IIA Digital Toolshed
IIA Toolshed – Social Media Design Tools
IIA Toolshed #4
Social Media Design Tools
Tooler’s Choice?
We looked at four social media Design Tools, no one is the winner because they are all very different and serve different needs.
What is IIA Toolshed? IIA Toolshed is a group of digital marketers & digital experts who know how difficult it is to keep up with the ever changing array of tools at our fingertips, to supposedly make doing business easier! To make things simpler, we’ve come together to test, evaluate and share the reviews of a broad selection of tools & technologies, to ultimately make the decision easier for you, when choosing what tools might best suit your business needs. At the IIA Toolshed, we come together every 6 weeks to evaluate a set of tools for a particular business objective, and we’ll publish our findings right here.
Who are we? The Toolers who took part this month are:
- Maryrose Lyons, Brightspark Consulting
- Eoin Kennedy, eoinkennedy.ie
- Felicity McCarthy, Sparkdigital.ie
- Ailbhe Lee, iia.ie
- Lynne Rourke, Buyandsell.ie
- Sasha Kinch, inm.ie
- David Cuddy, Realex
- Beatrice Whelan, Sage
| Product Name |  |  |  |  |  |  |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Website | https://www.canva.com/ | http://piktochart.com/ | https://venngage.com/ | http://www.picmonkey.com/ | http://makeagif.com/ | https://www.draw.io |
| What Is It | It is an online image creation and editing tool. Has been hailed as "The easiest to use design program in the world” – The Webby | Web based infographic software. Works best at creating visuals using your data sets. Not recommended for creating a simple visual. | It is an online infographic maker | A very powerful image creation and editing tool for markers who are not Graphic Designers. Great for editing images, creating logos and even infographics. | Its an online GIF making site, where you can very quickly make a give from images, videos or even youtube videos | draw.io (formerly Diagramly) is free online diagram software that can be used as a flowchart maker, network diagram software but also a handy editing and design tool. |
| What's It Like To Use? | Very quick and easy. It is used by non-designers as well as professionals.It can be used for both web and print media design and graphics. | Very quick to get started, easy drag and drop feature allows you to build presentation or infographic quickly. Good selection of templates. | It is a simple platform to use for creating infographics. It has a number sample templates to get inspiration from. However, the majority of templates are only available for paid subscribers. Easy drag and drop interface allows rapid infographic building with elements such as charts, maps, pictograms, icons, text, images and more. | It can be a little intimidating and even fiddly to use initially. There are so many features and options that you can use. However once you get the hang of PicMonkey you can edit and design images in minutes. | It's very easy to use, very straightforward UI, but its sole use is for making GIF's. | The user interface initially appears intimidating as there is a lot of functionality and each session begins with a blank canvas. There is no registration and you literally start to design from scratch but the process is fairly intuitive. You can import images, add text with lots of export options and formats. |
| Is There Anything I Should Know? | Social-media and technology expert Guy Kawasaki joined the company as chief evangelist in April 2014. When you pay for an image, you only have rights for 24 hours. Good news - you only pay for what you use. Bad news - users might get an unpleasant surprise if they need to re-purchase an image. This is not made super clear in the interface. | It takes quite a while (marginal few extra seconds) to save, even when you haven't edited anything : ( | In order to unlock all the features you'll need to subscribe for a premium version ($15/month). With the Premium version you are able to export the infographics into PDF and PNG formats. The product was created by Eugene Woo who is also the founder of vizualize.me which is an infographic maker for resumes. | PicMonkey has a free version, but images fonts and functionality are limited. I would strongly recommend upgrading to the paid version (known as Royale Membership). It is inexpensive - $33 a year, billed annually or $4.99 a month. The paid version gives an unbelievable number of image overlays and design templates. One downside of PicMonkey is it does not allow you to re-edit images or even save a "work in progress" for a