Digital Marketing Institute

Today I was at a conference hosted by The Brain Food Store where there were some great speakers – check the Twitter hash tag for the conversations and insights shared by people at the conference – #bfs10.

As usual however, one of the great things about attending conferences is the opportunity to meet interesting people and one of the people I connected with today was Deirdre Waldon of Agency.com.

In our conversation I discovered that their agency had developed the iPhone App for the National Lottery in Ireland and I also learned that they had had a significant numbers of downloads of their first version of the Lottery.ie iPhone app without any advertising or significant launch programme.

So I invited Deirdre to share a few thoughts on my AudioBoo podcast series that I have been recording where I’ve been in conversation with people about their favourite iPhone apps. You can listen to the short interview where we cover:

- ideas for why you might consider an iPhone app for your business

- tips for leveraging the facilities of the iPhone when developing your app

- how the iPhone app for Lottery.ie is part of the 360 engagement plan and the mobile strategy for their business

- how they achieved the number of downloads without a main launch.

What ideas does this give you for developing your iPhone application for your business as part of your 360 marketing and communications programme?

If you haven’t listened to the rest of the series of podcasts I have recorded with people in my network sharing their favourite iPhone apps, you can do so HERE.

This last week there have been a a couple of notable business projects reaching out to connect with bloggers and using new media as part of an integrated campaign of 360 marketing that have caught my attention.

REVIEW OF YOUR COUNTRY YOUR CALL

‘Your Country Your Call’ is a new project and is a countrywide competition to identify and reward two proposals that, when implemented, they can help to secure job creation and a prosperous future for Ireland. There will be two competition winners and the winning proposers will each receive a cash prize of €100,000. Both winning proposals will then be implemented with the support of an independent working group and with a development fund of up to €500,000 for each project.

President Mary McAleese launched the programme on 17 February 2010 – opening up the Irish Times yesterday you would have seen an article and a full page spread to help build awareness of the programme.

From a social media perspective, the organising team reached out to a number of people who are active in the area of social media including Darragh Doyle, Brendan Hughes, Pat Phelan and myself for input ahead of the launch to share ideas and assist in gaining online visibility of the project – now that is forward thinking and I know that those of us invited to comment welcomed the opportunity to share ideas for the programme which has the potential to truly impact the future prosperity of Ireland.

Take a look at their website and you will find there is a link to a Facebook page, a Twitter Profile, a YouTube channel, a LinkedIn group and a Flickr channel. There is also a facility to share the content to social networks and to book mark content.

You will see on the YouTube channel a short video about the blogger outreach event that they held on the 15 February (unfortunately I was not able to attend).

The project team have allocated resources to supporting the social media channels and it is great to see that there is a real commitment to this channel for communications.

My three recommendations for the project in terms of helping their online visibility of their content online at the moment would be:

1. to have a more complete profile and more effective descriptions, titles and tags on their YouTube channel videos

2. adding a full profile, titles, descriptions and tags on their Flickr channel and allow some of the photo’s to be available to use under Creative Commons licence. That way bloggers who were not at their launch event can add images to their blog posts

3. adding a full description and a URL to their Twitter channel so people can find their web page about the programme easily.

You can read Brendan’s blog post about his experience of attending the blogger event for Your Country Your Call here.

BALLYGOWAN BOTTLES GO PINK

I have to disclose that Ballygowan sparkling water is my bottled water of choice! On Sunday 14 February I was made aware that Ballygowan had changed it’s dress – it had gone pink.

In a 360 marketing campaign which I first came across on TV, Ballygowan announced that it had launched a new campaign to raise awareness and funds for breast cancer in association with the Marie Keating Foundation in the Republic of Ireland and Action Cancer in Northern Ireland.

Every bottle sold will raise funds for breast cancer awareness and contribute towards cancer support projects.

Ballygowan Pink has a microsite and a Facebook page which already has almost 4000 fans.

