Delighted to have been asked to comment in a piece in this week’s Sunday Times on the role of business schools in ethical business practices…

Sunday Times Sep 2010

clear the house out!  www.jumbletown.ie is a forum-based website for ‘Givers & Takers’. I posted 6 items on the site 3 hours ago, and most are not only reserved, but also collected at this stage. I was delighted to have a steady stream of people with vans arrive the the front door to take this stuff away. It included a double bed and various other items of bedroom furniture that would have otherwise ended up in a skip or tip!

This site definitely deserves a higher profile for completely sorting stuff out for people who can really help each other.

Go digital

A client kindly invited me along to attend a talk on SEO by Matt Cutts – a seriously senior Google guy, visiting Dublin. The presentation, as expected, covered some stuff most of us probably new, but definitely new stuff too. For me, some new tips were:

1) Google does NOT treat underscores as spaces, but DOES treat hyphens as spaces (with the exception of domain names). This means that using contact_us will not be correctly interpreted as two separate words ‘contact us’, but as ‘contactus’, which clearly is not likely to be a highly searched term. By contrast, the hyphen in ’contact-us’  does serve to split the words.

2) Avoid ‘backlink obsession’ – an unhealthy pre-occupation with analysing page rank of every inbound link relative to competitors and attempting to understand why variances occur. Google uses over 200 factors to assess every web page, so excessive focus on page rank will NOT be sufficient to guarantee your way to the top.

3) I liked Matt’s analogy about when to hire an SEO – like getting a mechanic to do your oil change, or doing it yourself. If you like it, enjoy learning about it and tinkering with it, you can do a good job yourself. If you don’t, then hire someone else to do it for you!

Overall, a very worthwhile couple of hours… but still dying with curiousity to find out who the fleet of limousines parked outside the building were for. Sadly, they weren’t there for me

Thanks to Dublin Chamber for organising.

I read a very interesting blog post recently, which highlighted the most popular fan pages on Facebook at the moment in terms of fans.

Unsurprisingly, Barack Obama featured very highly in fourth place (behind a war game, Michael Jackson and a poker game). It got me wondering how our political leaders closer to home might be doing on Facebook in terms of ‘Fans’ – and how they each compare to each other relative to their populations. So I calculated the table below.

The comparisons are admittedly simplistic, and purely for my own amusement in the study of online marketing, but nonetheless I find them really interesting. The results certainly indicate the global interest in Barack Obama and it would be really interesting to understand the demographics behind each leader’s fans.

Although the numbers are tiny for both Gordon Brown and Brian Cowen, our Taioseach does perform the better of the two, but the US president does over a hundred times better.

Facebook Fans as at 29th March 2010

Another observation, perhaps relevant for best practice thinking, is the avatar the Barack Obama uses is his key message ‘Yes We can’ rather than his photo. Subtle, but food for thought. Perhaps we should all work harder at thinking about the details when we’re marketing our professional persona. 

I will be keeping an eye on this every few months, and investing lots of time and effort in developing my own Facebook page once I finish my famous Smurfit MBA course.

The internet and indeed traditional media are talking about online marketing like its going out of fashion. With so much information, its sometimes hard to know where to start. I recently started working with a new client company who are making amazing dive lights and I thought it would be useful to document the actual process in simple terms, for other small companies who need to know where to get started.

The key steps in my view are:

1) Understand the business and its target market

2) Identify a list of keywords that your customers are likely to use to find you.

3) Use the Google keyword tool to check that list, and get an idea what other key terms you need to be using that may be more popular with browsers. In the case of Cathx, we found that ‘dive lights’ as a search term is used five times more than searches for ‘diving lights’.

Using this information, we can edit the copy, page titles and page descriptions and improve the search engine rankings for their site.

4) Create accounts on all major social media relevant to the audience – key ones include Facebook, Youtube, Flickr and Twitter. Each industry is likely to have its own sites also, so its worth registering with those in particular.

5) Create great content. News stories, images of shows or product manufacture, videos of the product in use or instructions how to use it. Use this content extensively across the social media sites to create awareness with key online influencers. Hopefully some will start to link back to your site – building critical credibility with Google.

6) Build up a permission database for your product. Email databases and an RSS subscriber list are two of the easiest to create, so you can keep your customers posted on your key news and developments.

7) Repeat!

Clearly this is not a simple or quick process, it takes time and dedication and a lot of research along the way for each of these steps. The good news is, there is plenty of information online to advise and guide you. Persistence is critical, so choose your channel, and use them regularly.

Happy online marketing.

One that might be of interest to any budding entrepreneurs out there:

The Entrepreneur Show, April 23rd and 24th, RDS, Dublin

Will be particularly excited to see my favourite UK dragon speaking live.

For anyone interested in keeping up to date with the latest developments in either online marketing or eCommerce marketing, the following events caught my eye:

1)      UCD are organising ‘Digital Landscapes’ this Wednesday – as part of their ‘Growing Ireland’ theme.

Facebook & Google will both be in attendance along with Minister Eamon Ryan and some other well known speakers in the industry.

2)      Catalyst Show by Channel Advisor, April 12th & 13th, London

One of the best respected solutions in the eCommerce sector, with keynote speeches from Amazon, ebay and a panel discussion on comparison shopping sites.

3)      eCommerce Expo – Manchester, 27^th May 2010

eCommerce show themed around acquisition, conversion, fulfilment and retention.

Speakers and solutions focused on eCommerce issues – perhaps a show format that would be useful in Ireland?

4) The ‘National Digital Media and Marketing Summit’ - RDS, Dublin, 31st March 2010

Run by the Sunday Business Post, I personally think this event is overpriced (their last one was €99 for the day, which felt more appropriate in these current recessionary times.) Anyway, let’s hope there is some good fresh content and case studies from the presenters.

I really look forward to shows like these. Hope to see some of you there?

I have resisted for long enough. Despite the many demands on my time – writing a blog is just so critical for anyone worth their salt in digital marketing. So here it goes – my business blog that I am calling ‘Online Marketing Musings’.

To start, I wondered how many blogs exist? Although accurate statistics are hard to find, Wikipedia quotes a figure from Technorati of 112 million – but that was back in 2007! How many have been added since then? Are there now double that, or triple? Does it even matter? I think not.

I think ‘a lot of blogs’ is good enough and sets the bar nice and high for any to succeed. Thankfully I have never been afraid of a challenge. I realise there are many incredibly impressive people already writing about digital and internet marketing. I plan to continue to follow their work and absorb as much as I can & hopefully attract lots of readers of my own.

As a starting point, my plan is to share the knowledge I have gained over many years in (and out of) online marketing. I will include case studies of my own work in digital (both good and bad) and plan to continually research and share whatever tools and tips I believe are working most effectively.

I come from a very competitive business background – the travel industry – which has been one of the more progressive sectors to embrace online and one of the most demanding in terms of measuring returns. I now work with companies in a range of sectors – from technology to retail.

My particular passion and field of expertise is ‘eCommerce Marketing’ – which I define as the use of online marketing tools & techniques to drive online sales, while recognising how often offline sales can be attributed to great online marketing too.

eCommerce marketing includes everything from products to channels, to communication and conversion – and everything in between. Fascinating, complex and ever changing.

In marketing, I believe that variety can be a great teacher if it’s measured, tested and shared. I hope you agree.

I hope you find it useful.