later date. One big downfall with PicMonkey is that it is desktop only. A Mobile App would be really useful. | There is no need to sign in/register to make a GIF, but having a profile gives you more flexibility (there is a limit to the lenght of the gif you can make without signing in). Also before signing in, Youtube gifs seem to not work properly. Registration is free, and very quick and easy. Once you are registered you can remove the watermark. They have an chrome extension which seems to work pretty well and is easy to use. Its also possible to share to your social profiles (in many different ways) from within the app. Note there is a limit to the video upload size ( MB). There is virtually no editing of videos - it is just a GIF maker. | This tools is really designed for rapid building of flow charts but could also be used for enhancing, editing and producing good graphics for social media output. There are limited stock graphics available in the search bar - mainly icon style but currently it is a free tool with future licensing planned. |
| Who would you recommend it for? | Creating images for use on social networks, in presentations or for print. | Any small business currently outsourcing design work. | For businesses wishing to create quality infographics without the cost of in-house designers | Any business that wants to create great looking images for their marketing materials and social media posts without the cost of a graphic designer. | Creating GIFs quickly from photos, videos, webcam or youtube. Especially useful for companies with lots of related images and willing to experiment in visual story telling. | Creating images and assets with flow chart elements or basic editing of images |
| Cost | Free unless you purchase images. It would be preferable if you could arrange to view images by Free/Paid. Payment mechanism is cr card only (no PayPal). You have rights for 24 hours to edit imagery. £1 or €1 only. | "Free" but with watermark. Starts at $15/month. Templates, icons, 100MB download (no watermark?) Moves to $29/month (everything) | Two plans: Free and Premium ($15/month) | There is a Free option, but it is limited. I would strongly recommend upgrading to the paid version (known as Royale Membership). It is inexpensive - $33 a year, billed annually or $4.99 a month. The paid version gives an unbelievabile number of image overlays and design templates. | Free | Free but with future licensing planned. |
| Specific Criteria (Out of 4) | ||||||
| Size formats for various social platforms | 4 -Yes, it has pre-set up templates for Twitter header, FB cover, and all the main social channel image post sizes. | 3 - Yes you can change the canvas size. | 3 - the canvas size is customisable | 4 - There are plenty of size templates and you can customise your image or design to any size. | 1 - no not really, its an embedded link when sharing on Facebook/Twitter, but this is probably the right way for it to be shared | Size is pretty much determined by the edited size of the canvas. |
| Purchase images | 4 - Yes, it has a range of free and priced images that you can search for from within the tool. You only pay when you publish the image - before publish you can use but they are watermarked.You can also upload your own images from your computer or Facebookor drag them from your desktop. | 0 - You cannot purchse images although there is an extensive libriary | 3 - free and for purchase images available. You can also upload own images | 2 - Once you have the paid version there are amazing templates, images and designs you can use. However you will most likely need to bring your own images to the PicMonkey table. | 0 - not relevant to this platform | 0. Some free icon style images available in search bar. |
| Add transparencies | 4 - yes you can edit the transparency of layers. | 0 - no | 0 - no | 4 - Yes it is really easy to isolate images and add transparency of layers. | 0 - no editing capability | 0 - you can move images to background but no transparency |
| Add layers | Yes, and you can easily move them back and forth - easier to use layers in this than it is in photoshop. | 2 - You can basic layers | 1 - you can add layers | 4 - Yes - very easy to layer images, text and photos. | 0 - no editing capability | 3 - Yes. Simple basic layering |
| Editing capability | 4 | 4 | 3 - Fine | 3 - Once you create an image on PicMonkey you cannot re-edit it. However there is great editing features available when editing a picture. | 0 - no editing capability | 3 - Fine |
