how some of the larger corporations that he is working with are embracing customer engagement by using social media and discussed that what they might lose in control they gain in new and more engaged stakeholders and customers. Neville said that it’s a given that social media is going to disrupt and businesses will have to change the way they work but that understanding this change relates more to understanding societal behavioural change in general. This point is echoed in a book I recently finished that was lent to me by John Beck, the director of one of our member companies, PillarProjects. The book was called Good to Great by Jim Collins and examined how a number of companies achieved sustained greatness. It included the concept which Collins called the Hedgehog Concept which suggested (put extremely simply!) that the great companies that his team examined had a core concept for the companies from which they did not stray. If one agrees with this one might ask why would one change one’s approach to communications and customer relations? However, I believe that a company with a strong Hedgehog Concept will easily take on the added challenges and benefit from the opportunites that social media offers because of the very strength of their core concept. A great company which is made up of great people will easily be able to engage and involve all their customers in their work.
Another great practical aspect of the afternoon that we hope to use for future open meetings of the Social Media Working Group was the addition of OnlineMeetingRooms.com. This doubled the attendees at the event and we had seven from Clonmel, two from Kildare, and one each from Dublin Southside, South Tipperary County Council, Limerick, Greystones and Munich!
I posed a question which many of the people I meet and talk to on the phone ask me: how to make time to use social media, how to know what is a good use of that resource in relation to it. And here I am breaking my own rule writing this post at 7.44pm on a Friday evening. Sad or what!? Like many who make a living out of their knowledge of social media and have the time to blog every day, Neville didn’t really have a straight up and down answer for this except that the whole discussion answered that question. He talked about CEOs who blog in their own voices and the value they place on that and indeed the value which is placed on it. He talked about social media tools allow him to use his time more effectively and (gratifyingly for me as I am writing the chapter on RSS for the SMWG’s guide to Social Media) he said, “RSS is the best thing ever invented!”
To finish he was asked what kind of goals could be set in relation to social media for a business to which he replied that businesses shouldn’t get hung up on return on investment (ROI), the goals are softer than that but you could look at things like Technorati authority which is based on linking, set realistic comparisons with the ROI on other marketing, subscriptions to RSS feed, citations or links, tools like StatCounter or Google Analytics could be used, your own comments and comments on your blog etc. could be evaluated.
Regular readers of this blog might be thinking “Good Lord, Roseanne, please get off your Social Media Hobby Horse!” and obviously I have a certain bias as I’ve been blogging since 2003. But one point that Neville made, with which I agree heartily and I noticed there was a lot of head nodding in the room, was that currently we make a distinction between the web and social media; soon we will not make that distinction. All media, even traditional media, will be social, in the new sense, in the not too distant future. Anyone who thinks it is not social already doesn’t understand how people interact with information. Your business is being discussed online AND offline, make sure you are part of the conversation.
Thanks to all in the SMWG who came along and also to Campbell Scott, IGoPeople.com, Damien Mulley, Emily Tully, Eoin Kennedy, Slattery Communications, Eoin from Bord Gáis, and the students from Tipperary Institute, our online attendees and anyone who I’ve left out!
To finish off I’ll share this slideshow I found today with you. It gives the lowdown on social media in a no nonsense way. Please excuse the title: relax it’s Friday and apart from the expletives this is very well put!
(Found on MediaThink)
Edit: Brendan Hughes, chair of the Social Media Working Group, has written a series of blog posts encapsulating his thoughts that arose from the Open Meeting. You can start with Part 1: Context.
Also Eoin Kennedy has since written a post on his thoughts on the above open meeting. As he works in Slattery Communications Eoin focusses on the public relations and communications opportunities that exist in social media. He obliquely makes a good point that PR company are content generators.
Uncategorized
IIA chosen as a Network Partner in Microsoft’s Bizspark programme
On November 6th at an event in the Four Seasons in Dublin Microsoft launched an innovative new program that unites Startups with entrepreneurial and technology resources in a global community with a common goal of supporting and accelerating the success of a new generation of high-potential Startups.
