On Wednesday I had the pleasure of attending the Mayo Open Coffee Club in my alma mater, GMIT, in Castlebar. It was an interesting experience and deserving of a write up in my all too infrequent blog :)

Pearce Flannery

I arrived a couple of minutes late, so I dont know how the event kicked off, but when I arrived Pearce Flannery was in full flow. If you don’t know Pearce, he’s an entrepreneur, author, and motivational speaker extraordinaire, and I can attest to that last.

Pearce spoke incredibly well, delivering a rousing and informative motivational talk perfect for the audience of business owners present. I took extensive notes during the talk and I’ll write up a further post on this blog with that asap (subscribe to the RSS feed or put your email address in the box in the sidebar to receive a notification when that happens). I highly recommend him as a speaker for any business events you have.

Making Use of Good Advice

After Pearce finished, there was a short Q&A, particularly focusing on how to put Pearce’s advice into practice – rather than forgetting the whole thing and going back to the same old ways of doing things. I found this discussion particularly interesting as I realised that the Mayo OCC group were looking to become something similar to a small network I am involved in – the Kaizen Group (you’ll see the logo in the sidebar of this site).

Kaizen is Japanese for “continuing improvement”, of Toyota management fame. The Kaizen Group is a small group of 8 business owners who formed up to help each others’ businesses. The idea was to have a small, completely trustworthy group of peers who will give honest feedback and criticism. (We met through the DCEB LINK Network, which is now under threat of closure.)

From the discussion at Mayo OCC, it appeared to me that something like Kaizen is what they are looking for.

Not Your Typical Open Coffee

I shall not make a joke about the distinct lack of coffee ;) but the main differentiator between this Mayo Open Coffee meetup and the other OCC’s I have attended in the past (in Mayo, Dublin and elsewhere) was the formality of proceedings.

The event kicked off with a speaker, and moved onto a short open discussion and Q&A. After that, there was a breakdown into groups of 5-6 people, where we each had to do a quick intro and declare business goals (as suggested as part of the discussion after the talk). This part was quite formally organised.

I skipped out after 20 minutes of this exercise, (to meet an ex-lecturer and friend for coffee!) and to head for a train.

My thoughts

I highly commend the Mayo OCC organisers for having Pearce come in and give a super talk, and for the work in organising the group afterwards. However, and here’s the “but”, Open Coffees are just that, “open”. I found the proceedings quite formal and prescribed in comparison to others.

It appears to me that the Mayo OCC group is migrating towards a more directed business network approach, more like the county enterprise boards sponsored events (like the LINK network mentioned above).

This approach has advantages and disadvantages – it will be interesting to see in what direction the Mayo OCC has evolved when I next attend.

I’ll be doing a blog post soon on Pearce’s talk. Your comments and suggestions on this post are welcomed – please leave a comment below.

Hello Wordcamp Ireland attendees!

The Wordcamp organisers have asked me to speak on the topic of plugins – the suggested title is “10 Must Have Wordpress Plugins”, and it’s in the “Bloggers” track.

My plan is to look at some great plugins, and list some particularly valuable ones, and also to touch on some fantastic alternatives like using themes with built-in features, and if we have enough geeks in the audience, maybe take a quick look at coding some of the simpler plugin functionality yourself.

I would like the talk to be useful and interesting for you guys, so what I’d like to find out is if you have any particular topics you’d like to cover, and if you would like me to show you some basic PHP code, or keep it at a higher non-technical level.

Please leave a comment below or tweet a message including the hashtag #amdtalk

I’ll also be watching that hashtag during the talk and will take any questions or comments from there (as well as any asked in person, of course)!

The network manager announced to us at the last meeting that DCEB are withdrawing support for the network and that the next meeting will be the last.

The members are very disappointed to hear of this and we have contacted the board of DCEB to show our support for the network and to ask them to reconsider.

In this time of recession and financial turmoil, particularly in the Small and Medium Enterprise sector, now is NOT the time to be withdrawing support for startup businesses.

