I was unable to attend the blogging conference in Dublin on saturday, organised by the European Commission. With a lot of foresight, Philippe and Cian ensured that people like myself could view proceedings by streaming most of the event with Ustream.TV;

Well done guys - the presentations I saw were good; I thought the workshop with Harry, Damien, Richard and Joe was excellent - it’s a shame that it was so short.

The picture included here shows Damian O’Broin from AskDirect.ie giving his overview of social media campaigns for fund raising and online advocacy; I think this was a particularly good session and highlighted the innovation that is happening in this sector; I would have liked to hear more offline, his views on the models that are currently being used in this sector - he alluded to it, but did not really have the opportunity to develop on.

I suppose it proves exactly the reason you need to attend get together like this - otherwise, you really do miss the networking opportunities.

Ah yes. Most mortals will agree that the NRA radio and TV campaign for the M50 becoming barrier free was irritating. I’m not sure what got to me most - the cover version of the Queen hit from the 1970’s, or the pseudo “where oh where is shadow” sharp-and-pointy-type-characters from the Bear in the Blue House.

I’m such a snark really.

Right up until the end of september, the advert continued to play unchanged - and still rattling on about the fact that the M50 was going barrier free “from the 30th August“. Fair enough you’d probably say - getting bang for the buck by just doing one version, reinforcing the change over date, how much better it was goinf to be and all of that good stuff….

So it came in the light relief slot of the Last Word on Today FM yesterday evening, that actually there are some huge problems with the system, and specifically the positioning of the tag in a travelling car.

In fairness to the NRA - they have all of the requirements for the tags well documented - in information sent to those who bought the tags. The NRA website however, is a different matter - I wasn’t really able to find any information about tolling and possible teething problems - apart from that contained in press releases.

Getting to my main point then - are the NRA guilty of not being customer focussed? From the little I heard today, having a quick look at the report in the Irish Times, and checking their website - I think they are. What could they have done?

• Be more proactive with these issues on the airwaves. They mention it deep in a press release on the website from the 20th August that “teething problems” are expected. They should have known that any hack worth their salt, and their old friends in the AA would be crucifying them by now; the financial meltdown over the past few weeks has probably saved them to this point.
• Press Releases are not for ordinary people; they are for media outlets; don’t communicate with your customers through press releases. If you are - you are failing the customer.
• Make these teething problem difficulties more obvious on the website. Have a huge feckin’ button on the home page that leads the customer to a dedicated sub-section (not a press release !) about the issues; at the very least, replicate the materials that were sent to customers - that should be a no-brainer.
• Don’t let Minister Dempsey infer that motorists are lazy or stupid on national radio.
• Drop the “Don’t stop me know” ad campaign, and instead inform the lazy and/or stupid motorists how to use the tag - (now should that be in front of or behind the rear view mirror?)

Customers should always have a good time, they should always have a ball.

Update 1 : Have I been too harsh, given that main site is not nra.ie but rather www.eflow.ie ?

Update 2 : I received my statement for september (video registration) and it was correct.

We’ve been deep in client projects over the past few months, so here’s a quick rundown on some of the things we have been up to.

Mobile Marketing : Online solution for a retail customer to enable them to easily communicate with their customers via an opt-in text messages for products and services. Features included message personalisation, campaign maintenance and delivery statistics. We’re really pleased with this work.

Web Consultancy : Helped a major Irish Travel Industry organisation in developing theit online marketing strategy including more than a hat tip to a stragetic use for all things social media and web 2.0.

Project Management and System Specification : Project Management for a major overhaul of an online booking engine and website, along with the specification of widget based affiliate system.

Viral Marketing Tools : We are just finishing up a project with a financial institution that involves widget development (both javascript and flash) and embed capability on websites, blogs and social network sites such as facebook.

Joomla Development : We have also recently completed a major Joomla implementation, which included the development of new modules and components for easier client maintenance, data extraction and customer support.