The Irish Internet Association is delighted to have been chosen as one of the Network Partners in the Bizspark Program. As a Bizspark Network Partner we can help provide Startups fast access to valuable technology-based benefits. So if you are a member of the IIA and your company
- Is in the business of software development,
- Is privately held,
- Has been in business for less than 3 years, and
- Has less than US $1 million in annual revenue.*
you could be eligible for inclusion in this program. Interested? Contact Roseanne Smith, Membership Manager at members@iia.ie.
* Please visit the Microsoft Bizspark website to read all the terms and conditions of eligibilty.
Social Media Working Group, Guest Blogger
Social Media Collaboration
A guest post from Brendan Hughes of FBD.ie and chair of the IIA’s Social Media Working Group.The IIA’s social media working group has been up and running now for a few months. We each work in different organisations located in various parts of the country and the group was configured so that there would not only be social media experts, but also business professionals with relatively little knowledge or expertise to date. For many of us the group has provided a great opportunity to learn by doing since we decided from the outset that we would seek to use social media as much as possible to support our collaborative working. The following are some of the social media tools we have used to support our endeavours.
The online hub of our collaboration has been the online project management tool Basecamp from 37signals.com. I’ve seen companies use this to communicate their project timelines with clients but it comes into its own when you need to collaborate with a dispersed group. Each member of the working group can post messages for the entire group or to just a few. Members of the group can reply or comment, just like on a blog. There are whiteboards where ideas can be teased out. Everyone is kept up to date by email and all communications are tracked. It gives great transparency on everything we do.
We decided that we would initially write 4 white papers on particular aspects of social media that we felt would be of primary interest to the business community in Ireland. To support the task of up to 16 people working on a single document we set up a wiki. A wiki is essentially a tool that allows anyone to edit an online document and have their edits tracked. There is a complete audit trail of who does what and changes can be easily rolled back. Notifications, or “watchlists” can be set up so that whenever a change is made to a particular document you can receive an email. While we struggled with the first version of the wiki we used since it was not very intuitive to use, we have since moved onto a new version – SocialText – that meets our needs better.
Rather than dragging everyone into the Digital Hub in Dublin every time we needed to meet we agreed to hold Skype conference meetings when we needed to. As smaller groups this worked well but when I personally tried to organise a full group Skype meeting I managed to leave most of the group out of the conversation for 20 minutes or so. I had an older version of Skype installed than was necessary to host the full meeting. Thanks to Skype’s instant messaging facility I was alerted to the problem by the excluded members and was able to get someone else to host the meeting.
In between meetings we’ve all been keeping in touch and letting each other know about useful resources or activities via social network websites such as FriendFeed and Twitter. These have been really useful ways of providing information quickly. Many of us have our own blogs and we’ve been using these and the IIA blog to try and keep people outside the group up to date. The social networking tools have been great for us individually in creating links with interested people outside of the working group. It was great to go to the Podcamp event in Kilkenny and to meet most of the working group there, as well as many of the other people I’ve connected with online over the past while.
Our white papers are now coming close to publication. We intend to widen the circle of collaboration and with this in mind we plan to publish the documents (via the wiki) in draft format. We will then invite people to review and post comments directly to the wiki. We also intend to host a review session for each document, online of course, using the services offered by OnlineMeetingRooms.com. I’m personally very excited about this as it provides the opportunity to gather the expertise from practitioners and interested business professionals in a constructive and engaging manner.
We’re also planning to host an open meeting with social media expert Neville Hobson from the UK to discuss the business case for social media. Neville is coming to Ireland on November 5th and we’ve managed to secure a few hours out of his busy schedule. The meeting will be organised via the social media website upcoming.org, allowing anyone who’s interested in attending to register for free and see who else is attending. We’ll post more information on this later.
We certainly haven’t exhausted the range of online collaborative tools available out there, but what we have used to date has proved very useful for maintaining the momentum of activities of a diverse group of individuals. What’s more, we have done it all with minimal cost. Learning the new technologies is not without its sometimes humbling (and frustrating) moments, but thankfully there is never a shortage of knowledgeable people only too willing to help out.
As an footnote, I came across a interesting video-cast from BT on their BiggerThinking website talking about how companies can collaborate with customers, using social media technologies, to build better products. Well worth a few minutes of your time.