| Add text & edit fonts | 4 - yes and good range of fonts | 4 - some really good fonts | 3 - fine, but could be more variety | 4 - loads of fonts and you can even import and use additional fonts on your pc. | 0 - no editing capability | 3 - Simply start typing. Can change text fonts etc |
| Save templates | 3 - Yes although they are not called templates, you can save designs and copy designs to use them as templates for future designs. | 3 | 4 - Yes | 0 - Once you have created an image on PicMonkey you need to save it to your pc. They do not store your images, (This may be a good thing) | 0 - no editing capability | 3 - Yes |
| Good range of export formats | 3 - presentation formats don't export to ppt compatible | 3 - limited to pdf formats and image formats. Will not export to ppt | 2 - pdf and png 4 - Dermot - export to Google Docs etc | 3 - Good format options. | 2 - GIF and MP4. Its more impressive that you can create a give in a few ways | 4 - wide range of drop down menu options of fromats and saving options from Google Drive, Dropbox to Browser. |
| What did you love? | 4 -ease of use and the pre defined templates for social and ads. | 3 - SurveyMonkey Integration was great and really easy and quick to use and get started. | 3 - easy and quick to build infographics | 4 - Once I got used to it. It made me feel like a Photshop wizard without even going near the complexities of Photoshop. | It does what it says on the tin, no unnecessary frills | Although built for flowcharts it offers lots of functionality for creative use. Easy to play around with. |
| What did you hate? | 3 - Very little. Can't believe there is no mobile option. Not even mobile optimised site. | 3 - Felt a bit like WordArt at times, limited shapes. Slight time delay can be annoying. | 1 - no keyboard shortcuts copy/paste like ctrl+c or ctrl+v, instead of clicking on delete button you need to use venngage interface button to delete items. | 3 - Only complaint is the inability to save and re-edit images. And the lack of a mobile app. | Inability to do ANY editing (even to flip the images around, which would be handy for videos taken on a phone). To get around this, upload the video to Youtube first. | Initial blank canvas and early learning curve. |
| Are you going to continue using it? | 3 - Yes | 3 - Yes, good for reporting | 3 - Yes | 3 - Yes | 4 - Yes |
What’s next from the IIA Toolshed? Customer Service Tools
Uncategorized, social media, Social Media Working Group, new technology, IIA Toolshed, Social Media Monitoring
IIA Toolshed – Social Media Monitoring
IIA Toolshed #3
Social Media Monitoring
Tooler’s Choice?
We looked at four social media monitoring tools, no one is the winner because they are all very different and serve different needs.
- Market leader Radian6 from salesforce is powerful and provides all you need for monitoring and listening, but it is truly an enterprise solution and requires a hefty investment. For enterprise, Radian6 is one of the best there is.
- Mention is accessibly priced tool for medium sized companies, with budget, who have reasonably large web and social search monitoring needs and wish to centralised the management of these. Ideal for those who have report generating needs and wish to involve large teams.
- New Irish offering, Olytico is an interesting software and a service tool. You tell Olytico what keywords you want to track, they set up the searches for you, and you use the tool to view results. It neatly overcomes the problem that many face with social media monitoring tools of only being as good as your search terms, but this at times can be a bit limiting. We decided that Olytico is the perfect tool for agencies who need to report back on how far their client’s brand travelled across the social media spaces.
- Social Bakers is probably best suited to SME’s, although it only really monitors what’s being said about your own social media, rather than listening widely about broader conversations. It serves a purpose for bringing reporting together and does that very well, providing benchmark industry data.
What is IIA Toolshed? IIA Toolshed is a group of digital marketers & digital experts who know how difficult it is to keep up with the ever changing array of tools at our fingertips, to supposedly make doing business easier! To make things simpler, we’ve come together to test, evaluate and share the reviews of a broad selection of tools & technologies, to ultimately make the decision easier for you, when choosing what tools might best suit your business needs. At the IIA Toolshed, we come together every 6 weeks to evaluate a set of tools for a particular business objective, and we’ll publish our findings right here.
