I don’t know about you, but the minute I hear the words “used car sales” I brace myself for a deeply unpleasant experience. So we worked hard to put together a site that would set BetterCars.ie apart from its unfortunate cousins in the used car market. Interestingly, although you cannot purchase vehicles online, this site is built on an ecommerce platform - we’ve simply ripped the financial transaction part out and taken full advantage of the cataloguing system. (The site also features a blog, though it’s currently a bit unloved.)

So I’ve been drafted in to speak at PodCamp Ireland - Krishna De rang me up this morning to point out that if I am going to be there anyway, I might as well open my mouth and do something. I was a little surprised because I assumed that something called “PodCamp” was all about, well, podcasting - a subject about which I know next to nothing - but apparently it covers all kinds of social media. Who knew?

Anyway, Krishna suggested that I do something around design for blogs and websites, but to be honest, I can’t. I suck at talking about design. There are a lot of reasons for that, but at the end of the day I just find design very difficult to be articulate about.

So instead, after a quick Twitter poll for topics, I’m going to be presenting on How to Market Your Website or Blog (Without Making the Internet Hate You.) I have more than a month to put this presentation together, but I’m pretty sure it will break down into the specifics of conversational marketing, generating press and PR, and paid advertising.

I’ve been doing a couple of these informal presentations, so I’m also pondering getting a bit more organised about presenting materials and having downloadable slides and handouts available after each one, just so they’re more accessible to people who missed the gig or want the notes.

Realistically, that probably means a redesign. God help me.

Photo ©TheConsumerist

One thing I’ve noticed is that Irish companies in particular seem strangely hesitant to put themselves forward for things, be it press, social business introductions, or award nominations. This is, in a word, stupid. Unless you are paying a very, very good PR company, the person whose job it is to promote your business is you. While sure, some of your customers or clients may think of you and throw your name in the hat for this or that, there isn’t a lot of sense in sitting on the sidelines and hoping someone will ask you to the ball.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with going after something, and hey - if you don’t make it, nobody will know so that’s okay. These quickly approaching deadlines are on my list, and I hereby challenge you to put them on your list, too.

This is the inaugural year for the Irish Web Awards, being held in Dublin on October 11th. Rumour has it that nominations may open to the public in the next day or so, but you can (and bloody well should) nominate your site in the applicable categories. Whether any of my clients make the short list this year or no, I’m going - at €30 a ticket, it’s a bargain for a great night out and Christ knows I need to leave the house.

The Irish Internet Association’s Net Visionary Awards are also taking nominations until Friday, 12 September. I do love a black tie do, but at €250 a ticket I’ll only be dusting off my ballgown in the extremely unlikely event I make the shortlist. Still, this is great PR for any company, so if you fall into any of the categories or love a site that does, those nomination forms are not going to fill themselves out!

One place I definitely will be going to is PodCamp in Kilkenny on the 27th of September. My other half has been drafted as a speaker and is doing From Broadcast to Podcast. I also have a couple of clients ripe for podcasting who I will be dragging along by way of encouraging them to get their feet wet in the podcast pond.

Finally, I have one more, top secret, soon to be revealed event planned for September, but I’m scheduling it around the previously mentioned Girl Geek Dinner in Cork on Sunday September 7th, 2008? There’s still time to sign up if you’re of the XX persuasion — the table is about 1/3rd booked and this event could use a little love if you’re inclined to help get the word out. Thanks! :)

Hurrah! Martha Rotter’s moveable feast know as Ireland Girl Geek Dinners is coming to Cork on the 7th of September, 2008. We’ve booked a table for 20 and we’ll be meeting up at Proby’s Bistro, which has a dire website. Despite this, Proby’s has been the scene for many geeky get together dinners of one sort or another, and the quality of the website does not reflect the quality of the menu.

What is a Girl Geek Dinner and how do you know if you’re invited?

Girl Geek Dinners are a chance for ladies in technology to get together, enjoy some nice food and drinks, and have fun meeting other women in their field.

“Ladies in technology” is a rather wide remit, so as far as I’m concerned if you’re doing anything from coding software in C++ to blogging on a default WordPress template, that includes you.

The table is booked in the private dining room upstairs for 7:30 PM, and there will be a set menu with vegetarian options for €24. Proby’s Bistro is located on French’s Quay, and there’s a map if you need one. So RSVP by leaving a comment at Girl Geek Dinners and we’ll see you there!

