RTÉ Pocket for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad on the iTunes App Store

RT @morning_ireland: Get all 11 RTÉ radio stations on the new Pocket Player app http://bit.ly/bpPr41. How cool is that?

Packrati.us = Twitter + Delicious

Nice idea for delicious users http://packrati.us/

Slashdot Technology Story | Google To Pay $8.5 Million In Buzz Privacy Settlement

RT @slashdot: Google To Pay $8.5 Million In Buzz Privacy Settlement http://bit.ly/bs9QSK

Jean-Paul Hévin ouvre un bar dédié au chocolat à Paris lundi

http://tommiekelly.com/

Exploits Database by Offensive Security

SixApart Kills Off Vox

Image via Wikipedia

Politically Incorrect Tshirt of the Day

I spotted this while browsing ThinkGeek earlier:



Nothing like a little bit of FourSquare humour on a Friday !

How NOT To Market Via Email - Golden Spiders 2010

I don't like lazy marketing.

I've never given the Golden Spiders permission to email me or my business, yet again today they did.

Annoying.

However it's also quite amusing ..

One of the emails landed in our helpdesk which stripped out ALL the HTML .. what was left over wasn't exactly um .. intelligible..

Local Knowledge Is Key

If you're going to spend money registering domains in target countries and doing targetted pay per click campaigns you should also take the time to do some basic market research. And no, I don't mean pure figures - I mean cultural stuff.

Jonathan Brazil spotted a really silly mistake this morning:

If you go to the hassle of buying a .ie and sponsored Google links for Irish searches, don't call it EIRE and price your products in GB£

The ad in question:


And here's another one I found:
I can't think of anyone IN Ireland using the term "Eire" or in what context they might even try to use it.

Seriously.

If you're going to try selling to us then learn to speak to us in terms we understand and use.

Dropping Sweetcron

I was using Sweetcron to publish a rather boring "life stream" over on one of my other personal domains.

Unfortunately the script has been pretty much abandoned by developers, so no new features or updates have been made in well over a year.

It also didn't have ANY caching options whatsoever, so it really wasn't a "gentle" script to run.

I'm currently looking for a suitable alternative, though I'm experimenting with a Wordpress plugin and theme, which seem to work reasonably well.

Hanging Out With Domainers In Dublin

For the next couple of days I'll be in Dublin for the TRAFFIC conference.

It's the first time that there's been a serious domain industry event in Ireland, so it's nice to see so many familiar faces on my "home turf".

The lineup for the event is good, but I'm really looking forward to seeing how the auction tomorrow afternoon goes. There are some really good names on the list...

Steve Jablonsky – The Craziest Mess I've Ever Seen

http://www.last.fm/music/Steve+Jablonsky

Steve Jablonsky – Mass Winnings

http://www.last.fm/music/Steve+Jablonsky

Steve Jablonsky – This Tongue Thing's Amazing

http://www.last.fm/music/Steve+Jablonsky

Steve Jablonsky – I'm Not Ready to Die

http://www.last.fm/music/Steve+Jablonsky

Steve Jablonsky – Renovatio

http://www.last.fm/music/Steve+Jablonsky

Steve Jablonsky – Mass Vehicular Carnage

http://www.last.fm/music/Steve+Jablonsky

Social Media and A Hosting Provider / Domain Registrar

When you don't have a massive marketing budget you need to be careful how you spend what you have and try to find alternate methods to promote your business.

Promoting your business shouldn't be just about the sale. Of course you need to make sales, but there are better ways to interact with people than just trying to sell people your products and services.

This is where "social media" comes into the picture.

"Social Media" for us as a company has gone from being almost an "afterthought" to being one of our more focussed online channels. It helps us provide customer service to our clients, while also helping to drive sales and get feedback on new product and service ideas.

Unfortunately there are a hell of a lot of "buzzwords" and inane claims being made by people about how social media can help companies. A couple of years ago everyone was told that they needed to have a blog, now they're being told that Twitter and Facebook are the "one true way".

Sure, there is some truth in it, but the reality is that a lot of people don't really understand how it works and a lot of the people advising them are out for very short term benefit. (I'd love to know how many "social media" related businesses have sprung up over the last couple of years!)

For many companies they'd be better off ignoring Twitter and Facebook rather than setting up profiles across multiple social media networking site and services and not actually using them actively. This may seem to be counter-intuitive, but in reality it's not.

You'll have to excuse the analogy, but if you're never going to answer the phone or make a phone call, would you continue paying line rental?

While a company that actively engages and adopts social media as part of its business processes can benefit (and I know we have), unless you are willing to really "dive in" it's probably going to do you more harm than good.

So what has been our experience to date?

Bear in mind that some things we've done probably wouldn't suit everyone, but I'll share them anyway.

We have been actively engaging with the public via discussion forums, blogs and mailing lists since we first started out over 7 years ago. The "explosion" in social media hasn't changed that. All that's really changed is the media that we use.

I've posted some of the statistics of our usage etc., in the past, so let's revisit them again.

