How many times do we go to events and simply hope for the best? Well, maybe this is a great opportunity to reinvent yourself, investing a good few minutes in something that will maximise your event experience and will bring you home happier at the end of the day.

Below, I’ve made a very short video displaying a few easy steps to strategically connect with professionals before any event.   I featured the Dublin Web Summit so if you’re going there tomorrow, leave a comment below, suggest other tips  and/or connect with me on LinkedIn before we meet

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Best,

Fred

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How can your business be more remarkable and memorable to      your existing and potential customers? BIG question, huh?

We believe that one of the best ways to start unravelling this question is with a simple approach: (Visualise) Write down the type of business you’re in, its characteristics and also each one of the activities that you do everyday. Now, because you do them everyday and exactly the same way, you took for granted that there is where the opportunity lies!

But don’t worry, this time you don’t have to come up with ideas. We will do it for you, using online tools and social networks! Here’s how it works:

• Step 1: Leave a comment below  with your name, company, website and social media presence (if any).
• Step 2: We will select FIVE companies
• Step 3: The Channelship team will brainstorm some cool ideas to make your business different and remarkable.
• Step 4: Within the next few days we will deliver a specific video-answer for each one of the companies selected.

…and since we will squeeze our brains for you, we would be delighted to see your company take action.  Fair enough?

Go on, leave your comment below!! (Submissions finish at 6PM (GMT) on Tuesday, June 22nd)

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*UPDATE* 30/06/10

Hi everyone.
Thank you so much for all your submissions. We’re working on the selection of companies and in the next few days, we’ll start delivering the video answers so stand by!

*UPDATE* 05/07/10

First video-answer goes to Make Your Own. Check it out here!

Best,

Fred

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Yesterday, we were at the Nokia Store in Dublin for the “Nokia’s Apps For Ireland” competition.
It encouraged ordinary people to come forward with simple ideas for applications for Nokia mobile phones, generated a huge amount of creativity along with an extensive number of App ideas. The judging panel chose the overall winner of each category from a selection of App ideas that were voted for each week throughout the competition. Included on the judging panel were Today FM DJ and blogger, Ray Foley, fashion blogger Laura Whiston from whisty.wordpress.com, Internet entrepreneur Pat Phelan and Shane McAllister from Mobanode who will develop the apps for Nokia.

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The winners were Hilary Weldon, Alan Duncan and 17 year old student, Lorcan O’ Mahoney. The competition, which attracted over 1,000 applications across three categories: sports, lifestyle and general, ran for eight weeks on Nokia’s Facebook page and prompted over 4,500 votes by the viewing public.

The winning entries, which each collect a dream prize worth €3000, include a Cycling App in the Sports category, an App to help determine colour in the Lifestyle category and an App to help households and businesses with financial management in the General category.

Finally, have a look at this cool video that Nokia prepared for the launch of their “Pop-Up” store:

Best,

Fred

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Hi all

As part of the ongoing series of events with the Social Media Working Group, the Irish Internet Association are holding an afternoon seminar giving the behind the scenes of digital video & audio content and examining how to maximise its impact.

The subject: “Audio Video Culture: Behind the Scenes of audio and video content online”

The event is on Thursday, April 22nd, 1:30PM at the Clarion Hotel IFSC with fantastic speakers from: Rabo Direct, YouTube, RTE, Mayson & Hayes and us, Channelship

Remember to use the special promo code “SocialApril” to get a 20% OFF your ticket!

Click HERE to reserve your spot!

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Best,

Fred

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Loving this campaign guys!

Short story: First, I got an email invitation. A few days later received this printed one in the post…

Later on, I discovered a Twitter hashtag for this event: #livead

Want to know what happened?

@young_kubrick is a character created by the Bord Gais team for their Big Switch campaign. It was a very fun night with loads of people in the room shooting out pictures and making videos of a live commercial that @young_kubrick and his family acted live for us.

Check out the famous commercial (captured from my angle. Loads of others are available)

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And here are the pics!!

Here’s what people said. Click on the image to pull the full stream of conversations:

This was a very interesting and creative  idea for a social media campaign that has just started. There still a lot more to come…

Best,

Fred

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As you all know, we’re co-founders of Bloggertone.com. We have teamed up with the business bookmarking website, Bizsugar to run a cool blogging contest!