Who are we? The Toolers who took part this month are:
- Maryrose Lyons, Brightspark Consulting
- Eoin Kennedy, eoinkennedy.ie
- Felicity McCarthy, Sparkdigital.ie
- Ailbhe Lee, iia.ie
- Lynne Rourke, Buyandsell.ie
- Sasha Kinch, inm.ie
- David Cuddy, Realex
- Beatrice Whelan, Sage
| Product Name |  |  |  |  |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Website | Radian6 | Mention | Olytico | Social Bakers |
| What Is It? | Radian6 is a Social Media listening and monitoring tool owned by Salesforce.com. It is heavily integrated with other Salesforce products (Buddy Media) and features. Very often used as part of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud package. They are repackaging Radian6 with new features under a new name called Social Studio | Mention is a online social media monitoring tool that searches the main social media channels and incorporates alerts, responding capability, task assignment, reporting and analysis. | Software AND a service! It's a hybrid between self service and managed. You tell Olytico what you want to track, they set it up for you, and you can then do the monitoring yourself | Online, Self Service, Social Media Measurement Tool. Very good for competitive analysis & industry benchmark. Super basic for Free. Social Bakers Statistics = free. Marketing Suite = paid. Additional upgrade features = Analytics (customised reporting, benchmarking etc), Builder (Plan, publish, measure from single place), Advertising (plugin to FB & Twitter ads), Listening. |
| What’s It Like To Use? | Simple to use. Set up automated searches by keywords and/or company name. Search by location for better results. One of the best things about Radian6 is its ability to turn searches into really digestible reports. Within seconds I can search, measure and identify business opportunities. It is great for analysing sentiment, monitoring competitors and identifying influencers and brand advocates. | Reasonably simple set up. Does a very broad search and generates good reports. Allows you to respond to mentions or allocate to team members. | Simple to use. It's all set up for you. Can view activity by day, and assign content to team members. Cannot track whether they have actually done something with it or not. It trawls all the main social platforms (FB pages plus open groups, not profiles), Flickr, Insta, not that strong on Pinterest, plus forums, and news sites. | It's easy to use at basic level. Free Trial offered for 2 weeks. Heavily focused on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. May be more customisation possible but not obvious. |
| Does it give meaningful results for Ireland? | Yes - easy to limit results to Ireland only | Yes. Strong on Twitter especially when hashtaged | Yes. Strong on Ireland as you'd expect from an Irish tool. | Yes, as strong as any other country |
| Is There Anything I Should Know? | Salesforce seem very cloak and dagger in giving anyone access to it unless they are a large multinational and already using the Salesforce platform. Very difficult to get a price list from them. They can penalise organisations when high volumes of data. | Range of functionality appears limited for the price. Much of the functionality could be achieved with free tools like google alerts and topsy/social mention. Low threshold on number of mentions means upgrade for busy accounts. | Workflow exists in that you can tick the box and assign content to team members. Team collaboration is coming, where you can mark it as done or dealt with. Good support function. | Ideally you should set up more than one business for benchmarking, so ideally you're monitoring you and your competition. I like the presentation format exportable reports. Love reports about which types of posts perform best, which times of day, and days of week, also industry benchmarks |
| Who would you recommend it for? | Organisations already using the Salesforce.com platform. Great for big companies with a sizable budget and a large community to monitor and listen to. Possibly a good tool for Digital Agencies who want to offer listening and monitoring services to their clients. Enterprise. | Medium to large organisations with budget who wish to utilise the team collaboration features. Suitable for disparate enterprises centralising brand/company mentions who appear over a wide variety of online sites. | Agencies needing to track client mentions. Or brands/businesses who are being talked about widely and not just on FB and TW. Good example given was Jameson Film Festival, who were talked about widely for a month. No annual contract means they can sign up and use the tool just for the month. | Medium size businesses who are |
| Cost inc VAT | Expensive - Pricing in Feb 2013 - The good folks at Radian6 got back to me and it turns out that they have changed their pricing model. There are now two different models: Business Model: $600 / month for up to 10,000 mentions Agency Model: $950 / month for up to 1 million mentions Historical Data: $100 / month going back to 2008 (except Twitter that goes back to 2010) Source Some hidden charges especially when there are peaks in activity, which seems counter intuitive | Starter $29, Growth $99, Company $299, Enterprise $799 (per month) | €700 per month, without limitation on keywords or Results or seat/user. If you want separate feeds per channel, €200 per additional channel. Single chanel is good 2-3 clients.. | "Free Trial for 2 weeks. $120 per month thereafter. I believe there are other more tiered products, but v difficult to get access, and default is to 120 per month. Social Bakers Statistics = free. Marketing Suite = paid. Additional upgrade features = Analytics (customised reporting, benchmarking etc), Builder (Plan, publish, measure from single place), Advertising (plugin to FB & Twitter ads), Listening." |
| Name of Tool: | Radian6 | Mention | Olytico | Social Bakers |
| Ease of Use | 3 | 3 | 4 | 4 |
| Price | 1 | 2 | 3 | 2 |
| Documentation | 3 | 2 | 2 | 3 |
| Mobile Compatible? |
3 | 3 | 3 | 4 |
| Tablet Compatible? |
3 | 3 | 3 | 3 |
| Social Media Platforms It Monitors | 3 | 3 | 4 | 2 |
| Sentiment analysis | 3 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| Reporting | 2 | 2 | 1 | 2 |
| Unique Insights | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| Analytics? | 3 | 2 | 1 | 3 |
| Any Restrictions? Gotchas? | Some hidden charges especially when there are peaks in activity, which seems counter intuitive | You can’t experiment with searches | No API integration | |
| Customisable dashboard | 3 | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| Product Intuitiveness / UI | 3 | 2 | 4 | 3 |
| Team Collaboration Features? | 3 | 3 | 2 | 1 |
| Are we going to continue using it? | 0 | 0 | 2 | 3 |
| Total Score | 35 | 32 | 32 | 34 |
What’s next from the IIA Toolshed? Social Media Design Tools in July.