I spent the afternoon at the fairly wild and fabulous Cork Airport Hotel (pictures) taking part in Damien Mulley’s very generous Train the Trainers event. This day was interesting in a lot of ways, but for me a very valuable part was listening to and taking part in the back and forth conversations about content. It helped me to formalise some of my thoughts about the process of blogging.

Basically, I think there are two approaches one can take when blogging as part of a business communications strategy, both to engage readers and attract links:

1) Be a Resource

Ice Cream Ireland and Tast.ie are examples of this kind of blog. While both Kieran Murphy and Deb Hadley blog about their businesses and their experiences in ways that help keep the content varied and lively, if asked to sum up either of these sites most people would say “they’re recipe blogs.” They provide a very specific resource that helps them to pull a very specific audience.

Damien made the point that one of the most popular and link-tastic formats for resource posts is the Ten Step How To. People love this stuff; just look at all the inbound links and Twitter chatter on yesterday’s How To Demo Your Startup post at TechCrunch.

But you can’t produce that kind of post every day; it’s tremendously time consuming to create, which is why the successful blogs have that “varied and lively” content. More importantly, however, people take in a massive amount of information from scores of blogs each day. I suspect your average reader can manage maybe one or two “heavy” posts from across all of their sources in a given day. If your blog is always the blog with the big ask for time and attention, you will actually lose rather than win readers with your dense but awesome content.

2) Be Personal

This does not mean you need to share your ovulatory cycle with the internet. Rather, it means putting a lot of your personality, experiences and individuality into your blog posts. The best ways to do this are:

• Be funny.
• If you can’t be funny, be controversial or at least opinionated.
• If you can’t be opinionated, be intimate.

Again, intimate does not mean spilling your sex life online - and unless your profession is among the oldest in the world, this probably isn’t a great topic for a business blog anyway. But being intimate does mean giving readers a way to connect with you.

One of my favourite dislikeable people is Penelope Trunk of The Brazen Careerist. She gives excellent career advice, and if you skim through the entires in her blog, you’ll see that she almost always relates advice to experiences in her own life. Being fired, embellishing resumes, getting divorced - a continual litany of her personal failures peppers her instructions and lends a lot of authenticity to her posts. You learn a lot about managing your career, and a lot about Penelope.

Intimacy in this case is about the reveal, but it doesn’t have to be personal. Companies, and the individuals blogging for them, can tell stories, too - about the company, its employees, its relationships with outside vendors… all kinds of stuff.

Either way, the point is that a business blog is not about press releases, not about products, not about job vacancies. Can you name one blog you regularly read that’s about that stuff?

No, me either.

Luckily I am short on sleep, low on health and about a month behind everything I need to do, so I don’t have a lot of spare time to spend bitching. So I’ll just get straight to the point of what’s got my panties in a wad this evening.

I got an email tonight from  Angeline Vuong at CrowdSpring. It was also to Angeline Vuong at CrowdSpring; it was a mass email that read thusly:

Hi there,

I’m Angeline, crowdSPRING’s new Community Manager. I saw you used Twitter and wanted to just say hello. If we’re not friends yet, feel free to follow us at http://www.twitter.com/crowdspring. We love to keep in touch with our creatives and buyers..I post lots of interesting / informative blog links, promote designers, and give hints at really cool upcoming projects of interest. Hope to see you on the site. Feel free to say hi!

Best,
Angeline

My response to this was “feel free to kiss my ass” but my email was slightly more polite than that. Some pertinent facts:

• I am in CrowdSpring’s database, in so far as I have a working login there. I have never used the service, never posted a project, never bid on a project, never posted in the forums, never filled out any profile information there. I am not “in touch” with CrowdSpring in any sense of the word, nor am I any kind of community member.
•  To the best of my knowledge, I have not at any point provided CrowdSpring with my Twitter details. Their privacy policy doesn’t say they collect that data, either.
• Their privacy policy does say that they may tell me about “targeted marketing, service updates, and promotional offers based on your specific preferences” - and my specific preferences are set to No way, Jose. Seriously, that’s what the check box option says. (The internet, it is killing me with these hipster kids…)

OK, so according to Sabrina Dent’s Dictionary of Bitch, the above email qualifies as a tasty processed ham product nestled in white bread and lovingly coated with mayonnaise. In other words, it’s spam. But what really irritates me is that it’s not just spam; it’s really crappy spam.