Below is the text of my letter to the DCEB board members. If you would like to learn more, please see the Bring Back LINK! Facebook page.

Dear DCEB Board Member,

I’m saddened to hear of the planned closure of the DCEB LINK! network for startup businesses. I’d like to express my support for the network and any plans to keep it open.

I want to let you know how valuable a resource the LINK! network has been for me and my business. I have made many friends, business contacts and learned massive amounts from the LINK network events. The chance to learn from and talk to inspirational people like Adrian Birrell, Ireland’s hugely successful cricket manager, Brody Sweeney, amongst many others.

I’ve also learned about the many valuable DCEB resources including training courses and particularly the mentor programme which I found invaluable (In fact I found this so useful that I started a business with my mentor – there’s networking for you!).

But the most important part of LINK for me has been to have a network of like-minded peers going through the same issues of starting a business. This is a huge asset to any small business owner, particularly one like me who is not coming from a traditional business background (I was a software engineer working in a large corporation). The peer support from the LINK network is invaluable.

I believe that the network should remain open so that the current members can continue to benefit from its existance BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY so that new businesses and entrepreneurs who are just now starting out for whatever reason, so that they have peer support and gain from it as I have been lucky to do so. As you can see from the messages of support and subscribers to the Facebook page, there is large support from the existing members to keep the network intact.

I understand the fiscal realities facing DCEB but if there is anything I can do to help the network remain open and in place, please let me know.

Thanks for reading.

Best regards,
Alastair McDermott
Director, LogOn Internet Marketing Ltd (T/A WebsiteDoctor.com)
Director, ArrangeMyWorld Ltd.

–

My brief here is to talk about the importance of search engine optimisation (SEO) vs social media, and where I see the industry going over the next year. SEO here meaning “organic search”, or more simply: the results you get when you search Google, etc.

SEO and organic search is very important in 2010 – as is social media. Most organisations are significantly increasing their social media spend compared with last year – mainly because it was so far behind other marketing spend. SEO spend continues to increase, though at a smaller pace since larger organisations released the importance of SEO in 2007-2009 and started to invest heavily then.

SEO itself has undergone huge changes in 2009, mainly focused on the areas of real-time (e.g. incorporation of Twitter results and news), personalisation (based on your browsing history), and the related local results (geographical based). This trend will continue as Google drives to improve in particular their real-time results which are still at an early stage currently. There is a general shift of consumers moving from their reliance on search to peers for news, recommendations and answers – Twitter and Facebook are capitalising on that, and Google are working hard to combat it by the partnership with Twitter, amongst other strategies.

The first port of call for most people looking to answer a question online is still Google search. Why? This is Google’s stated goal in search:

“Our goal is very simple: We want to return to the user the answer that they need. It’s about getting people what they need, and about getting the results to be as accurate and fast as possible. We’re innovating, and concentrating just on the relevancy of results. Last year we made over 450 improvements to the algorithm.”

Google Search Guru Udi Manber, April 2008.

Even in 2010, SEO basics are still the same as before: if you focus on creating good, relevant, link-worthy content then your authority and relevancy will build and you will rank highly in results. Unfortunately there is no quick fix or silver bullet for SEO, and as your competition invests in creating content so the bar rises.

If Google made 450 changes to their search algorithm (the formula which they use to rank results) in 2007, how many tweaks and changes do you think they made in 2008 and 2009? Google are continuously tweaking their algorithm on a daily basis – so instead of trying to cheat on this exam, it’s time to knuckle down and put in the effort!

What’s to come in 2010? More real-time stuff: more focus on Twitter, news headlines and maybe even Facebook integration in either Google or Bing. Social media will continue to grow, though not at the breakneck pace of 2009. My advice – sign up for whatever social media you prefer, e.g. Twitter & YouTube, and start blogging: high quality posts infrequently are more useful than poor quality posts frequently!

Back to the original question of the importance of SEO vs social media – ultimately choosing the right tool for the job is as important as ever. SEO, social media, and all of the other facets of online marketing (don’t forget email marketing) will continue to be relevant for some time to come.