Summary:
Social Media Working Group
Social Media Working Week: an invite from @eoink
As this week is officially Social Media Week I thought it was timely to once again kick start the IIA Social Media Working Group. By way of introduction I am Eoin Kennedy and I am this year’s chair.
This is a general call to all interested in helping to contribute to the social media sector in Ireland though collaborative work. We are inviting you all with an open invite to a kick off session in the Digital Hub on 24th February at from 6.00pm to 7.00pm. Please register for free online.
The group has an official set of aims outlined but in truth this sector moves incredibly rapidly and I would really love to hear people views on what they think a grouping of like-minded, motivated and skilled digital people can achieve. In essence the working group is a collective effort and we can achieve more through harnessing each other’s expertise than we can as stand-alone units. No one of us has all the answers.
My experience of these type groups is that if we follow a defined and agreed set of work that it moves quickly from a talking shop to something of real value. We will be asking for time but we will respect it and use it as efficiently as possible. Your expertise may come in the form of peer review of papers/reports we build, speaking at events or face to face meetings to run through work.
Ultimately the Irish Internet Association and the industry in general will benefit from a lot of the work done by the group but this not a selfless task and by giving up time your efforts will be acknowledged.
For my part I am committing a year in chairing the group. I don’t have all the answers and this is not driven by ego but I am passionate about the social media sector and how it changing how we communicate and do business.
At the session on the 24th I will outline some of the work done previously, the work in progress and some thoughts about areas we can make a real impact. I am stepping into big shoes following on from the excellent work by previous chairs Conor Lynch and Brendan Hughes and I would like to thank them and the other members of the group and the IIA staff for the hard work to date.
A note from Roseanne, IIA Membership Manager: While we welcome all to come along to this meeting to hear about the Social Media Working Group plans only fully paid-up members can join the Working Group. You can join online or get in touch with me by email or 01 5424154 to discuss membership with me. I will, of course, be at this meeting if you would like to talk to me then.
blogging, accessibility
My pet online peeves
In this post I get more than a little ranty about my pet internet peeves and Darren decides to throw in his tuppenceworth too. However, on a positive note, I do share some useful resources and content. I wonder finally is it time to resurrect Feedback Friday?
A tweet I saw from Michele Neylon in Blacknight and another from Ann Donnelly of O’Mahony Donnelly eBusiness reminded me of one of my personal online pet peeves. They were both complaining about sites that did not work if you left out the “www” e.g. iia.ie versus www.iia.ie. It’s a little thing I know but I did title this post as being about my pet online peeves!
Are you trying to make me mad?
Will I go on? Okay a little venting! Another one that drives me a little more bonkers than I am already is Out of Office emails that begin with Re: + my subject line. This means that I have to check them just in case you have replied to my email. Not a problem when it’s an individual one to one email but when you send to a list of over 6000 as we do with the Digital Digest it can become a bit of a chore. I know, I know that not everyone has control over how this works on their email but are you sure you can’t fix it on your email?
