Every small company in Ireland should have a website, the excellent gettingbusinessonline.ie allows small businesses to get a basic website online for free.

Now though, it’s not just enough to have a website, you must also have a presence on social networks as well. It is now essential for companies to have a facebook or google+ page as well. If you don’t, you’re competitors may and you risk falling behind.

So why are social networks so important? Simply put, that is where your customers (no matter your business) are. the numbers of people using social networks in Ireland is astounding. According to figures from May 2011, there are 1,942,980 Irish Facebook profiles. That’s a lot people that you can target with not a lot of work.

Setting up a facebook account and a google account is easy and free. Setting up a facebook page is also free and really easy to do.

Once you have a facebook page set-up you should use it as the focus for your social strategy. One thing that was repeatedly mentioned at the Dublin Web Summit was that engagement was the most important metric.

So what does engagement mean? In facebook, every post on a page you own has a feedback metric displayed, this metric is calculated as “Number of Comments and Likes per impression”. It is not enough to set up a page and post marketing messaging, you have to have content that visitors want share and comment on.

Here are a few pointers for the posts on your facebook pages:

• Think about who your audience is, and write your posts in the language of your audience.
• Keep the posts short.
• Avoid ‘marketing speak’.
• When someone comments on a post, comment back (it’s only polite).

Engagement is really important and does take a bit of time and work, but a successful social media campaign is important for 2 reasons: there are nearly 2 million potential customers; if you don’t, you competitors will.

I hope it makes some sense.

Alex Ljung, Soundcloud; Jens Begeman, Wooga — Europe’s Hottest Startups, moderated by Robin Wauters

SoundCloud can be thought of as the ‘YouTube for sound.

Jens Begeman, Founder of Wooga number 3 games platform worldwide in 2 and half years.

Both vc backed

SoundCloud based in London, New York and San Francisco

Wooga from London and US

Alex Ljung: harder to get funding in Europe,
More capital available in the US, more willing to take risk

Jens Begeman: its improving, investors willing to travel.

Alex Ljung: Investors are asking me what companies should they talk to. Looking for companies.

Jens Begeman: People don’t want to play complex games, people typically play 4 times a day for about 10mins

Jens Begeman:Facebook relies on companies like Wooga.

Jens Begeman:Google plus, too early to tell.

Jens Begeman:Everyone in the company is based in the one office.

Jens Begeman:Moving into mobile ‘Magic Land’

Alex Ljung:Barriers for music creation going down.

Alex Ljung:SoundCloud has an extremely high engagement level

Eric Ly co founder of LinkedIn, Presdo

Founding Cto of LinkedIn left 4 years ago.

Now invests in other companies.

Presdo: social network for conference attendees

Bootstrap model

Discovered the business based on what the market told us.

What he looks for:

• The entrepreneur having a passion about something
• Personally interesting
• Are they dedicated?
• If well executed will it make revenue and a difference.

Five year trends:

• Social/mobile convergence
• Mobile is the future
• The way we interact is going to change a lot
• Natural language interfaces

At LinkedIn spent a lot of time how to build the network.

Studied Spoke to see how they built their network.

Irish entrepreneurs panel

• Anne Hearty CPL
• Brian Conlon First Derivatives based in Newry
• Iain McDonald Skill Pages

Anne Hearty:asked her boss could she specialise? He said no so she went off on her own.

Cash is king

People side of the business is huge

Brian Conlon First Derivatives based in Newry Software guys didn’t understand the business, so he started writing software himself.

Go and meet people

Learn how to use PowerPoint and see if there is an idea worth developing first

If you are small, get on larger companies supplier lists

Barriers to entry are lower now than ever before

Iain McDonald Skill Pages: A business should be about solving a problem

Helps if you have an empathy with the problem

Just go for it

Anne Hearty: Now is a really good time to start business.

Life is a risk

Failure is an opportunity to learn

Scott Belsky Behance

Largest creative community

Behance now has a platform

Critical mass vs credible mass

James Whelton

19 yrs old

Set up coder dojo

Programming for kids

State of IT education in Ireland sucks

Panel: Nick Bilton, New York Times; Mark Little, Storyful; Nick Bell, News International — The Future of News

Technology hasn’t changed news, there are just now much different tools.

Journalists have a more editorial role.

People don’t read newspaper anymore, read online versions

News companies in a race to monetize online before newspaper revenues completely disappear.

