Damien Mulley

It being the season of goodwill and all of that, it’s worth noting that this can be done in many many ways. Right now with the recession biting and many good people being let go or made go part-time, it’s worth making a little effort in pointing out to others the good work they’ve done with/for you. Other people don’t even know it but they’ll be let go soon too. It’s unfortunately inevitable. One way for me to give thanks to people is LinkedIn, where over the next few days I’ll try and recommend as many people that I worked with as I can.

Photo owned by shirokazan (cc)

It doesn’t take much effort at all to make a recommendation but might be of immense benefit to the person you’re recommending. Don’t do it for any other reason than to recommend the other person. Don’t expect reciprocity. Also don’t ask for recommendations from people you haven’t worked with. That’s messy.

On that topic, please note I’ll be doing that LinkedIn thingymajig with it@cork next week and I’ll put the notes for it online after it. 50 people have so far registered for it. I would have thought events like this would have been snapped by a recruitment company to sponsor… 😉

Highlights from the survey:

• Adoption for most categories of digital content services doubled from last year, with services such as social networking now at 60 percent penetration and Internet data plans for mobile devices at over 40 percent for respondents globally
• 76 percent of consumers have already watched video on their PC, up 27 percent from last year
• For both PC and mobile video, the vast majority of respondents prefer advertising-supported models as opposed to consumer-paid models, representing huge growth opportunity for the industry
• Close to 60 percent of total respondents were willing to provide information about themselves – such as age, gender, lifestyle or communications preferences – in exchange for something of value
• The 13-24 year old segment owns an average of between four to five multimedia devices

Edit: Well that’s a screw up! This was launched in July! Slow news Summer for Mulley.net!

Chris alerted us all on Twitter than the new LinkedIn DirectAds have launched.

Some thoughts and figures from playing around with LinkedIn DirectAds:

You can go er direct to the Directads creation page to run your own ads. It runs a bit like the Facebook SocialAds idea. Target ads to people. You can target them based on: Company Size, Job Function, Industry, Seniority, Gender, Age, Geography

Targeting

There are 12,449,658 members in the United States who you can now target a LinkedIn DirectAd to. United States only right now, hopefully the rest of the world to follow. Also LinkedIn charge per impression, not click. The basic charge is $10.00 per 1,000 impressions. As you make your ad more targeted, they charge more. For example to target women or men only it’s $13.00 per 1,000 impressions. To target women aged 25-34 it’s $16.00 per 1,000 impressions.

I actually like that idea of charging more for targeting. Facebook doesn’t mind how targeted you get but there is more value in targeted ads really.Trouble is that LinkedIn will only allow you target based on two or less of the seven target types. This is odd.

Some additional figures :

Company profiles:

211,137 are self employed
513,697 in a company with 1-10 employees
640,016 in a company with 11 to 50 employees
802,168 in a company with 51-200 employees
562,431 in a company with201-500
479,299 in a company with501-1000
1,129,009 in a company with1001-5000
560,801 in a company with 5001-10,000
2,404,600 in a company with 10000+

Added up you get 7,303,158 who have filled this in.

Oddly, when you check the Seniority box you are told 1,296,023 are the owners of their business, yet 211,137 are self employed. Hmmmz.

Age Profiles

18,841 are aged 18-24
623,310 are aged 25-34
1,428,227 are aged 35-54
102,392 are aged 55+
When you tick all the boxes you get 2,172,770

So that means you are missing 10 Million people if you send an ad based on age

Misc:

On gender there are 4,752,304 women from the U.S. on LinkedIn and 5,625,916 men. Which gives 10,378,220 that have filled in their gender. So 2 Million in the U.S. have not.

There are 1,423,490 people on LinkedIn who say they’re from New York

Thoughts

All in all, this is good. I’m sure mySpace and maybe even Bebo will come along now too and offer something like this. I hear it’ll be 2009 before mySpace can offer these type of targeted ads.

TechCrunch broke the news last week about certain members on DIGG.com charging to get your website/blog post to the front page of the website. I see nothing wrong with hiring a copywriter wise to the tricks of DIGG to get your website to the front page but not this way.

I seem to be talking to PR companies and PR people a lot and many of them are subscribed to the blog. Hi folks! I think most that sub to this blog realise that PR is changing and there’s going to be an online element to their work and they want to learn that that is.

I was thinking of putting together a free bootcamp for PR and Marketing companies that would cover the basic elements that companies should be aware of in 2008. Spend half a day at it. The companies that would go along would also be encouraged to share their thoughts and their own experiences. It needs to be interactive. I asked a few PR people for some areas and this is the list so far.