Thanks, Niall, for the interesting question, and helping me get my blogging muscles warmed up for the new year!
–

You can see the full post including Eric and Niall’s commentaries here.

Last night, Twitter removed your ability to see @replies from people you follow to people you don’t follow. This is a massive change, because this is one of the primary methods for Twitter users to find other interesting people to follow.

If your friends are talking to someone you don’t know, it’s very possible that you would be interested in tallking to that person too. Twitter have removed your ability to see that conversation happening, even though it’s in public.

The folks at Twitter believe that this is just a “small settings update”, saying:

receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don’t follow in your timeline is undesirable. Today’s update removes this undesirable and confusing option.

We should be thanking them for making the internet less confusing for us!

However, they do acknowledge the importance of discovery:

Spotting new folks in tweets is an interesting way to check out new profiles and find new people to follow. Despite this update, you’ll still see mentions or references linking to people you don’t follow… We’ll be introducing better ways to discover and follow interesting accounts as we release more features in this space.

That means that you will see mentions – where a Twitter name is in the middle of a Tweet, but not at the start.

This change has not gone down well with the Twitter population – #fixreplies and #twitterfail are trending top of the Twitter Search right now. The huge outcry over this issue is reminiscent of Facebook’s recent Terms and Conditions update: hopefully we’ll see a quick reversal of this change.

Some great commentary over at ReadWriteWeb, particularly this comment from Michael putting the issue in context:

The change today removes one setting — the option to see all replies from people you follow, whether or not you follow the target [...]

As of May 2008, this option was in use by less than 2% of Twitter users — the default is, and has been, to see only replies to those you also follow [...]

I disagree with the implication that 2% of users is either a small number, or even a valid statistic to use given the amount of spam accounts on Twitter.

Jeff from BrickandClick has a great follow-up on this:

I’d bet that the only reason “2%” of users chose the now unavailable feature is that the vast majority assumed they were seeing ‘all tweets’ from people they followed. Once this all get out in the open, and Twitter returns this feature, it’ll be more understood, and a few million people will choose it, and end up discovering a whole new piece of the conversation pie they were missing. Great way to discover new and interesting people your connections are chatting with.

I’m in complete agreement.

Workaround For Twitter Censor

I tried testing a few workarounds. They’ve already told us how – don’t include the @reply at the very start of your message. So the best way to ensure your friends read all of your messages is to simply add some fudge text to the start, e.g.:

"To @reply Your message here."

or

"@@reply Your message here."

Using a single space like follows does NOT work, unfortunately (this would have been the optimal solution):

" @reply Your message here."

However, this does not deal with the problem that you cannot view your friends replies unless they use the hack above. The only solution for that is to setup a search for each friend you want to view all public tweets from, or view their Twitter profile page, neither of which scales.

I hope Twitter decides to put back this option, and I hope that service providers learn that removing user choice is almost always a bad thing to do. Let me know what you think via the comments below, or on Twitter at @AMcDermott.

Update @4:40pm

Wow, this blog post got loads of RTs, shows what a big issue this is to Twitter users – Twitter must listen!

I’ve got 5 minutes between meetings, so I’m going to try respond quickly and succintly to some really good points raised either in reponse below, or to me on Twitter.

Josh had a note about the above workaround breaking the Summize “Show Conversation” feature:

Unfortunately none of his followers got to see that message ;)

But seriously, the workaround does break functionality of many Twitter applications that figure out threaded conversations from the @ sign usage. The answer here is to re-enable the setting so that we don’t need to use workarounds. And it is kinda funny that non of @kitson’s followers would have seen his message to me :)

Ok, in the comments we have a long reply from Michael at Black Belt Productivity. I apologise in advance, I really don’t have time to answer every point right now, but there are several things I disagree with. Michael’s text is in quotes sections, my replies below each:

THANK YOU TWITTER for doing something about endless drather of noise! There are PLENTY of ways for people to find new followers. They don’t have to rely on one-sided conversations with people they already know.