Wordpress Development : In tandem with all of these, we have been kicking along with some of our core web development skills in developing Wordpress based sites, and designing bespoke plugin features where necessary.

We’re looking forward to a bit of a break over the next few weeks…

We’re currently working on a web development project that will allow a customer to run a highly targeted SMS marketing campaign.

Thing is, we’re trying to gather some old, SIM free mobile phones together to do some serious testing. Those we have asked, have pretty much already donated their old models to the the very worthy Jack and Jill Childrens Foundation.

However, iff you have a mobile lying around - we will pay for postage and packing, and will in turn donate to the foundation in about 3 weeks time - on project go live. Drop an email to kevin[at]electricmill.com

Why not buy a few SIM free phones? I may have to, but would prefer not to; these will be used for a week or so, and no more.

A couple of weeks back, I outlined our interest in Electric Mill to public data projects , and an initial example of how A&E attendance figures could be presented. This is a good example of the data being available, but delivered in such a way as to make it kind of hard to get at.

So cue Side Project #2. If you live in Ireland, chances are you are either interested/intrigued/repulsed by house prices. This national obsession with home ownership is well recognised.

For reasons to profound to delve into here - planning regulations for residential or commmercial development - are also keenly followed by the media as well as by the public.

While individual county and city councils provide access on their websites to this information - and the information is also provided in regional and local newspapers - it is inevitably hard to get at.

Electric Mill Side Project #2 is Planning Buddy - a website that easily allows a user to create alerts based on particular named locations of interest to them.

For example, I live in Strandhill, Co Sligo. My account on planningbuddy.com is filtered to trigger emails based on matches of “strandhill” in Sligo. I can also receive these alerts as an RSS feed if I so wish.

In my “spare” time - I also maintain a community website for the area . For that site, I have configured a widget from within my Planning Buddy account - and placed this small piece of HTML code on the community site; Suddenly, anyone who visits there, has an instant view of the latest planning applications in the area. The widget is fully configurable for things like colours and so on, so that it fits nicely with what’s there already.

At the moment, Planning Buddy correlates just over half of the councils in the country including Carlow, Cavan, Clare, Cork, Donegal, Kerry, Leitrim, Limerick, Louth, Monaghan, Offaly, Roscommon, Sligo, Tipperary North and Waterford.
In order to get an understanding of what counties to include next, we’re asking for visitors to the site to suggest what counties might be completed next ; we will then look to facilitate this by building bespoke scraping rountines.

In the background to all of this, we’re currently working on expanding the reporting side - for example comparing applications per county per month, downloading the data, etc.

We’ve already had some queries from people that want to advertise on the site and that’s nice - we’ll be looking at this type of scenario and others over the coming weeks.

In the meantime, we would be delighted if you could send any comments or suggestions as to how we might improve what’s currently there.

We are becoming pretty familiar with bloggers every now and then ripping into businesses that are providing poor customer service and poor customer experience.

I’m talking here about someone that writes a less than complimentary blog post on a product or service; I am not talking about conversations and threads on an online forum, etc.

Most businesses will have little experience about how to engage properly with negative commentary from bloggers, who by definition will be pretty savvy communicators.

The jump from email, phone and forum dialogue through to discussion on the bloggers site - an away fixture if you will - is a lonely place to be slugging it out in defence of a product or service.

The thing that’s missing for me though in these encounters is the success rate or closure rate for the blogger vs. how it could have been achieved through “traditional” avenues?

Does the public dialogue and exposure help solve the problem?

Does the service provider often just dig their heels in and say “feck you” to the negative criticism of the blogger - thinking that it will go away.

The latter is the worst case scenario for the blogger - probably more than made up for by increased traffic and just a little more profile.

The worst case scenario for the service provider is in how their brand name will probably now be submerged in negativity in their first page of SERP’s.

From that perspective alone, they should be swallowing their pride, desisting from cease and desist and such foolishness, and attempt to make the customer happy - regardless of the feelings of indignation, anger and loathing that they feel.