Some topics which might get covered are:

• Current state of the web today
• Web 2.0 and social media
• SEO
• Blogs, writing blogs, engaging with bloggers
• Feed readers
• Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon
• Social networks
• Web/blog/social network monitoring
• Wikipedia/Wikis
• Podcasting

Any others? Any interest?

Photo owned by ninahale (cc)

For those not familiar with Twitter, it’s a text message rebroadcast service, it has about 1.2 million users online.

If you have a look at twitter.com you’ll see SMS sized messages from people telling people what they’re doing or what they’re up to. People subscribe to get updates from your profile more than you sending stuff to your list of people.

When compared to the 100s of millions on social networks, Twitter is tiny, but the current trend is seeing people focus more of their attention on Twitter and way from the traditional social networks. Hah – “traditional social networks”. Those people on Twitter too are the trendspotters and trend makers. I recently put a list together here of Irish Businesses on Twitter and that is of course growing.

Photo owned by David Masters (cc)

It’s just one more place where companies can do business. Unlike other “markets” though, this is very very informal and while people are happy for business to take place, they’re more interested in the social aspect of this space. But aren’t people more influenced when they’re relaxed and talking to real people? I’ll harp back again to Recruit Ireland who have recently joined and are really getting the space and very recently Herb Street joined Twitter. Herb Street are a restaurant in the Dublin Docklands and while they only have a holding page for their website, they’re active enough on Twitter, even posting pics of their daily specials.

Irish Businesses are using Twitter in four main ways

Rebroadcast
1. First they just use it as a rebroadcast service so blog feeds or special offers are sent out in 140 character bursts from the account. There is no real interaction with people. Like this special offers account from Dell: http://twitter.com/DellHomeOffers , In Ireland the company might not even do it themselves, there are unofficial feeds for RTE for example: http://twitter.com/RTEnews

Human face of business
2. They human power it. Using an official title they go off and they might auto mention new blog posts but they also answer questions posed to them and join in conversations. Irish company Blacknight’s is like that: http://twitter.com/bksolutions

Active Participation
3. They join in as humans first, business people second. They take an active part in conversations, start them, contribute to them but also give their opinion on business issues and so forth. They use Twitter to show off their knowledge, to network and to have fun. Pat Phelan from Cork based Cubic telecoms is an example: http://twitter.com/patphelan

Monitoring and then interacting
4. They monitor Twitter for their brand and see what sentiment is like and they will also engage directly with a user to help them with their issue or a sale etc. Any company can search for their details using http://search.Twitter.com

Photo owned by bobster1985 (cc)

It’s interesting to see some Irish companies being ahead of the curve when it comes to this and there’s a good deal of Irish using the system when it comes to number of users per capital. Also too, a few Irish companies have built other applications and businesses on top of twitter. Cork based Pat Phelan and Dublin company Dial2Do made twitterfone.com, the ability to dial and talk in your message instead of typing and another group in Cork have built a statistics package called TweetRush.com to monitor how many messages go through the system per second, hour, day, week etc.

Brendan has a great post about the way some people online treat newcomers to online communities:

Over the past while I have witnessed several individuals and companies being dressed down by leading members of Ireland’s online community. These are individuals and companies that have broken the rules of the community.

He goes on:

The misdemeanour could range from the way they set up their blog, taking advertising on their personal website, to sending unsolicited emails to large numbers of people. Individuals are named and shamed, and often rightly so.

He points out that businesses are probably afraid to come online and interact when they see that kind of aggression. Very wild west! Where are the Pinkertons? 🙂

I’ve given out when people set their blog up on blogspot, which I call catpissspot. I’ve given out when people dress lies up as advertising and I’m constantly giving out about businesses spamming people. It’s frequently pointed out to me that I’m very ratty on this blog. Certainly when it comes to spamming, I wouldn’t shed a single tear when a business infringes on my privacy and blames it on a simple mistake and then gets hammered. If we had a competent Data Privacy Commissioner I think this would happen less. It’s like the excuse those headcases give when they microwave their dogs. They didn’t know. They were never informed. That was never written down. No get out of jail card there from me. Anyway, back to the point.

Photo owned by faeryboots (cc)

I’ve previously mentioned the art of being subtle and of observing and I left a comment advocating the same on Brendan’s blog post. The trouble is that it seems companies now hire consultants to quickly tell them what the rules and nuances of this online game are and the companies jump straight in with their rulebook learned off by heart. They still need to observe. What’s with the rush?

What do you think? Should we attempt to turn the other cheek and not get so enraged? Leave a comment over there. Brendan is the chair of the IIA Social Media Working Group and I’m sure would enjoy as much constructive feedback and different viewpoints as possible.