Yes, there are plenty of ways – but personally I (and many others by the looks of things) find that watching who my friends are talking to is THE SINGLE most useful way of finding people to follow.

People seem to forget that twitter is NOT a democracy. People do not paying to use the service. Biz, Evan and the twitter team get to decide what happen to the service that THEY CREATED. I read one of my followers and he said “Put replies back to the way they were! You’re going to lose a lot of people this way – epic fail” REALLY! You are going to leave twitter because you have a little more work to find new people. Come on, that is the most ridiculous thing that I have ever heard.

It’s not a democracy, but people can vote with their feet. Look at what happened with the Facebook T&C changes recently: Facebook reversed their decision in hours. Twitter is censoring our conversations here and we have the right to voice dissent.

I applaud twitter for turning OFF the firehose to make this a better service, and more importantly, an enjoyable experience.

I do not applaud Twitter for removing the ability for us to see who our friends are talking to. It was always optional, and you always had the right to ensure you didn’t have a “firehose” incoming.

At the end of the day, Twitter has removed user choice, and those of us who used this feature are rightly kicking up a fuss about that.

Ok, that’s all I’ve got time for now – please leave your comments below or @@reply me @AMcDermott on Twitter ;)

Read on for the slides, notes and a partial transciption of the talk.

1. Planning a Web Project Notes
   • Presentation by Alastair McDermott, WebsiteDoctor.com for IIA’s “Get the most out of your Website” eBusiness Seminar. DLRCEB Enterprise week, Stillorgan Park Hotel, Wednesday 25th March 2009
2. At minimum your website should have:
   • A professional appearance
   • What you do (Products/Services)
   • Contact information (minimum: phone number, email address and address)
   • Appear near or at the top in Google for your business name
3. Identify your needs – why do you need a website?
   • “Because everyone else has one” is not a good enough answer!
   • What is the purpose of your website?
   • What are your website’s Goals?
4. What are your website’s goals?
   • When someone arrives at your website, you generally want them to take one or more of the following actions:
   • Buy something on the site (direct sales)
   • Contact you (lead generation)
   • Find information
5. Evaluate Options
   • Many options available – appear similar but are actually very different
   • Learning/education, and finding trusted advisors are the key
   • Flickr photo (cc) by LadyExpat
6. Pick the right supplier
   • The hard part. Different for everyone.
   • Small vs Bigger suppliers.
   • Ask your friends/peers/advisors for recommendations
   • Ask suppliers to talk to previous customer/view testimonials
7. Contact Me
   • Email me at info AT website doctor.com or find me on Twitter at @WebsiteDoctor and @AMcDermott.
   • This slide – Twitter badge from Flickr’s 7son75
   • Slide photography from iStockPhoto.com unless otherwise attributed

For a transcription of the planning a web project talk, click here.View the slides on SlideShare.

Great talks

The talks were fantastic, as you’d expect. I made it to included Dave speaking about SEO and Silver & Magic Bullets, Patrick about link building, Al talking about affiliate marketing, Guy showing some really cool eye tracking videos, and Joanna teaching us about advanced segmentation in Analytics.

That bloke in the white coat

I was disappointed not to be able to attend every talk, particularly Tim’s SEO Page Rank demo as he attempted to blow the building up at the unfortunate hour of 9 o’clock (apparently there’s one in the morning too).

I also missed Kieron’s talk on affiliate marketing and Dirk’s one on accessibility, but I managed to catch up with both of them in the pub later on, which was fantastic.

In terms of learning and take-away ideas, I learned a bunch of new stuff, and had a lot of previous thoughts reconfirmed.

Eye tracking and Analytics

We got lots of great information from Guy and Joanna on tracking visitor behaviour. I particularly loved the tips on how to use the information practically. My main concerns with visitor tracking and user testing is how to interpret the data and draw accurate conclusions – it’s very easy to misinterpret this data, draw incorrect conclusions or simply suffer from information overload.

SEO companies in a vacuum

I had an interesting chat with Dave & Becky about how SEO companies are working in a cocooned environment – not sharing resources and there is a huge amount of duplication of effort, particularly in issues such as metrics (SERP tracking) and research.