Panel: Errol Damelin, Wonga; Ben Milne, Dwolla; Colm Lyon, Realex; John Lunn, PayPal — The Future of Money

Banks suck

Transactions should be free

NFC is just an interface

NFC stands for ‘no fucking chance’

Mark Read WPP

Increase engagement is the most important.

Advertising is screen vs print not digital vs print vs tv

Recession is a great time to invest.

Noel Toolan, BrandAid; Marcy Simon, Burson-Marsteller

It’s about building relationships

Branding countries

Every challenge is an opportunity

How do you rebuild Libya?

Do an audit

Start with local population

Northern Ireland troubles became the peace process

Don’t over promise and under deliver

You don’t need a huge budget to start

Brands don’t deal with ones and zeros, ie need more than likes

So that was it, for another year. It was an interesting couple of days, I would say that it was more a business conference than a tech conference. I didn’t one slide with code on it.

Having said that, there was great content and it was fantastic to see so many high profile speakers in Dublin.

Maz Nadjm from Ogilvy spoke about social commerce and niche markets. Social is not new, social transcends technology. Likes the site Fashim.com

Mark Nolan and Deirdre Waldon from Cawley Nea were up next. They said social was not new. They also did a contrast between Arab spring and the London riots showing how people in one wore Adidas and in the other wore Nike. Called the London riots the ‘Nike Swoosh riots’.

Mark also gave his 3 rules:
Be engagement led
Increase sense of identity
Let it breathe ie. release it into the wild and see what comes of it.

Mark and Deirdre then highlighted Bjorks app album, Biophilia, and rounded up their talk with a couple of videos:
Video of Electric Ireland tweet hunt campaign.

Showed a video of HSE anti smoking campaign. Quit.ie

Adam Levene, from Grapple, the leading mobile app development agency in Europe and north America spoke about the importance of the Mobile phone.

They asked the question ‘How would you live for 24 hrs without mobile?’
One of the responsese was “I was itching like a crackhead without my phone”

There were 840m apps downloaded in uk in 2010 and £4.4bn forecasted global revenues in app purchases.

“When brands get it right returns can be huge” Deloitte

He then showed the Fable 3 Kingmaker mobile app example, and an example of an app from the Premier Inn. This app brrought in £3,000,000 in additional revenue.

Adam then gave 5 tips for anyone developing an app:
Know objectives
Know your audience
Add value to your customers
Know the context
Shout about it

Ciaran Norris from Mindshare, the biggest buyer of google ads globally.
He started with the Wiliam Gibson quote: “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed”

Ciaran then outlined some emerging trends:
Living in a post pc world
6% of Irish population own iPad
51% use social, gaming gamblimg apps
Platform neutral HTMl5 apps
iPad is not mobile: Mark Zuckerberg

Need to educate when using cutting edge tech.

David Sneden Google
Nice google wallet video
Use google insights for market research

Carla Buzasi Huffington Post
Launched in uk the night before hack gate.
Make it as easy as possible to comment.
They have 24000 bloggers in the us.
People are eager to blog.
Politicians love blogging.
Ordinary peoples voices are the most interesting.
If you wouldn’t read it why would anyone else.

Why people blog, people just like talking.
What makes blogs stand out: passion.

Joe Fernandez Klout
Web moving from site centric to people centric.
Klout sends influence score to hotels, call centre to see what perks you deserve or how long you are on hold.
Klout works with companies to put their products in the hands of influencers.
Number of followers not important, it’s all about engagement.

Alan Coleman onlineadvertising.ie
Creating a campaign on facebook LinkedIn allows you to target people by many different variables enabling you to target a ver specific demographic.

David Shing, AoL
It’s all about conversation.
Attention is the new economy.
Engagement
Participation is very important.
Cause marketing: 90% of people interested in it.
Fiesta movement
What’s next?
Conversations not campaigns or chatter.
Second screen companion, for example a phone synched with tv to provide more information
Curation culture.
Mobile merits, frequent flier points for mobile, like the rewards you get from being the mayor of a place in Foursquare
Focus on explorers, look after VIPs
Post digital=physical time online to enrich offline life.

How to succeed:
Encourage remix culture
Find the right people
Harness the power of pre-existing products
Make it look good
Be ambitious
Producer and consumer should work together

Tony Wang Twitter
Was asked why there are no dev jobs in Ireland and mostly qa support type jobs
Replied that it was early days for twitter in Ireland
Also said one of the reasons they came to Ireland was the friendliness

Cindy Gallop makelovenotporn .com
Peoples idea of what ‘love-making’ is formed from what they see in porn.
Porn more easily accesible than sex education.
No open dialog.
Launched at ted 2009.
Ifwerantheworld.com

Nick Bilton, NY Times
The hyper personalisation of everything
Spole about the Nycresistor hacker space
Showed how information spreads
Nice data visualisation of the day that Michael Jackson died died

Ben Parr, Mashable
Gave 7 reasons why entrepreneurs fail.

