Active Growth is the Activate Ireland blog, focused on internet marketing and the areas of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) online marketing. Have a question we can answer in our blog? Contact us!
Tesco online is a great service that has saved my bacon on several occassions. I use it because I am very busy, and sometimes lugging small kids around the shops after a stressful day just isn’t worth it. The delivery guy is lovely, and the quality of the food has always been good, no sneaking out-of-date items into my delivery.
I did fill out a customer satisfaction survey by email some months ago. Another one arrived earlier this week. I ignored it. This morning I have a reminder to fill it in, and to be honest, I’m annoyed about it. Please don’t ask people, who are already too busy to get into the shops in the first place, to fill in yet another online questionnaire. It’s self-serving communication harrassing customers to remind them to fill it in. I know that the information is useful to Tescos, it’s great that they are interested in customer feedback, and improving the customer experience. But they are losing sight of the fact that it is a time-saving service that they provide.
I attended Bizcamp Limerick on Saturday, or most of it anyway. I was impressed with the energy and enthusiasm around the place, both organisers and participants. I know the question has been raised of how many businesses will be formed or radically changed as a result of the two Bizcamps. The Bizcamp events are geared towards start-ups and early stage businesses. These are the benefits as I see them:
Contacts, contacts, contacts. Activate is in business over 2 years, a huge amount of our work comes via contacts, word of mouth, and who we know.
Exposure to new thinking, ideas, products. If you sit in your own little bubble, you run the risk of limiting your knowledge about new technology, developments, methodologies & key players in your field.
Enthusiasm is infectious. Current media output could make you think that 90% of Ireland is jobless and depressed, it is good to recalibrate your sense of reality.
Start-ups generally start up small. This can easily lend itself to a sense of isolation. These events help you realise that there is a whole army of people out there just like you, plugging away and getting things done.
Access to free advice on start-up admin/legal issues
Activate is over 2 years old. We have gotten through the initial hairy stages of wondering whether the phone will ring. We have our contact list, we are busy, happy and focused. Had I stayed in bed on Saturday morning, I don’t think I would have missed anything life changing. I enjoyed the motivational talks I attended, and will work a little harder at some of those things.
However, there will have been people for whom this was the first such event they attended. And it might just spark them to take the leap of faith, or keep them motivated when days are tough, or provide them with a crucial contact who manages to solve an issue or refer a client down the line.
The fallout from Dell in the Limerick area will be huge. The wind-down is only just starting. An estimated 9,500 jobs will be lost, and these people are emerging out into a very unfavourable jobs landscape. Starting out for themselves is a new idea that some may be just getting their heads around, they haven’t done the so called ‘blow-job circuit’ before. This practical and emotional support is crucial to them.
Because let us not minimise the emotional impact of lay-offs. At Bizcamp, Joan Mulvihill, spoke about feeling miserable, wretched and an utter failure after being made redundant in late 2008. A career driven person, a huge amount of her self worth and identity was tied up in her career achievements. In the dot com crash of 2000, a colleague of my husband’s, who was laid off from a semiconductor company, responded with suicide. He was middle aged with a family and a large mortgage. He didn’t believe he had any job prospects at his age, and he didn’t see any way forward.
The talk of same old faces, same old talk on the circuit is a very subjective one. People will naturally drift away from these events once they feel they have nothing further to gain. And new people will come along, and hear this stuff for the first time, and be inspired and energised and delighted to meet like minded people.
Just because your time at Bizcamp type events may have naturally come and gone, that doesn’t mean Bizcamp’s time has come and gone.
I hope all the Mammies had a lovely Mother’s Day yesterday. I was fairly spoiled and had the unusual experience of hitting 10pm not feeling exhausted.
Because like most working Mammies, there is a huge amount of juggling on a daily basis. Being self-employed adds more complications to the mix. Not only is there work to be completed, but the admin side of a business, the invoicing, reporting, marketing, travelling to meetings, tax, VAT etc. How do you balance this so it minimises the impact on your work, and also minimises the impact on your family?
After my last daughter was born, I managed to take a break of a full 10 days. Then it was back to work. My husband took 7 weeks off work, and I took breaks only to eat, shower and breastfeed. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it, but I felt I had little choice. Now my daughter, who is coming up to the year mark, is cared for at home by a fantastic child minder. I start work at 7am and finish at 2pm, just in time for the school run. Then I become mammy, cleaner, cook & grazed-knee kisser until the kids go to bed, and quite often then I’m to be found on the laptop until midnight or later.