• When you mass email people you do not know, it’s really preferable to attempt to disguise this fact by, oh let’s say… actually sending the email to my actual address, using my actual name.
• Angeline does not “just want to say hello,” as she claims in the second sentence; she wants me to follow her on Twitter. Presumably so I can follow her “interesting / informative” content, like uh, trolling for new members.
• To underscore how completely impersonal and outcome driven this email is, the “if we’re not friends yet, feel free to follow…” line clears that up immediately.

So basically, someone who doesn’t know me from Eve has abused my personal data to spam me with a solicitation to join her (it? them?) on a social network. Despite the social and conversational nature of the network, the communication invitation is completely top-down, and the message being sent here basically boils down to “Follow me, I’m COOL!” I had to double-check this wasn’t a MySpace invite for a minute there.

Seriously, people. It’s called conversational marketing for a reason. It’s called social media for a reason.

I know I’m a cranky, picky bitch. But here’s the thing: while I like networking as much as the next freelancer, I do not like social networks. Bebo is for children, MySpace is the AOL of its era, and LinkedIn is all very nice as far as it goes, but it’s virtually impossible to find anyone I’m not already connected to - by the thousands of email addresses I already gave them.

Facebook in particular, however, is really starting to drive me up the wall. I know it is incredibly 2007 to pull the Oh My God, I Hate Facebook and Am Leaving! drama queen stunt, though, so I’m not going to do that. I’m just going to complain about it instead.

First of all, while it’s nice to get in touch with old friends and colleagues, I want to be able to find you, see what you’re doing, and keep up with the handful of critical changes likely to happen with you in the course of a year: new job, new city, new spouse, new kids. If you want to know what’s up with me, I have a blog. What I do not have is the capacity to conduct the exact same “Hey! Long time no see! What are you up to?” conversation 30 times in a month.

Second of all, I do not want to suck your blood, take your quiz, or play scrabble with you. It’s nothing personal, but I can probably play Scrabble by post in less time than it will take me to kick your ass on Facebook. On a professional level, I am disgusted that Hasboro has put the kybosh on Scrabulous because it’s an increadibly stupid move on their part. On a personal level, however, I will die a happy woman if nobody ever challenges me to play Scrabulous ever again.

And last but not least, I hate to be the one to break this to all of the many Facebook whores out there but: your mama is ugly. Facebook was no beauty queen of a website to start out with, but there was always the hope it would get better. The recent redesign has proven that for the foreseeable future, at least, that’s not the case - it’s still cramped, still frustrating to navigate, and still a glowing example of grody-arsed ad placements.

But of course I’m staying. Mostly so I can log in once every three months to discover all my new friends I’ve never heard of. And then have them ask me what I’m up to.

Pat Phelan has a post up over at his blog in which people have been discussing boundaries and blogger ethics in terms of full disclosure. This kicked me up the arse to go and do something I’ve been meaning to do since Day 1: add a Disclosures page to my site.

There are some cases that are cut and dried, like the instance Pat is highlighting. If you’re being paid by Flixwagon, using Flixwagon on your site, demoing Flixwagon, and/or writing about Flixwagon in your own space or others, you need to disclose that you have a financial relationship with Flixwagon.

And then it gets muddy. Because by paid, I mean any exchange with a monetary value attached to it. If I got free hosting from Blacknight (which I do, although not for this blog) and wrote about Blacknight and how awesome they are (which I have), I would be ethically obligated to disclose in my post that I get free hosting from Blacknight (which I did, just for the record).

Furthermore, were I interviewed by a journalist about blog hosting and mentioned that I send all my clients to Blacknight, I would also be ethically obligated to disclose to said journalist that I have an existing financial relationship with them in that I get free hosting.

After that, it’s up to the journalist to put that fact in the piece or not, but I think they should. If they didn’t, you better believe I’d be right here in your browser (or RSS reader, as the case may be) disclosing that myself as soon as the article was published.

Why? Because the fact that I am either getting money or getting freebies by its very nature colours my perception of whoever is giving them to me. Tom Raftery hates them, and I know this. I, however, love them - in part because I’ve never had an issue with them, but also in part because they have given me something that makes me happy. I feel special, warm and fuzzy about Blacknight because they give me stuff, and the fact that they give me stuff slants my opinion of them.