The combination of both sites’  names explains why this is a “Sweet Business Blogging Contest”. The idea is to give your articles extra online visibility, reward your social networking and an opportunity for you to win prizes to help you promote your business.

• It’s free to enter
• Anyone can join the competition including current Bloggertoners and BizSugar members!
• You’ll have lots of chances to win
• Prizes total USD 6,921

How You Can Win These Prizes

#1 Do you write business articles?

All you have to do is submit a business article to Bloggertone Between Monday March 15th and Wednesday March 17th – but there are a few guidelines you need to follow.

All votes will take place on BizSugar, the social bookmarking site for businesses.
#2 Do you like to read business articles?

You can also win prizes by simply voting and commenting on the Sugartone articles posted on BizSugar.com

Click on the banner below to learn more!

Last night we were at the Weedle offices for a very much awaited sneak preview. The beta service goes out today and is quite promising.

What does it do? It allows you to find the right individuals for the right task (not necessarily job) in the right place,  anywhere in the world and to be found as an individual by other people.

You’ll think, LinkedIn right? Well, apparently that’s not the case. While you need to create a profile as with any other platform, the difference relies in a series of factors based on semantic technology, Weedle’s own algorithm, and a very particular way to handle user’s ratings so as to avoid biased/fraudulent little stars

Paraphrasing a little bit here: LinkedIn is more of a white-collar platform while Weedle aims to present you with the right result = the right person.

All this is based around the idea of you finding out the best possible person according to what your contacts have done/recommended in the past, with an element of “no nonsense” in recommendations, backed up by technology.

We were a small group last night and very interesting questions came up regarding content creation, user adoption, even monetization. I would say the main challenge Weedle faces is the adoption and usage of the platform (the “yet another network” problem). However the team has some cool ideas in place to overcome that.

Once this is overcome, I see a lot of potential in the platform in the form of partnerships.

Did I say that all the profiles at Weedle will be indexed by search engines?

I couldn’t stop thinking last night that if the technology is as good as the demo suggests, in time, there is potential for running a search on different services and getting individuals highlighted as “Weedled”, immediately generating trust (think Google, Twitter search, Facebook, even upcoming players in Asia, or Orkut in Brazil). Fred here at the blog was discussing the importance of being found rather than hunt nowadays and Weedle promises to help out with this

Here are a few pics of the event and a little video explanation. In order to try Weedle, grab your Beta here: www.weedle.com

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Best,
Facundo

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Last Thursday, January 21st, we successfully launched our first free monthly webinar. We believe it’s a great way to share and reach out to our audience and will continue to explore this method throughout the year.
We had a brainstorming session a few months ago about how could we share more value through a different channel than the blog or social networks, and the idea of the webinars came up.  It takes a good few days of preparation to deliver 1 webinar hour per month, but we’ll try to be consistent and bring you topics of interest, LIVE!

The first one was : “How to build your business network with social media” and as promised, we compiled all the relevant info below:

• Full recording of the webinar
• The slides
• The conversation thread under the Twitter tag #sm4biz
• Some questions…

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The slides are already available on our Slideshare account!

My Power Point slides also contributed to the Twitter conversation
Have a look at what was said during the webinar by clicking on the image below:

Thanks very much to everyone that helped us spread the word in the different social networks.
We’re looking forward to have you on our next free monthly webinar:  “Social Media for Sales & Marketing Departments“.

Got questions or comments? Add them to the thread below!

Last Wednesday, the Measurement Camp Dublin organised by Simply Zesty was back. It was a smaller group than the first time but we had a great time and learned a lot from each other.
After the presentation from Philip Macartney (Bebo) and Matha Rotter (Microsoft) we went straight into three case studies. We picked the last one and the problem to solve was the following:

“A client of yours has a bad reputation online (through forums, blogs etc…) from a revolutionary new music device they developed that is guaranteed to help to send you to sleep. The device – the iNod, is very difficult to use and people have been complaining it goes off at full volume in the middle of the night.
To help combat the problem, the company has released a set of easy-to-use instructional videos that they’d like to distribute online.