On the subject of email, I am asking you now to check your signature and make absolutely sure that you include a contact phone number at the very least after you sign off on every email, even then ones that only say “Grand fine with me.”
Whatever about not including your phone number on every sign-off a registered company in Ireland is required by law to include certain details on their website (See Information Leaflet No.7 on the CRO website). It is best practice to include as much detail in your contact page as possible. We also use Meebo (see on the right) to allow people to contact us live. With the recent news that Google will be including negative/ positive reviews in their search algorithms wouldn’t you prefer that people contact you one to one with their complaint rather than write an online review that is negative about your customer service rather than focussing on your exemplary product? (Thanks Christophe Bernigaud for the link!)
I can see your code.
On a slightly more serious note I abhor websites that rip off content. Obviously we’ve all discovered through Google Alerts that some blog somewhere has wholesale copied and pasted our blog content as part of some weird link farming activity (SEO specialists – help me out on this one!) but it’s clear that this is fairly automated and it won’t take long for the host of the free blogging platform to shut them down. What bugs me is when legitimate businesses copy and paste content from other sites, maybe write a prefacing paragraph and sometimes include a link back to the original post. A couple of blogs I have seen recently have done this and I am racking my brain trying to work out if they think this is okay. Yes by all means quote salient points from the content you have read online but please reference and link to it properly. This one particular blog I had ocassion to visit had really good content and I was thinking, “This guy is wasted here: his content is gold!” It was only after day 5 of 5 of top-quality content that a link back to the original article that I realised it was a word for word match. There’s a name for this and it’s copyright infringement and even if the law can’t help you, by Nelly, the internet will. Another give away on a different blog was the fact that the blogging software garbled the pasted text, displaying the HTML code for special characters (eg á). Nobody types that stuff by accident… I presumed the worst and thought, “Poor show, chaps!”
On a more positive note I read a great blog post recently entitled “Things You Should Do Immediately After Launching a Website” which will have food for thought and some actionable items for nearly everyone who is responsible for a website. (Hat Tip to DeepSpin for that one!)
When my colleague Darren, our events & training manager, realised I was writing this post he sent me an email with his pet peeves for your enlightenment. We’re easily ticked off, aren’t we?
Websites that automatically play music or videos. It’s not helpful – I know how to click play! It’s more likely to make me close your page rather than sit and listen to your new song/advertising spiel/video introduction…
Flashy, sparkly, slow-loading homepages. Chances are, I’m just looking for your email address. Don’t make me wait two minutes to see your actual content. Close page, move on.
Websites that don’t actually tell me what the company does. Is it so hard to include a short paragraph telling me what you do? Where’s your About Page?
Pop-up ads. Do I really need to elaborate on this one?
Not knowing the difference between you’re and your.
Typos in generel. Peopel, we live in de age of Splelchek, use it.
Sites that are incompatible with my Mac. This makes me sad and it makes your website useless to me.
Farmville.
I’m done (for now)
Regular readers of this blog will remember a feature I ran on a Friday for a good while called Feedback Friday. It was intended to help companies get some ideas about areas in their sites (their own or clients’) that needed improvement. Well Darren reckons it’s time we resurrected this feature. So if you are a member of the IIA and you would like some constructive feedback about your website or an element of your site or a client’s site please email details to me and we’ll kick off again.
Social Media Working Group
Do you blog for your business? Tell us all about it
Calling all business bloggers! If you blog for your business, no matter what size, we want to hear more about your experience. We would like to gauge the effectiveness of blogging for business, start collecting data about trends, the costs involved, your target audiences and the benefits. We look forward to sharing the anonymised results of this survey and analysis of the data with you in due course.
Please take 10 minutes to complete our survey.
This is an initiative of the Irish Internet Association’s Social Media Working Group to gather information about blogging for business in Ireland. This survey was run last year (results available online) and formed part of the data for the guide “Join the Conversation: A Guide to Blogging for Business” Your response will be completely anonymous and the survey takes about 10 minutes to complete.
Did you complete the survey last year? Please take the time to complete it again; it will help us gauge developing trends in blogging for businesses in Ireland.
blogging
“It’s the best damn marketing tool”
Thanks to IIA Member Oracle‘s Frank Bradley for bringing my attention to the following short video.