Therefore, when a journalist asks me “What is the best blog hosting?” and I say “Blacknight,” this is not based on an survey of the market or even on my experience as a typical customer. My opinion is no longer impartial because I have an extra relationship with them, and it’s one that involves money, goods or services.

And if that’s true of €33 worth of free hosting for a tiny site that isn’t even running, it’s exponentially more true as the numbers and visibility go up. The web is incredibly powerful in forming opinion, and to not reveal a paid relationship when you endorse or evangelise about a company, product or service is an abuse of readers and viewers. It harms - and can potentially destroy - credibility.

Which, before you ever pull a referral, ship a product or sell a service, is the most important thing anyone has online.

The tiniest bit of internet sleuthing reveals that Dublin based marketing firm Inspiration were the SEO company behind Irish Greeting Card’s recent debacle. Their homepage proudly declares it, in fact.

The part that made my jaw drop, however, was the next notice on their home page:

Cathy McGovern, Inspiration was one of three guests invited by Enterprise Ireland’s eBusiness Unit to participate in a round-table discussion on issues surrounding eMarketing and how it can be exploited by SMEs in Ireland.

Emphasis mine. I don’t have a problem with Enterprise Ireland and I think they’re providing key help for a number of high potential start-ups. Given the state of the economy, God knows bright businesses need the help now more than any time in EI’s history.

Somehow, though, I don’t think this episode is the kind of “exploiting” EI had in mind when they funded Irish Greeting Cards for online marketing consulting. A relationship between EI and Inspiration would seem to exist, but if that’s the case, my hope is that in the name of upholding best (or even acceptable) practices for online business, EI’s eBusiness Unit terminates it.

Post haste.

I started cringing as soon as the email hit my Inbox and it just got worse from there.

A fairly new business called Irish Greeting Cards has been dumping little email missives onto a number of Irish bloggers today. From the badly worded, poorly punctuated and grammatically convoluted copy, we have:

We’ve just completed a major upgrade of the site… The cards are unique in that you can personalize most cards on the outside and your own message on the inside. What we’re looking for is for bloggers to mention the offer and site to their readers (if you think it might be useful to your readers of course) and point them to the Greeting Card Site and perhaps encourage their readers to tell people who might think the cards are worth ordering.

According to Mulley, this contacting campaign was devised by a SEO strategist hired by the company. I have no idea who this SEO guru is, which is good - because if I did, I’d be sorely tempted to haul him out back and shoot him. Frankly, this company had more than enough going against it to begin with without his specialist help.

I am willing to bet that this SEO expert also advised them on their spam blog. And wrote all the “content” himself, lovingly filling it with re-constituted pork. It’s easy to see exactly how much effort went into this grand affair.

The only thing they did right was to mention in the email that “We’re not looking for better Google rankings” and invite me to set my links to no-follow. Which is the only thing they asked me to do that I’ve actually been happy to comply with.

The thing that pisses me off the most about this is that I would have used this service. I hate trying to remember occasions in advance, I hate going to the post office, and I hate filling out cards. I have been looking for a service like this in Ireland so that I can pretend to care enough to send cards by being horrendously lazy and doing it online.

What could they have done better?

• Emailed me an offer to try their product myself. I mean, it’s not like I’m going to forget I have a blog. If I liked it, I’d have blogged it, just like I do with other online services I love using.
• Dropped in a humble PS invitation to tell my friends if I enjoyed my card sending experience with them. Blatant solicitations to pimp their untried products to my blog audience is not the kind of transparency we’re looking for.
• Not shat on the entire concept of blogging with the absolute worst example of… I’d say blogging, but that isn’t anything close to blogging. That’s using WordPress as a CMS for spam.

Granted, not having a product that sucks out loud would have helped, and a little more thought about their “Irish cards, Irish diaspora” positioning wouldn’t have hurt, either.

I mean, know I’m a transplant, but I’m pretty confident there’s nothing particularly Irish about stock images of toast.

Having said that, I’m desperate enough that I probably would have become a regular customer of this outfit and sent the crappy cards to my friends and relatives, just on the basis that they’re better than the cards they are currently not getting at all. At this point, however, all I can do is tell all my friends:

Don’t use Irish Greeting Cards.

Update