Ethical affiliates

Something I’ve wondered about is the issue of ethics in affiliate marketing – it’s been one of the self-imposed barriers to me doing affiliate stuff. I see a lot of dodgy stuff being done that leaves a bad taste – folks recommending stuff that is of poor quality, hijacking cookies, etc. So it was pleasant to chat to Al, Kieron and others about how to be a successful affiliate and remain ethical while doing so.

No SEO magic bullet

A really obvious one – there is no magic SEO trick that will get you ranking. I think it’s all the cowboy SEO merchants selling “SEO Secrets” that reinforce this myth. It’s all about the content.

Nasty tricks

On the other hand, there are lots of nasty ways to hurt your competition (most of which involve buying them SEO magic bullets from the aforementioned cowboys.

Meeting people

As ever, the huge value for me was in the great people I got to meet before, during, and after the conference. I was able to chat to all of the speakers at one point or another – in surroundings where they were not under time pressure. If you’re planning to attend a conference (in any industry), I cannot recommend enough that you make sure to schedule in enough time afterwards to stick around and chat to folks outside of the formal conference – it’s invaluable.

Some highlights of the trip included:

• Meeting lots of really cool people like all the speakers I mentioned above, and Dom, No. 2 UK SEO Shaun ;) and cheap holidays in the sunshine Chris and Andrew and Wie and James and Dave and Andrew and Dan and Dan and Jag and loads more (leave a comment with a URL if you met me and I’ll link you here)
• During Joanna’s demo, I was following it by making the changes live in my Analytics account while sitting beside DaveN. Who promptly does a “mine is bigger than yours” by showing me his monthly traffic figures.
• Getting a pint for £2.30 (!) and being told that I should have used a student card to get a discount – Dublin bar owners with your €5.50 pints, take note
• Tim’s “Scientology must be the only religion with an affiliate link” comment (which came at 3.30am in the Radisson residents’ bar with neither of us was even staying at the hotel).
• Playing Wii Sports in the pub during the after-party

Leeds

The furthest north I’ve ever been in England, I really wasn’t sure what to expect from Leeds, and I was very pleasantly surprised. It seemed like a very young lively city with a thriving nightlife and a good buzz about the place. So it definitely was a great venue for a conference in our still fairly young industry.

Other write-ups

• Hoboweb
• Pfft
• Dirk
• Polr
• Dom
• Dave
• Rats saw God (huh?)
• Floating Frog
• Dan
• James
• Joanna
• Tom
• More Tom
• Rahoul
• Andrew
• Another Andrew
• Kieron

Well done on a great event Dom, I’ll be back.

• 90 second survey for businesses, buyers and potential buyers of outsourced services.
• 60 second survey for subcontractors, freelancers and all suppliers of outsourced services.

The purpose of this is to find out what attitude and experience people from different perspectives have on outsourcing, and to get some basic statistics on it. The results will be published, if you enter your email address on the survey form I’ll inform you when that happens (entering email is entirely optional, and I guarantee no spam).

The surveys are very short – so please take 60-90 seconds to complete either (or both if both apply to you!).

The results of this survey will help please take a moment to fill one of them out.

Thank you!

Via Open Forum

How to prevent that happening

I think the primary thing for PR people is to understand that most bloggers really, really hate spam, and when approaching them you should avoid at all costs appearing like spam. That means not sending unsolicited form emails, press releases etc.

Some bloggers tolerance levels for spam can be quite low: after after receiving just a single unsolicited email they might decide to name & shame you (or your client!) as a spammer, vow never to purchase from your client again, etc etc.

Of course all bloggers are not alike; the blogosphere is very diverse. For example my spam-tolerance level is quite high – if I get spam I don’t like, I’ll usually just delete it and move on.

How can a PR person approach the blogger without setting off these sensitivities?

There’s a few options. If the blogger has their email address listed publicly on the site, see do they mention what kind of emails they want to receive. Send them a short initial email introducing yourself and asking if they mind if you send them on something for consideration. Maybe tell them why you picked them to contact.

