http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVdtJTNcrok

For those of you that did not see them in the previous post – he has old photos of Carlow and takes new photos from the same place and angle. In the video he merges the two so you can see how things have changed.

I never seem to manage to guess where the old photos are taken. The videos are well worth a look – and take a lot of time I’m sure.

At one of the last timeslots of the day we had our own session to discuss what we did to organise the event and to show where the money went. We had some very useful feedback from the attandents as well. Normally at these events I’d have a big list of things that I think could have been done better – this time it’s more a list of things we can do to make it a little different.

Of the 499 registered attendants we had 291 people turn up. We probably had a few more come in without registering. Feedback from a number of people was that for a free event this was good – that a 50% dropoff rate is normal. I find it disappointing – and really unfair if people registered with no real intention of going. It basically meant

• We had loads of people that couldn’t come because we had closed the registration.
• We had 120 portions of lunch wasted – money that could have been used for other things
• It reduces the effectiveness of the event

At the review meeting suggestions were made that a number of people registered only with the intention of having their name listed. I suspect they are right. It means that we will have to limit what people can write – and will have extra work next time to try and verify registrations. Keep in mind that this work is voluntary.

We also had one no-show for the speakers – that’s twice as annoying. We had circa 70 people who wished to speak and only 40 time slots. Considering the talk was on time management there were a lot of jokes about the speaker not having the time etc etc. A phone call would have been nice – we could have slotted someone else in or at least warning the attendees so they could go to other sessions.

I hope this post is not coming across as a whinge. The event went really well – we had great comments from people on how much they learned and the contacts they made. I’m certainly glad I did it.

In order to support our new heavenly home – we’re selling the heavenly home where we currently live. It’s a 3 year old (but in showhouse condition) 3 bedroom semi-detached house in Sandhills in Carlow.

As all the “for sale” websites only show a few boring pictures I’ve started a site purely to give people a better idea of what the house is like – and why we loved living there so much. It will be updated (hopefully daily) with articles on what you can expect in the house, in the estate and local area and things you can do when you want to get out for a while.

If you know anyone that is interested then please ask them to have a look at www.73sandhills.ie and to contact us if they would like a closer look.

IIA establish an International Strategy Working Group
Members sought for working group
The IIA have set up an International Strategy Working Group. The aim of the International Strategy Working Group is to assist Irish businesses in increasing revenues from Overseas markets through better use of the Internet.

This working group aims to achieve this by providing support to businesses on how they can achieve increased global reach, increased global market share and increased global revenues.

Topics covered by with group will include Localisation, Translation Services, Foreign Payment Methods, Legal and Taxation issues in other Jurisdictions.

If you are a member of the IIA and would like to work with the group please email Roseanne at members@iia.ie. 

Read more about the working group on IIA.ie  

From my own work with the Social Media Working Group I can warn you that it can involve a lot of work. It can also be very rewarding. For me personally it has rounded out my level of knowledge and exposed me to areas of Social Media that I normally don’t work with.

If you are in a business that has the potential for internationalisation (or of course if you have already done the legwork) then get in contact with Roseanne to find out who else is involved and how your experiences may fit in.

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On the afternoon of the first day the Social Media Working Group held three breakout sessions. Quite a bit of effort was spent in preparing for the breakout sessions and I have to admit that I missed the two practice runs. The idea on the day was to take a sample company as a case study and to form mini groups to discuss how blogging, forums and twitter could be used. The order of discussion was guided by a very good five point plan devised by Conor Lynch.  One of the things I especially liked about it was the simple fact that the first point of focus was to figure out who your target customers are. Regular readers of this blog will know that no matter how much I love tech – I’m always wary getting the tools and then going looking for where to use them.

There was two of us in each group facilitating the discussion and then after a few minutes we were moved on to the next set of people. I was doing Blogs with Conor. The feedback was great and most people seemed happy. The sessions were packed and we had people waiting in the room for 20 minutes during the break to make sure they had a spot.

While an overall success – I do feel that it didn’t really work as we had hoped. The biggest issue was that we didn’t have enough time to get an actual discussion going – and we ended up doing most of the talking ourselves. I got some very helpful feedback from FinalContext via Twitter. Next time I think we should try keeping it as one large group and having a general open discussion.

As a reminder – The working group is publishing the whitepapers on the IIA website – http://www.iia.ie/smwg

I spent all Friday morning doing the mentoring sessions on Social Media. Matt Matheson from ThinkhousePR and I spent 30 minutes with individuals from companies talking to them about their social media strategy and answering their questions. The format of these sessions is fantastic. For all my readers – book them as early as possible next year and fill up your whole morning. Do your homework to have questions ready in advance – you will never have a better opportunity to get so many experts together in such a short space of time. Your brain will be steaming afterwards but it’s worth it.

Originally Matt and I were going to split up the sessions but the day before we decided that we would do all the sessions together. This worked much better as while I’m strong on blogging – I have not been so involved with facebook (especially with fan pages).  It was a tiring but productive morning – we even managed to help three extra people during the break and in between sessions.

The Fish

And finally I have to talk about the fish. The hotel has a projector in the hall that shows images of fish on the floor. Companies can put there own graphic as the background. There is a sensor for when you walk that causes the “water” to ripple and the fish to swim away. No surprise that I want one – I’ll find a home for it later. Some gadgets are just too much fun to try and be sensible and find the requirement first. The picture below does not do it justice.

Related Links:

IIA Protecting Your Brand Slides

IIA Congress 2009

Irish Internet Association Congress 2009

Review of IIA Congress 2009

Photos are available from the IIA

Slides of the presentations are also available