When the baby was 5 weeks old, I had to pitch to a large multinational, with the potential of taking over their Irish online marketing. So, physically wrecked, I did my research, made my preparations and drove to Dublin with baby in carseat. I fed her, handed her over to my own fantastic Mammy, and headed into the meeting. About 15 mins into proceedings, I could feel something was amiss, but I ploughed on. In the back of my head I wondered about the etiquette of stopping a meeting due to ‘leaking boobs’. Should I just say to the Marketing, and IT Directors “Sorry, just give me a second but I appear to be leaking all over my freshly pressed shirt “?. And if I did, it wasn’t like I had a change of clothes in the car. And the implication to me was unfair – to stop proceedings would imply that if they were to work with this woman they would be presented with problems, when in fact I had surmounted more on that particular day than anyone else to be there.
As it turns out I ploughed on, and everyone pretended not to notice the very large stains on my clothes.
And as time has worn on, I have gotten used to pretending not to notice the unmade beds, or the stack of dishes, or the occassional empty fridge. I have decided that being superhuman is not on my to do list. I have hired a cleaner, taken up Tai Chi and joined the gym.
And I had a really lovely day yesterday, because I had help around the house, and because I took the decision that I wasn’t going to clean, cook or wash anything. I guess sometimes we have to decide which of the balls we are juggling is least important and let that one go.
I leave you with the haunting Kate Bush, Maxwell’s version just can’t touch the original for me.
I am tired of seeing an advert with a t-shirt emblazoned with my year of birth when I log into Facebook. No – I do not want to advertise to the world that I am [insert guessed age here] for God’s sake! In fact, I spend a small fortune on skin care products, the gym, organic whatsimibobs and drink so much water every day that it renders me unable to move more than 50 metres from the bathroom at any given time!
However, the targeted ads may be smarter than I give them credit for. Because they already seem to know that my demographic are a bit like that little boy plugging the hole in the dam in Holland. So typical ads aimed at 35 year old females holding back the floodgates of aging are indeed weight loss, fitness equipment, an Bord Bia & make-up adverts.
Facebook Adverts for 35 year old female in Ireland
Out of curiousity, I decided to play around with my profile settings to see how the ads differed for different demographics. Changing my status to ’single’ and ‘interested in females’ did in fact prompt one email from a friend worried that I had split up with my husband and was ‘trying other things’. In my new guise as a 25 year old male, the adverts did change. The focus was on fun, games, gadgets, mortgages although surprisingly I didn’t get any dating adverts during the time I was experimenting with this profile.
Facebook Adverts for 25 yr old male in Ireland
Profiled as a 50 year old woman in Ireland, the unplanned pregnancy advert was indeed ‘a surprise’. I didn’t think either that the ‘1959′ t-shirt was going to go down a bomb either.
Facebook Adverts for 50 year old female in Ireland
Lastly I decide to profile as a 59 year old single male, interested in females and males. I got a singles ad, not surprisingly, but the picture was of a 20 something female. And I know that YES, many single 59 year old men are interested in this, however it is not in fact what most 59 year old men get! There is huge scope out there to target ads further, save the 20 year old female for the similarly aged male, and perhaps show adverts with potential dates closer in age?
Facebook adverts for 59 yr old male in Ireland
Advertisers also seem to think that men close to getting their bus passes are very interested in money. Perhaps this how they hope to woo the 20 year old girls? Note that of the three money/cash ads, one uses $, one uses £ and only one uses €. Conclusion: Okay my experiment wasn’t exactly controlled, just a quick look around. Unsurprisingly some advertisers are doing it pretty well, but there is clearly a lot of room for improvement.
After having ‘start blogging’ on the to-do list for well over a year now, we finally put the wheels in motion. I decided to give the site a face-lift too whilst I was at it, and import it all into WordPress.
Working with the very talented web designer Sabrina Dent, we choose a brighter palette, some pretty illustrations, and improved the navigation. I think the greys of the old site ended up feeling a bit too downbeat, especially in the current climate. We wanted people to look at the site, and come away feeling uplifted and positive. Sabrina managed to work in a palette that integrates the current logo and colours whilst managing to brighten it up hugely.
That said, I picked the previous colours myself, so that is no slur on the previous designer, Ben Wakeford, who is an excellent web designer and friend of mine. Ben doesn’t do WordPress yet – but I think he will soon after this.
A good portion of our own research involves reading some of the excellent blogs out there. Ireland has a wonderful community of bloggers, who are knowledgeable, positive and helpful. Hopefully Activate can add something to that community.
A big “thank-you” to Sabrina for her hard work. Did I already mention that she’s very talented?
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