So that was the day 1 of the 2 day event. The main take aways I got from it were that social and mobile are extremely important, and engagement is more important than number of followers. The web is increasingly becoming about personalities and less about sites.

In a short and entertaining slot, Mary outlined their view of the future of the web. You can see the talk here and download the full deck here

Starting with the theme of “globality”, kpcb outlined the top 25 websites in the world (based on market value). Mostly, these sites are US based, but there is a growing trend in Chinese and Russian sites, for example the Chinese site Baidu is 5th largest site in the world. One interesting statistic was that the vast majority of the users of the largest websites are from outside the US, 81% in fact.

The number of new users in the last 3 years also threw up a few surprises. The top five countries are China, India, Nigeria, Russia and Iran. It would be interesting to see if any Irish businesses are targeting any of these countries.

Social networking seems to really capture peoples time especially in Israel, Argentina, Turkey and Chile spending more than 10hours a month on social networking sites.

Unsurprisingly, the growth of mobile is a continuing trend with a 35% growth in global 3g subscribers. No doubt the increase in smart phones like iPhones and Android phones has something to do with this. In 2010, smartphone sales surpassed ordinary phones in Western Europe. There is still a long way to go for smart phones to go as there 835 million smartphone subscribers and 5.6 Billion mobile subscribers.

Mobile usage of sites such as Pandora, Twitter and Facebook has increased dramatically since 2008. For example Pandora mobile usage increased from 5% to 60% in that space of time. Google mobile queries quadrupled in the last year. Mobile advertising has ramped dramatically as well, up to $12Bn in 2011E.

The next part of the presentation involved the changes in the way that we interact with computers, the evolution of the user interface as it moved from text based to graphical to sensory. Touch and sound now form a large part of the user experience. This is mainly thanks to the visionary work of Steve Jobs and the iPad.

According to Mary the next big thing is audio. Sites like Spotify (unfortunately not available in Ireland yet) and SoundCloud are leading the way in this regard. Voice services, like the newly released siri on iPhone and Google voice search are another example.

E-commerce online continues to grow against offline, with online accounting for 8% of total retail sales in the US. Mobile sales continued to grow also. Another interesting fact is the way that consumers are using their mobile devices to check prices before making a purchase. 52% of smartphone users gave the reason for abandoning a purchase in-store, that they found it online for a better price. That means that these people were in the store before abandoning their purchase. 51% gave “Found it at another store for a better price” as their reason. It shows that with smartphones, people can check prices in other shops, while they are in your store.

Mobile and online can also help with real world commerce. Sites like Groupon and Foursquare are driving business to local companies. For example a friend of mine is currently the ‘Mayor’ of Brambles in Sandyford through Foursquare. He got a free mushroom soup, and made me want to knock him off his perch.

Advertising spend online still has massive growth potential. The spend on advertising compared with time spent online does not correspond. There is a potential market of $20bn in online and mobile up for grabs in the US alone. Print media is going to be the loser, with revenues dropping for the fifth year in a row.

According to kpcb, the biggest trend in the near future is the empowerment of people through mobile devices. 85% of the worlds population is covered by wireless signals. To put that into context, only 80% of the worlds population has access to electricity.

The rest of the presentation is mostly about the US economy, the highlights being; there is lots of uncertainty and the US has too much debt.

So what does all this mean for Irish businesses? For a start you should have a global focus. If you have a website, it should work on smartphones. If you don’t have a website, why not? It’s easy to set up.

Your business should also be on facebook and twitter. Social networks are your customers are, so it makes sense for your business to have a presence there no matter if you are a local petrol station/shop or a global multinational.

When we think of start-ups, especially in the technology sector, we think of young men tinkering away in their garage or dorm room (before they drop out of course). The reality is a bit different. Starting a company is really hard. If the ‘nerds’ who start up tech companies seem to have no social life, it’s probably because they don’t; starting the company is taking up all their time.

After the general election there was a lot of talk about creating jobs through the digital economy and governments don’t create jobs, they create the environment to create jobs. If the article form the New York Times is correct, the government should create the environment to create start-ups.

So what can be done to create this environment? The government essentially own the banks. Through Nama they own loads of property. We have a highly educated population and as the Global Irish Economic Forum showed us earlier in the month, we have a global business community that is willing to help.