The campaign which was managed by McConnells Integrated encompasses TV and Radio, an is in consumer and trade press and on outdoor posters. My one observation on the TV launch was that as a consumer it did come across to me as being a bit too repetitive – I think every ad break I saw on Sunday featured Ballygowan Pink.

From a PR perspective I was thrilled and surprised to find that a case of Ballygowan Pink bottles had been delivered to me – this being organised by the PR team of WHPR. I have had to confiscate the bottles from my three daughters or they would have all gone by now.

You see what I thought I would do is take bottles of Ballygowan Pink with me to events and locations that I know I am meeting female colleagues or clients. Yes my household could drink the bottles of water ourselves – but instead as a blogger who also lives in the real world, what better way to spread the word than sharing a bottle with a friend! You see I want my friends to ‘be part of it’.

In fact the campaign has had such an impact on me in terms of getting into my subconscious that when Read More

Do you ever get stuck for inspiration in terms of what to write about for your online articles, your newsletter or ezine or your business blog? Or what you could talk about in your podcast or your inline video?

Google just might have the answer for you – in this video I go through how to use the Google Wonderwheel search tool to help you with ideas for your topics.

Of course – model NEVER copy someone elses articles won’t you!

What other places do you like to get ideas for topics for your articles? Here are three other ideas that you might find of assistance:

1. Questions that you receive from clients or prospects – how can you turn those questions into an online article, content for your newsletter, an idea for on online video tutorial or podcast episode?

2. Your RSS feeds – if you subscribe to news channels, websites or other peoples blogs, their articles might give you an idea for a topic to write or speak about

3. The calendar – could you write something that is relevant to the time of year either in the annual calendar or the calendar related to your industry or sector?

Check out Google Wonderwheel and let me know what you think – is it a tool you would you could imagine using?

Do you want to attract more leads to your business with webinars? Or use webinars as a way of generating a new stream of revenue?

What platform can you use if you have an audience who does not want to or can not install webinar technology on their computer due to restrictions in terms of their IT policy? Can you have a webinar where you can view it from your browser without installing anything to your computer?

These are areas I often discuss with my clients – in fact only today I was talking with a client about how to use webinars as part of their revenue generating model and for helping people use their product more effectively.

I have had the opportunity this week to trial a service that I have been aware of for a number of years – in fact it is founded by a colleague here in Ireland – OnlineMeetingRooms.com. Joe Garde is a well liked and well known entrepreneur and his services are used byt companies across the world. They have recently released a new service that enables your webinar participant to watch the webinar from their browser.

Joe gave me access to his sevice at no cost to use to connect to some participants from a programme I had recently run. You can see my review of the service in the video below.

I have been hosting teleseminars and webinars for 5 years – however here in Ireland not too many organisations host webinars and teleseminars at the moment. With services like OnlineMeetingRooms.com and their new simple webinar service, I predict that may change!

Out of interest here are the results of the polls I ran today with the participants – the webinar was about blogging, podcasting and online video:

• How likely are you to implement social media in your business in the next 90 days – 60% of the participants said yes, 20% did not vote and 20% were unsure
• Have you ever attended a webinar previously – 30 of the attendees had attended a webinar previously
• Would you attend a webinar in the future is it was a paid event – 75% of the attendees said yes!
• Was the OnlineMeetingRooms.com webinar platform easy to use – 100% of the attendees said yes.

No these results are not statistically significant as the group was small – however it does provide me with some insights.

What webinar services do you like and recommend?

Do you have a professional profile online at the business social network LinkedIn? Do you display endorsements or testimonials on your LinkedIn profile?

But what if the testimonial you receive is incorrect, or you want it to more accurately reflect what you did and who you worked for?

Or has the company name changed since you worked there due to a merger?

I was asked how to change the information in endorsements by someone in my network today – so here is a quick video about how to request changes to the endorsements that you receive through LinkedIn.