I travelled up to Limerick yesterday to attend the Word of Mouse Marketing seminar organised by the IIA and the Limerick County Enterprise Board. It was a very interesting and informative event. The morning session was given by Krishna De – the well known Internet marketing and Social Media expert. The whole social media space is one I have an interest in and in the last few months have dipped the PuddleDucks toes in the water of the social media sea. We have this blog, we have a Facebook page, we have started advertising on Facebook and I am soon to start a PuddleDucks presence on Twitter. The reason for all this is to find new ways to reach and keep in touch with our customers about our PuddleDucks products, news, offers, etc. The great thing about marketing on social media platforms is that it is free of charge but does need a sizeable time investment. This is the great difference between the old way of doing things in the established media and the new way on the new social media. As Krishna said – everyone can now be a marketer for their business as the new platforms are free or inexpensive.
Krishna’s presentation was very interesting and here’s a few “to-do’s” I have taken away from it:
- set PuddleDucks up on Twitter
- create a PuddleDucks photo page on pix.ie – maybe show photos of our our lovely gift wrapping
- register on key social networks
- check and maybe update my personal profile on social networking sites
- check on RSS reader on our blog and allow email subscriptions to the blog
- put link to our Xtreme PuddleDucking video on our next email newsletter!
The afternoon sessions were also very enjoyable especially Fred Karsson of DoneDeal.ie who shared his experiences of building a successful online business. Fred’s presentation was both informative and humerous and it’s amazing how DoneDeal has built their business to be so successful in a relatively short time. One tip I have taken from Fred’s talk is to check our spend on Google Adwords and reduce the Cost per Click for the top performing ads.
Of course the networking opportunities are very important too. I met Liz from StyleBible– who had very kindly written a review of PuddleDucks on her site. I had a long chat too with Roseanne of IIA blog fame about Twitter (she live-twittered the event), blogging and how her kids love wearing their PuddleDucks “fireman’s trousers”.
Overall a very enjoyable day. Thanks to all the organisers and presenters.
— Aedan
PuddleDucks Blog 
Krishna De said
Aedan great to meet you too. I look forward to keeping connected with you through social networks and to having you share your case study in the weeks to come.
Be sure to integrate your social media programme into your overall marketing programme – there are so may options available implementing, testing, evaluating and reviewing the outcome of your social media marketing programme will I am sure continue to expand your success and growth of Puddleducks.
Fred Karlsson said
Hi Aedan, great to hear that you enjoyed the seminar, and that it gave you some ideas how to get the most out of AdWords.
Google AdWords has worked very well for us, and it is certainly worthwhile reviewing the pricing and wording regularly.
Roseanne said
Hi Aedan,
It was great to talk to you yesterday and I’m glad you got so much practical advice from it. I certainly got a few take-away actions from it myself. As a regular blogger like you and Suzanne, I find sessions like Krishna’s really refreshing and inspiring.
In relation to the Twittering, I’m looking forward to welcoming Puddleducks. It’s a great way to keep your blog looking fresh too as you can feed it into a panel in your blog. Also using http://www.twitterfeed.com you can automatically share any RSS feeds from your blog/ news/ new products etc. into Twitter so while tweeting is another wee job to do every few days, Twitterfeed will also do some of your syndicating for you as well straight to people who are interested in what you do.
FYI – 2 things I’ve noticed about twitter since I started using it for the IIA: it is coming third/ fourth after direct and Google traffic in our stats for both http://www.IIA.ie and http://blog.iia.ie and secondly two new members joined because of a special offer I made to celebrate reaching 100 followers. From the point of view of businesses using twitter I’ve seen some interesting applications. For example: http://www.twitter.com/spinnakerpro also make a special offer to evey single one of their new followers. Also have a look at http://www.twitter.com/irishjewelryco and the way they have a permanent special offer on their profile. All clever ways to use Twitter I think.
Good luck tweeting!
Marcus Mac Innes said
Thanks for the plug Krishna. 😀
puddleducks said
Krishna – thanks for the advice. I’ll be in touch soon
Fred – yeah always good to save money. I’m sure we need those extra cents more than Google does!
Roseanne – I like the idea of special offers on Twitter and Facebook to reward followers/fans. Must do that …
Marcus – I’m a fan of pix.ie and must get that puddleducks page up there soon.
… oh and Krishna, Marcus- good luck in the Net Visionary Awards. I’ll be voting!
iia blog » Dynamic conference feedback - without the gizmos said
[…] Edit 23.10.2008: Speaking of feedback, Aedan Ryan from Puddleducks.ie also attended the event in Limerick and wrote a review on his blog. […]
PuddleDucks on Pix.ie « PuddleDucks Blog said
[…] ·Tagged gift wrapping, pix.ie, puddleducks Inspired by an talk by Krishna De at a seminarlast October, I set up a PuddleDucks page on the Irish photo-sharing website […]