The first thing we need to do is create a start-up culture; a hacker culture.

I’m not talking about the kind of hackers you see in Hollywood movies, I mean the kind of hacker Paul Graham had in mind in his book Hackers and Painters. This culture invariably starts in college or around colleges. It is no coincidence that silicon valley is close to Caltech and Stanford, and on the east coast of the US, a lot of start-ups are created in the vicinity of MIT and Harvard.

What drives the start-up culture in the US is a determination to give things a go. The fear of failure doesn’t really come into it. It’s better to take a risk and fail 100 times because you only need to succeed once. In Ireland, we have a problem with that way of thinking. Anyone who tries to do anything risky is seen as thinking “they’re better than everyone else”. There is a genuine fear of being laughed at by your friends down in the pub if you fail (and sometimes if you succeed).

Most successful entrepreneurs consider the experience of failure to be an important step in their eventual success. We need to teach people in Ireland that it’s ok to fail. The best way of doing this is to allow people to fail in a safe environment.

So what does this safe environment look like? I think the Government should create hacker spaces, like tóg around the major IT universities in the country.

We could use some of the buildings in Nama’s portfolio for example. Attached to each hacker space should be a business development unit to help start-ups with the legal and tax implications of starting a company. Thereby allowing start-ups to get on with doing what they do best, creating new innovative products. The government should also encourage the banks to provide funding for potentially successful companies. It would also be a place where the current leaders in the business community could lend their expertise in a mentoring role.

If the New York Times is right, we need to lower the barrier to creating a start-up before we can rely on the digital economy creating jobs.

Is feidir linn.

When you look at some of the numbers, it’s simply staggering; Facebook has 800 million users; Groupon’s growth rate in June of this year was 2,241%. These huge companies didn’t exist 10 years ago. How did they do it? Can Irish businesses capitalize on the techniques they used?

Back in 2004, Mark Zuckerberg realized that people love to see what their friends were doing. Initially, Facebook (or theFacebook as it was originally known) had a very basic profile and was intended to just share with your friends the classes you were taking. From those humble beginnings, Facebook is now worth, according to the latest private share auction on SharesPost, $82.25 billion. Facebook has since become the main player in the social networking space. As Seth Godin outlined in ‘The Dip’ becoming number one means that you are first by a long way.

What is social networking anyway? One way of describing social networking is sharing content and recommendations with your friends. It’s the simplicity of the idea that has made social networking so successful. I am friends with people because we enjoy the same things. So when someone shares something with their friends, it is only natural that they would enjoy it. Of course, not all your friends will enjoy everything you share, but for the most part they will.

All this about sharing, what does it have to do with business? Well it’s all about engagement. When people see that you share good quality content, they will want to engage with you, become your friend, if you like, which they will in turn share with their friends. This is great news for your product or business.

Imagine you have the coolest, most useful product ever and everyone that you show it to agrees with you. How do you get it to market? Traditionally, you would buy some space in a magazine or newspaper, and hope your ad agency could convey your products coolness factor. You may even send it to world renowned reviewers and hope they have time to review it.

However, in todays socially connected world you can simply post a video on youtube and tell a few key people and before you know it you are a multi-millionaire. Easy right? Unfortunately, it’s not quite that easy. The first thing you need to do is build your audience.

Building an audience is possible to do on a shoe string, it does take some patience and work though. The best way of doing it is a 3 pronged attack: a blog; a twitter account and a facebook page.

Writing a blog can be time consuming and hard to keep going (I know all about that). To have a blog that attracts an audience, you need to create content that is relevant to that audience. This content also needs to be discoverable by search engines (SEO). The blog should also be regularly updated, it might be a good idea to set up a calendar alerting you as to when you should post a new article. Articles can be short, they don’t all have to be war and peace. Finally, it’s important to interact with your audience, if someone takes the time to leave you a comment, they deserve a reply. Don’t make your blog about your products. The content has to be interesting; it’s not a sales pitch. That doesn’t mean you can’t mention your products, just don’t make them the focus.

For good examples of blogs have a look at hubspot’s blog of 37 signals’ blog.

Creating a twitter account with a large following starts, again, with good content. You should add ‘tweet this’ links to all articles in your blog. Following people in your industry is another way of growing your audience.

Finally there is Facebook. Your company should have a Facebook page. This year social network use has surpassed portal use, and Facebook is the biggest of them all. Having a presence on Facebook gives you access to 800 million users. The key to a successful Facebook page is once again, good content, regularly updated and engagement with your audience.

