February 6, 2012 in Blog, Training, Twitter, Uncategorized by davidmcweeney

Socialmedia.ie Tweets of the Week – 06th February

Five more top tweets from @socialmedia_ie over the last seven days. This week we bring you YouTube Tip and Tricks, as well as content to improve your Networking and Community Building.

RT @SolideoGroup: 10 Essential YouTube Tips and Tricks !! fb.me/NrOWHc2s@cian_corbett

— Social Media Ireland (@socialmedia_ie) February 6, 2012

RT @SEIreland: Looking forward to Social Media Training Workshop with @socialmedia_ie tomrw – sounds briliant – bit.ly/s5IQXg US TOO!

— Social Media Ireland (@socialmedia_ie) February 1, 2012

The SocialMedia.ie eMarketing module for class #mn319 kicked off today @NUImaynooth #emarketing #DigitalMarketing

— Social Media Ireland (@socialmedia_ie) February 3, 2012

@connector_ie the Irish Connector – Forget Networking. How to Be a #Connector | Entrepreneur.com j.mp/zp2bhQ

— Social Media Ireland (@socialmedia_ie) January 30, 2012

10 Tips for Building a Strong Online Community Around Your Startup j.mp/wGpLEw

— Social Media Ireland (@socialmedia_ie) January 30, 2012

To get great Social Media news as it happens, be sure to follow @socialmedia_ie

October 17, 2011 in Blog, Blogging, Business, Digital Video, eCommerce, mobile, Uncategorized by johncoleman

SocialMedia.ie & Sunday Business Post Social Media Series – Part 5 Mobile Media

We are at the half way mark of our ten part social media series in which social media expert Conor Lynch gives valuable information, tips and advice on how to implement social media to the advantage of your business. In part five Conor talks about mobile media and the powerful positive effects it can have for your business.

Don’t forget that socialmedia.ie give full social media training and consultancy. Email team@socialmedia.ie for more information or call (01) 804 4746.

June 12, 2011 in Blog, Blogging, Business, Social Media, Strategy, Uncategorized by Stephen Coughlan

CROWDSOURCING: WHAT IS IT ALL ABOUT?

Lately, it seems to be everywhere.  In music, design, advertisement, finance, customer service. In research and development, science, even in love life. With its endless applications and a potential that hasn’t been fully discovered yet, crowdsourcing has become part of our lives, and many of us haven’t even heard this word before. The concept is simple: take a job you would have normally given to an employee and outsource it instead to a large, undefined group of people, usually by publishing the task online and opening participation to anyone who feel they have the right skills.

The fact that crowdsourcing is such a broad concept is its main strength, since it has great flexibility and extraordinary potential, but it is also an important weakness: it’s easy to get lost in a myriad of examples and fail to see how crowdsourcing can be helpful to our business.

So, to start, let’s try to make some order. Jeff Howe, who coined the word “crowdsourcing”, identifies four main categories: collective intelligence, crowd creation, crowd voting and crowd funding. These categories can be mixed and implemented together; in fact, the most successful crowdsourcing projects tend to use a combination of these approaches.

The concept of collective intelligence is based on the idea that the group is smarter than the smartest person within the group itself. There are a number of well-known applications of this concept: for instance, the “ask the audience” option in the TV show “Who wants to be a millionaire”. An increasing number of companies, many of them Fortune 500, have enough trust on collective intelligence that they have open their R&D departments to the crowd and use crowdsourcing to find new ideas or to resolve problems. For instance, Innocentive is a community of over 250,000 scientists from nearly 200 countries, who work on problems of various nature for a prize that can vary from 5,000 to 1 million dollars, depending on the complexity of the challenge (see more stats on www.innocentive.com).

Crowd creation capitalises on the great deal of creativity possessed by the crowd: many companies are now outsourcing the creation of advertisement, logos, web sites, translations, etc., to online communities (see for instance www.zooppa.com, www.bootb.com or www.12designer.com). This allows businesses to receive many more proposals, at a much lower cost, than they would normally get from a traditional advertising agency.

Crowd voting uses the crowd’s opinion to organise large amounts of information. The “vote” can be consciously expressed, as in the iStockphoto rating system, or unconscious, as in Google’s “Page Rank” system.

The last category of crowdsourcing is  crowd funding, in which large groups of individuals effectively replace banks as a source of funds. This system is often used in micro-financing, for instance by organisations such as Kiva, Fundit.ie and Kickstarter.

We have mentioned just a few examples of crowdsourcing, but there are tonnes more out there: feel free to share with us the ones you consider more interesting or more successful!

CROWDSOURCING AND SMEs

Crowdsourcing has been successfully implemented by many Fortune 500 and by many big companies around the world, for instance Dell, Microsoft, Google and L’Oreal, to mention but a few.

But can it work for small and medium-sized enterprises?

The answer is yes, but there is still a lot to do before crowdsourcing becomes a commonly considered alternative for doing business among SMEs. Let’s see why.

From a research conducted by the author on SMEs, it appears that the adoption of crowdsourcing among smaller companies is still very limited. This is due to a number of factors: in the first place, the vast majority of companies are likely to be completely unaware of what crowdsourcing is about. Secondly, non-adopters of crowdsourcing do not seem convinced about the potential benefits of open innovation.

What are these advantages? According to the SMEs that have already implemented crowdsourcing, it contributes to increase the innovativeness of their company, improves their products or services, enhances the quality of communication with their customers, increases the knowledge they have of their clients and reduces costs. Not bad isn’t it?