If they don’t have email, you could leave a comment on one of their blog posts, saying you’d like to get in touch, and leave your email address for them to contact you.

You could call them if there’s a number listed- your mileage may vary. Speaking for myself here, I prefer contact by email 100 times over a phone call because I can deal with the email whenever I want.

Even better, but time consuming, is to genuinely develop relationships with the blogging community. Online social networking like Twitter is great for getting to know people better too. And possibly the best, but most time consuming, is to actually start blogging yourself.

What can bloggers do to improve the situation?

How about putting some sort of “incoming PR request” policy on your contact details page. State how you like to be contacted (or if not at all), about what, and anything else that might be relevant.

Is it about bloggers wanting free stuff?

One impression some folks have is that bloggers simply want to be bribed with free stuff and they’ll write about anything. And I’m sure some do! But I think most bloggers do it because they’re passionate about whatever it is they blog about.

That said, clever PR folks can make good use of social contracts as mentioned in Dan Ariely’s book[1] (I really love that book & think this excerpt is particularly relevant for both).

For bloggers: where do you draw the line ethically on making money or taking non-monetary payments? Many bloggers make significant incomes directly and indirectly from blogging that they would not earn if they didn’t blog.

Is it about bloggers wanting to be treated like journalists?

I don’t think it is, although the lines are getting very blurred, I believe there are many bloggers with higher standards than offline journalists.

On the flip side there are simply so many bloggers, so yes, the vast majority are not of journalistic quality[2].

Ok, that’s my unpolished thoughts on the matter, please leave a comment with questions and/or suggestions.

Other recommended reading on this topic:

• Do you need a blog if you want to pitch bloggers?

This post was a follow up to last night’s Collision Course event, a blogger & PR folks get together organised by Damien Mulley. We had 15 bloggers and 25 PR folks together, with a well directed discussion. Many bloggers gave their opinions to the PR folks on how they should approach & pitch stories.

Follow-up posts from Collision Course 1:

• Blog Will Eat Itself – Collision Course I Review (Kind of…)
• Takeaways from Collision Course 1
• PR and Bloggers Can Live Together

Note 1 Excerpt from Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, which I mentioned last night and recommend to everyone as a must-read:

“We live in two worlds: one characterized by social exchanges and the other characterized by market exchanges. And we apply different norms to these two kinds of relationships. Moreover, introducing market norms into social exchanges, as we have seen, violates the social norms and hurts the relationships. Once this type of mistake has been committed, recovering a social relationship is difficult. Once you’ve offered to pay for the delightful Thanksgiving dinner, your mother-in-law will remember the incident for years to come. And if you’ve ever offered a potential romantic partner the chance to cut to the chase, split the cost of the courting process, and simply go to bed, the odds are that you will have wrecked the romance forever.

[...]

The fact that we live in both the social world and the market world has many implications for our personal lives. From time to time, we all need someone to help us move something, or to watch our kids for a few hours, or to take in our mail when we’re out of town. What’s the best way to motivate our friends and neighbors to help us? Would cash do it — a gift, perhaps? How much? Or nothing at all? This social dance, as I’m sure you know, isn’t easy to figure out — especially when there’s a risk of pushing a relationship into the realm of a market exchange.

Here are some answers. Asking a friend to help move a large piece of furniture or a few boxes is fine. But asking a friend to help move a lot of boxes or furniture is not — especially if the friend is working side by side with movers who are getting paid for the same task. In this case, your friend might begin to feel that he’s being used. Similarly, asking your neighbor (who happens to be a lawyer) to bring in your mail while you’re on vacation is fine. But asking him to spend the same amount of time preparing a rental contract for you — free — is not.”

Note 2: For example, I hope that this blog post has some useful information for people, but I know that I could easily spend another couple of hours shaping it into what I’d consider a decent journalistic quality article. Just out of interest, time to write this post is currently 61 minutes (I wrote it in Word so can check that). Later edit: with formatting, linking & images, this post took over 90 mins to write.