Twitter can be a fun medium, though when things go wrong you need to be able to respond as quickly as possible. We have hooked both this blog and our status one into our Twitter account, so that all our blog posts, be they news or service related, get distributed to our Twitter followers. We have experimented with adding in other RSS sources, such as our forum, to our Twitter account, but the results weren't favourable.

Apart from news, customer service stuff and technical service related messages, we've also used Twitter to run a variety of "silly" competitions and other promotions. We view them as "silly" and "fun" and based on the feedback we've had from clients they seem to get a "kick" out of them as well.

In terms of our follower count it has been growing, but I wouldn't consider that to be the most valuable metric. When talking about social media you need to remember that the important thing is the "social" side of it. You need to interact!


We do use the web interface sometimes, but generally speaking we use 3rd party services to read and respond.

As you can see the most popular client for us is Tweetdeck, which we use on both desktop machines and mobile phones (iPhone). The only thing to be wary of if you're using a single client to handle multiple accounts is not mixing up the accounts! (We've all made that mistake in the past and it could be potentially embarassing!)

You'll also notice that we're using Twitterfeed, which pulls in any RSS source you throw at it and Facebook. Anything we post on our Facebook wall gets automatically sent to Twitter as well.

We recently setup a custom branded URL shortener so you'll see tweets from @blacknight and various members of our staff referencing blacknig.ht.

And since I mentioned branding....

If you're tweeting for business then you need to do it separately from any personal account that you may have. You should also spend a bit of time customising the avatar and background to fit in with your company's branding. We got our designer to do custom backgrounds for our main account and those of several staff members, so if you go to our accounts in a browser you'll see our branding is retained.

Facebook is a slightly different beast.

We've been using it in pretty much the same way that we've been using Twitter, so it's also being used to pull in posts from both blogs, as well as a channel to promote special offers and deal with customer service queries.

There is one notable downside to Facebook. There is no way to know if someone has posted on your "wall" unless you actually go there and check, so it's very easy to miss time-sensitive queries. To help counter this we added our primary contact details to the sidebar.

But what about actual metrics?

Here's a breakdown of our Facebook page:

The page has grown in popularity steadily over the last year and you can clearly see that our audience is primarily male and Irish!

Making sense of Facebook stats isn't that easy, as they use a lot of their own jargon, but "interactions" are pretty self-explanatory:

We tend to see spikes in activity if we run promotions or competitions

Over the past year we've run several promotions via Twitter and Facebook. While the uptake on them has been very good we've also been reminded more than once that not everyone is using them, so cross-posting coupon codes and other offers to our main blog or via our email newsletter has paid dividends. To that end we also setup a dedicated site just for our latest offers and coupon codes.

Going where our customers are (or could be) is essential, so we keep an active eye on discussion forums and mailing lists where people might be talking about us or the services that we offer. While there are several monitoring tools available Google Alerts works very well most of the time.  We also use Twitter's search functions pretty heavily!

Another area that we've found helpful has been video. Using tools like Camtasia or iShowU it's quite easy to put together tutorials and screencasts to help our clients make the most of our services. Admittedly we haven't posted a new video in quite some time, but it's on our ever growing todo list! And since we don't like being overly constrained by 3rd party services we've been cross-posting our videos to multiple video sharing sites using a combination of blip.tv and TubeMogul.

So what if any advice can I / we give you?

I guess the sanest advice is as follows.

If you're thinking of using social media to help your business then that is commendable. However if you're going to do it setup a personal account first and see how people use (and abuse) the various media first. A common issue I've seen with businesses attempting to use social media is that they don't understand how people use it, as they haven't watched at all and simply dived in. If you take a bit of time to observe and learn you'll probably gain a lot more.

There are an ever growing number of tools and services available to help people and businesses use social media and a lot of them either don't cost anything or are incredibly cost-effective.

We intend to keep using social media to communicate and interact with our clientele as we feel that is working for us.

There are probably a lot of things we could be doing and things we might be able to do better, but we're always willing to try new things!

In closing, though I started this off thinking about our experiences as a registrar and hosting provider I guess most of what we've done would apply to any company that offers services.. Maybe I should change the title?


Metrics pulled in from Facebook, Tweetstats and Twittercounter

TRAFFIC Dublin

I'm at TRAFFIC Dublin for the next couple of days.

It's nice to not have to get a plane to attend a domain industry event!

The schedule for the two days is interesting but, in common with most industry events, the real work and interest is in what goes on in the corridors.

Dublin's Shelbourne hotel has been invaded by internet industry professionals from the four corners of the globe!

Tomorrow's live auction should be fun and I'll try to post the results as soon as I have them

Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Now Available On VPS

We are now offering Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) on our Linux VPS servers.

Ubuntu 10.04 is an LTS (long term support) release, which means that there will be security updates made available for a longer period of time than you would get with a non-LTS version.

You can read more about how Ubuntu handles release cycles here.

Ubuntu is a very flexible operating system and is perfect for anyone who wants to run a variety of services on a LAMP system.

For example, you could run:

• webservers
• email servers
• database servers
• development servers
• CVS