Using social networking to promote your business is a must, even if your business is not online. If you don’t do it, your competitors will. Just listen to Burberry’s CEO Angela Ahrendts.

At first I thought it was all straight forward. I called them up and was told that in 5 working days I would have broadband. Cool, it’s only “up to 8MB”, but whatever, it’s got a contention ratio of 1 i.e. I’m not sharing my connection.

So on the the 30th of September I call eircom to set up my direct debit. While on the call, I asked where my ADSL modem was. I was then told that broadband hadn’t even been ordered for my account. At this stage I was a little bit miffed. So I said ok, make sure that 8MB broadband has been ordered and it gets sent out to me.

In the middle of this call the sales guy tried for (what seemed like) a long time to sell me emobile.

Fine, I’ll have 8MB broadband (sorry, up to 8 MB) in 5 days time. Or so I thought.

Five (working) days later, I received the ADSL modem. I set up the ADSL modem with anticipation of my blazing fast (up to) 8MB. Hmm, it doesn’t seem all that fast. Right, off to speedtest.net, what’s this 0.8MB?

Call number 3: Tech support at 8am in the morning. According to tech support, I only had a 1MB connection. The tech support guy told me I needed to talk to sales to get it increased to 8MB. He then told me he would transfer me to the sales department. The only problem was; there was no one in the sales department. Now I’m annoyed. How is it possible that the guys in tech support don’t know what time the sales department opens? Really frustrating.

I then waited until 9am for phone call number 4. I got through to one of the sales staff. At this stage I didn’t really trust what the front line sales staff were telling me so I asked to speak to a supervisor. After being put on hold 4 times I eventually got to talk to a supervisor. I wanted someone to send me an email confirming my order. I was then told it was against company policy to send external emails.

After speaking to someone in customer care, I was told that my case would be escalated.

Yesterday, I got a call from eircom. I tried to explain to him that it’s not the people that are the problem, it’s the process.

It took me 4 phone calls to get what I ordered and at no stage in the process did I get a confirmation that anybody understood what I ordered.

So how could eircom drastically improve the experience? Well here’s a few things they could try:

• Implement an automatic email system that emails people confirming what has been requested
• Tell the tech staff what time the sales center opens
• If I call to set up direct debit, don’t try sell me crappy emobile
• Frontline staff should be ok with letting people talk to their supervisor
• Educate frontline sales staff on what they are selling, e.g. if it can take up to 3 weeks to install broadband, tell me and explain why.

One thing eircom have done right is their twitter account. I found the guys doing it to be polite, helpful and responsive.

Anyway, rant over.

I have to say I think Apple’s behavior in this has been appalling. The only reason that Apple are doing this is for money. If they allowed the flash player on these devices, developers could make applications available to users without the need to provide them through the app-store and thus deny apple their cut.

According to Steve Jobs, Adobe Flash is a closed proprietary, whereas Apple is all about the open-source with Webkit. That’s great, but Webkit has nothing to do with this debate.

The Adobe Flash platform is a lot more open than Apple’s mobile platform. Let’s compare them.

To develop an iPhone application I can use xcode, Apple’s development environment, that’s it nothing else. To create a swf file that runs in the flash player I can use haxe, flash develop or fdt. There are loads more and none of these come from Adobe.

Once you have created my application, it doesn’t get any better. To make an iphone application available to the public, a developer has to pay a fee of $99. This fee allows developers to submit their application for the appstore. First, however, it has to be reviewed by Apple. This review process has resulted in a lot of denials and not just apps made by small independent developers. Google have had at least 2 apps denied, Google Voice and Google Latitude when they submitted them to the app store. On the other hand, once you have created an application on the flash platform you can share it however you wish.

Steve Jobs states performance as one of the reasons why xcode is the only dev environment allowed. This makes the assumption that if developers use something other than xcode, the apps will not perform as well. In that case, why not let these apps be developed on different platforms and add performance to the review process. That way, apps that are badly written on xcode are caught as well.

From a technology point of view, it doesn’t really make any sense. There are loads of developers out there who create great apps. Why is Apple forcing them to use their tools?

But lets look at it from Apple’s point of view. Why should they let the Flash on their products? There is absolutely no reason why they should. It just means that users will have less choice. They can only install apps from the app store. They are creating a closed system and history has shown that when a closed system challenges a open system, the open system always wins.

I love Apple’s products, I’m using a MacBook to write this post, but at the moment if someone offered me the choice between an iPhone or a Google Nexus One Android phone, I’d have to go with the Nexus One.