But even when the advantages of this strategy are acknowledged, there are various factors that can influence the adoption of crowdsourcing in SMEs; in particular, a lot depend on the personality and style of the company’s executives: are they generally inclined to take the risk of doing things differently? Are they afraid of doing something new? Obviously, if the answer is no, then they are more likely to abandon the old ways and add that extra bit of creativity that the crowd will surely bring.

Financial resources are also critical: a proper crowdsourcing strategy is not a way to access “cheap labour”, as it might look at first glance, but it actually requires a significant investment in terms of time and money. According to the particular application chosen (e.g. new product development rather than new advertisement, etc.) the company needs to spend time engaging with the crowd, transforming its processes and internal procedures to allow customers to cooperate in the creation of products and services, writing a brief for people that might not know anything about their brand, going through hundreds of creative proposals, and so on. Before engaging in crowdsourcing activities, the firm must carefully evaluate whether it can afford to have resources specifically dedicated to crowdsourcing, or to train its employees, or to offer adequate prizes to attract the right type of participants to its online contests.

The company’s culture and set of skills will also require adequate familiarity with Internet and the Web 2.0, if we want crowdsourcing to be adopted and successfully implemented.

In essence, there is still a lot to discover about crowdsourcing and many companies might feel these recessionary times are not the best moment to take the risk of doing things differently. Or maybe, there is no better time to try something innovative, and exploit the potential of crowdsourcing to its full.

Written by Lisa Cescon

May 30, 2011 in Blog, Blogging, Business, Events, Facebook, mobile, Social Media, Twitter, Uncategorized by Jennipher Prati

Social Media Awards 2011

And the winner is……. So exiting to be at the first awards of my life, and even better regarding something that I love too: Social Media.

I felt like I was in a movie. Conor was one of the judges and decided to bring us, his team, to a different type of training session, he said: “watch guys and learn as next year we will be on the podium!” I believe that, we are working hard, we have the passion and his knowledge, the perfect mix!

The inaugural Bord Gáis Energy Social Media Awards, which took place Thursday 26th May in the Mansion House in Dublin , organised by Damien Mulley and hosted by the inimitable Ricky O’Shea (radio 2FM), honoured companies that demonstrated innovation in their use of social media in business over the past year. The awards were judged by a panel of industry experts and members of the public.

The Grand Prix Award, for the best overall use of social media, went to Meteor Mobile, who also picked up the award for the best owned-managed business Facebook page. Here the link if you want to check it out: http://www.facebook.com/meteor

Well done to all the Social Media Awards Finalists and Sponsors, it was a great night! Good entertainments, well organised and I loved The Virtual Graffiti Wall, even if I didn’t win!

There is only one last question: will Social Media have “new ways of interacting with the public, provide better services and inevitably generate more sales??”

MORE PICS>>

Here below the list of finalists:

Facebook Page for a Business
Spin 1038 – http://www.facebook.com/spin1038
Facebook Page for a Non-Profit Organisation
Dublin Zoo – http://www.facebook.com/dublinzoo
Facebook Page for a Business (Owner Managed)
Meteor Mobile – http://www.facebook.com/meteor
Integrated Facebook Campaign (Page, App and Ads)
Maltesers Ireland – http://www.facebook.com/maltesersireland
Best Business Twitter Account – Marketing and Sales
Blacknight – @Blacknight
Best Twitter Account – Support, CRM
Eircom – @eircom
Blog of a Business – Sponsored by Frontline LED
Curious Wines – http://www.curiouswines.ie/blog/
Video/Video Campaign (non broadcast) – Sponsored by Publicis QMP
Laughing Kookaburra – Goldnomics
Online PR Campaign – Sponsored by ESOF 2012, Dublin City of Science
Wedding Dates - http://weddingdates.ie/wifecarrying
Use of Social Media by State Body/Org – Sponsored by pTools
Defence Forces
Best Mobile App
Oxegen 2010
Customer Care using Social Media (Integrated) – Sponsored by DoneDeal
Vodafone Ireland
Best Use of Social Media For A Sponsorship Campaign
Bank of Ireland Leinster Blue Magic
Innovative Use of Social Media – Sponsored by Arekibo
RTE’s The Rumour Room
Social Media Effectiveness – conversions, metrics etc – Sponsored by Kantar Media
Morning Ireland, RTE
Integrated Social Media Campaign – Sponsored by GrabOne.ie
Meteor
Agency for use of Social Media – Sponsored by Newsletter.ie
Irish International
Grand Prix – Sponsored by Bord Gais Energy
Meteor Mobile

May 30, 2011 in Blog, Blogging, Careers, Digital Video, Social Media, Studio, Training, Uncategorized, Web Development, Wordpress by Stephen Coughlan

SocialMedia.ie Studio – Part-time Interns Wanted

SocialMedia.ie is a specialist social media marketing agency with services including consulting, training and creating digital content. We have worked with an impressive list of clients including start-ups, SME’s and large organisations from Ireland & the UK.

We are looking for interns in the areas of graphic design, web design and digital video to help us grow in 2011. These positions are part-time and unpaid. This is a great opportunity to gain industry experience with one of Ireland’s top social media specialists.

Requirements:

-          Each candidate will have excellent skills in at least one of the following areas – graphic design, web design or digital video

-          You will be very professional and have excellent organizational, written and verbal communication skills

-          You will be capable of working on your own initiative as well as within a team

Each candidate will have the opportunity to receive training in digital and social media marketing. Upon completion of your internship you will have an excellent chance of being hired by SocialMedia.ie or one of our clients or partners.

For more info about SocialMedia.ie please visit our web site and forward your curriculum vitae to conor@socialmedia.ie