I’ve been blogging since 2003 (not here on my personal blog) and much of that blogging was, I presumed, never read by anyone. But every once in a while someone would mention my blog to me in conversation or I would receive a comment and it would all click into place and inspire me to keep going. As more people use social media tools and more of those tools help us broadcast our content (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed) and help us collect, sort, digest and engage with others’ content there will be less blogging in the dark. Some fear that there will be just less blogging and I understand this fear. However I think that a blog should be the backbone of your social media presence, allowing you to expand on the ideas that attract people to you (and your brand if you’re representing a business) in other social media. It also allows you to develop ideas and conversations in your own space.
However reading about Disqus, “a real time comment system”, makes me realise that services like this will give commenters just as much control and ownership of their content as the bloggers who inspired the comment. This acknowledges the importance of commenting and rightly so. It’s been a while since I used a comment management system. I tried one maybe two years ago and it was very clunky but I must give this a go again.
Anyway over to Seth and Tom!
Congress 2009
Bloggers do Congress
Many of the delegates at IIA Congress 2009 shared their impressions, notes and photos of the Congress and now I’d like to share them with you! Please leave a comment if I have missed your review, photos or other media about the event and I would be delighted to add it.
Krishna De shares some really evocative photos of both the Congress and the Net Visionary Awards – have a gander you may see yourself there! Speaking of which you might like to check out the “official” IIA shots on Pix.ie
Keith Shirley gives a very measured review of the two days and his feedback is appreciated. He was involved in our breakout sessions as a members of the Social Media Working Group and he also stepped up as a Social Media mentor on Day 2 so big thanks to him!
Conor Lynch includes a Qik interview with a participant of the Social Media Breakout Session in his review
Eoin Kennedy’s review includes some of the content from the Social Media Breakout Session which should help you with your Twitter strategy for starters.
Gita of Agile Technologies includes reviews of the 3 breakout sessions she attended and are well worth a look.
Fred from Channelship managed to interview two of the plenary speakers from the Congress and I’m including the vids below for you. You can hear the complete speeches from Colm Lyon, Realex Payments, Trey Harvin, dotMobi, Ronan Harris, Google and Colm Long, Facebook as MP3s on the IIA site.
Social Media Working Group
Social Media Case Study – PaddypowerTrader.com Blogs
Continuing the Social Media Working Group’s series of case studies is Michelle Daly from Paddypower was the second of our two case studies at the launch of “Join the Conversation: A Guide to Blogging for Business” Please find her presentation below. Thanks to Brendan Hughes, FBD.ie and chair of the IIA Social Media Working Group for recording and preparing the slide show below.
Congress 2009
Winning blog post(s)
Big thanks to Ann, Dorothy and Ivan who all entered our recent blogging competition. I thought their entries were all great: Ann’s had a lovely personal touch, Dorothy’s was creative and fun and Ivan’s was totally on message for his blog as well as sharing some great reasons with his readers about why they should come along to Congress.
In light of this and the fact there was only three entries AND because it’s Friday and I am feeling magnanimous I would like to give each of the entrants one ticket rather than award a pair to any one winner. It’s my compo and I’ll make up the rules as I go if I want to 🙂
Congratulations and see the three of you next Thursday!
Social Media Working Group
Social Media Case Study – Puddleducks on blogging
This week’s case study is the slideshow presented by Aedan Ryan at the launch of “Join the Conversation: The Guide to Blogging for Business” in April.
Thanks to Brendan Hughes, Chair of IIA Social Media Working Group and Technology Manager with FBD.ie for preparing the slideshow.
A short aside – Making an audio recording is a handy tactic if you would like to reuse your presentations on your company blog. You can easily attach a good quality digital voice recorder to a sound desk to record your voice. (I have an Olympus DS 30 with a Sony ECM-MS907 Mic) You can go even simpler and just record straight to your recorder. I noticed Alan O’Rourke of Spoiltchild using iTalk on his iPhone at an event recently – this app is free. If you are doing the presentation at an external event make sure you have the permission of the organisation for whom you are presenting before posting the presentation on your blog.