How would you measure the success of these videos and what else would your campaign involve? How will you measure the success of the campaign and whether you’ve turned opinion from a negative into a positive?”

The strategy that Dena, Frank, Eoin and I put together, included both: an OFFLINE and an ONLINE front.
With strategies, there’s nothing written in stone so it would be great to get your input to  improve the below plan of action. (Thanks again Dena for taking notes!!!)

Offline solution

POS (Point of Sale)

• Video boxes in key retailers constantly playing the video tutorials.
• Reps’ assistance to demonstrate the usability of the product and ensure immediate feedback.

Hotline

• Dedicated care-line to handle customers’ complaints. We would direct them to the relevant URL of the video tutorial.
• Collate feedback – post viewing of the video too. To find out what customers thought and if the material was useful or how could it be improved.

PR/Blogger event

• Explain that we’ve made a mistake with the user instructions and because we’ve listened to the feedback, we’ve made some instructional videos
• Launch the new videos.
• Key journos – both tech & non-tech specific
• Include some of the more vocal/influential bloggers – be very specific that we’re not trying to “buy” or “fix” their opinion, more that we want to include them because we value their opinion (positive or negative)

Press release

• Non-digital & digital version
• Digital version to have embedded videos/link & feedback option

Online solution

Forums/Blogs/Twitter/Facebook

• Already tracking them clearly – continue to do this & monitor what’s being said
• Engage commenters in all forums – acknowledge feedback, answer queries, explain launch of videos and share the link!
• Ensure all comments come from one “person” or character for synergy
• Direct users to video URL or embed the videos  where possible

Product Homepage

• Videos front & centre so that they can’t be missed. There would be a clear space to make comments and a “share this” button.
• SEO campaign to ensure that the iNod site is always top of lists for specific search results (postive and negative keywords)
• Videos should include a call-to-action to compel viewers to give feedback
• Poll Daddy poll?
• Useful versus not useful?
• Rate this?
• Email campaign – make use of existing database (Acknowledge the issue & offer help & advice)

Good post? come on, share your comments below! We’d love to hear your thoughts about this campaign!

Best,

Fred

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Hey there,

Just back from Bizcamp, a fantastic event ran for the second time (venue was the Guinness Storehouse here in Dublin).

So here comes what I learnt (or at least remember right now) from the different talks.

On funding (talk by Gerard Brandon):

Investors don’t care if your idea is the best in the world, they simply want to know what’s in it for them. Tough one and usual one, but still worth keeping in mind.

Preparation is key and you have to be ready for every single answer.

If you don’t have a team don’t even bother showing up to pitch. Investors can’t rely on a one-man-band, because if you die, their investment is in danger!

Here’s some stuff I never thought of:

Accountants and lawyers can prove to be very good investors due to their contacts. This is a great reminder, since in the current times these two proffessions may be a little bit low in workload, so are likely to partner up with the promise of future earnings.

Investors want to know 3 main things: What’s in it for them? How much could they lose? And, above all: Who are you?

If you have no convincing background buy yourself one by partnering up with an expert (but make that person non-executive!)

There’s no such thing as 2 minute elevator pitches in Ireland because buildings are not that high!

On making mistakes as a start-up (talk by Steve Gotz):

CFIMITYM (Cash-flow is more important than your mother)

In front of people, storytelling is more important than any plan, no matter how well presented.

Regarding Online business models (talk by Caelen King) :

There are three main questions to answer:

Who will pay?

How much will they pay?

How will they pay?

The CFIMITYM rule applies to online as well, so watch out.

Advertising (selling advertising) in your site/ web application is far from exhausted, you just need to do it the right way.

There are 5 main business models online and 7 ways in which those models can make money (not all ways apply to all models). See the Caelen’s slides below and pay special attention to slide number 11:

On service design (talk by Justin Knetch):

Understand the meaning of waht you provide. People do not want a specific drill, they want to hang a picture on the wall. Technology is just an enabler.

Check out Justin’s blog with a clear example of great service design
Ok folks, that will probably do for a Saturday evening post.

So what do you think? Help us improve this social media SWOT by leaving a comment below and sharing the post.

Later,
Facundo

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