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
Here at PuddleDucks HQ (aka corner of the living room!), we’re always looking for ways to reach and keep in touch with customers. Things move quickly in the new social media and online PR world and we feel that small online businesses (like us!) need to move quickly to keep up. In the last three months we have started this blog, created a Facebook fan page and in the last few days we have finally set up on Twitter. If you’re on Twitter we’d love if you would follow us here. I am excited about having another way to highlight the news about PuddleDucks and to chat to our followers (and to follow too). I am not sure how it will work for us but I’m looking forward to finding out. I’ll blog soon again about Twitter and our experience of it.
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