You are cordially invited to join us for New Year’s Eve Festivities as we welcome in 2009, hopefully with something between a whimper and a bang.

• There will be wine, beer and bubbly. If you want anything harder than that, bring it, although we may bust out the scotch at some point.
• There will be food. It will probably be yummy. (Oh hello, winter carbs!)
• There will be peace on Earth and goodwill towards men.

There will very likely also be music, count downs, noise makers and all that good stuff. We would love to have you, so please RSVP in the comments. You are very welcome to bring people along; just let me know how many, so I can plan accordingly.

Where: 18 Gilabbey Street, Cork, Ireland
When: 9 PM until sometime after midnight
Who: You, and whomever else you would care to bring
RSVP: In the comments, as soon as possible :)

You know that deeply irksome trend where people make charitable donations on your behalf instead of giving gifts? Well, we’ve done that very thing with you in mind, dear Internet. You were going to get coal in your stocking, but instead we’ve stuck a few bucks in the g-string of the following very worthy online organisations this year.

• Wikipedia: Does anyone not use Wikipedia? There is simply no better, more accessible or better resource when you suddenly need to know who the hell Lansana Conté is at 4 o’clock in the morning.
• Electronic Freedom Foundation: A lot of current issues including DRM and network neutrality emanate in the US. A donation to EFF helps to fight the good fight on the front lines of the battle for electronic privacy and freedom.
• MySociety works to make government open to the public – transparent, accessible and accountable . The code base it’s built on is similarly open, and is what John is using to bring some of this kit to Ireland.
• Scarleteen: Because abstinence only sex education simply does not work, and no matter how good your relationship with your mum, you probably don’t want to be asking her any questions that include the word “lube.”

If you’re looking to give in the spirit of the season but don’t know where to drop off your hard earned dollars, euros, or drachmas, you might consider the above. Organisations like these can take a beating during a recession, but unless you’re planning to give up your internet connection, your digital rights or sex in the face of economy, we hope each of these organisations will make your 2009 a better place to be in some way.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all, a good night.

We’re beginning to vaguely think about the new year here on Gilabbey Street, and we are pondering perhaps having a party of some flavour. Since, you know, everything is closed and there’s sod all else to do.

Since you, dear Internets, would be invited, please let me know which of these two events you might prefer to attend:

We’ll do neither if there isn’t enough interest, but assuming there is, I’ll add a new post with details accordingly. Comments welcome if you have any suggestions!

PS: By “brunch” I mean a complete civilized hour, like say noon or 1 PM.

One of the most predictable questions clients ask just before their new site goes live is “How do I get press coverage for my site launch?” My uniform but depressing answer is “Why would you get press coverage for your site launch?”

The harsh reality is that few news outlets are going to cover the launch of a site, because guess what – it isn’t news. New web sites launch daily in their thousands, and no matter how special you think your unique snowflake may be, it just isn’t that special.

Therefore, if you want media coverage, you need to actually make news. Here is how we did that for Ciara Crossan at WeddingDates.ie, where you can search for available reception venues based on your chosen wedding date and location. The hook in Step 2 will be different for every site, but the basic methodology is the same for all the clients I’ve been through this with.

1. Relate your product or service to something current in the news.

We’re diving head first into a recession, and the media has an endless appetite for recession stories. Weddings cost an average of 20K, so there’s probably a news story nicely nestled between big ticket items and topical budget cutting that we can tease out.

2. Find or create a hook that legitimately ties in your business.

To create our news story, we designed the 2008 Wedding Budget Survey using a free PollDaddy survey, and asked brides and grooms if the recession was impacting their wedding budgets. Ciara got a lovely prize sponsored by one of her hotels to lure 100 people in for the survey, and then we crunched all the data to get some nice beefy stats.

3. Write a really good press release.

There are two tricks here. The first is: do not write a press release. Instead, write the story you want the papers to run. (See press release here.) Format it like a press release and call it a press release, but make it easy for busy journalists to see the whole story by writing it yourself – preferably really well.

The second trick is to make the press release about your news story but work your client into it so seamlessly that it is almost impossible to cover one without the other. When done well, you’ll have about a 90% success rate with this.

4. Distribute it to a hand-picked media list.

Ciara’s homework assignment while I was doing 1, 2 and 3 was to buy all the papers and magazines for a full two weeks and start pulling names and contact details for people and editors covering this kind of story. Regional contact details came from the book. We targeted lifestyle, business and women’s sections of national and local newspapers and magazines.

5. Be available to respond to media calls and emails.

Ciara got loads of calls and contacts after sending out her release. Some outlets just ran the press release; others were more interested and called for interviews and sent photographers. Some ran the survey story and some ran more general pieces about her. It doesn’t matter; they would never have run any of these stories if she’d simply sent out a standard new website release.

So the press release did its job and generated several news stories:

• The Sun
• The Echo (full page in Women on Wednesday)
• The Cork Independent
• The Kingdom
• The Kerryman
• The Corkman

Bridal mags print quarterly, so we’re still waiting to see what, if anything, pops up there, but that’s a nice result with a good regional spread.

One thing I would encourage anyone to do before embarking on a campaign like this, however, is to really consider the benefit of traditional press. Because honestly, for a lot of businesses, there is no benefit. Read that again: there is no benefit.

Newspaper mentions and even radio and television coverage will not result in the traffic bump on your site that you expect. Let’s face it -  The Sunday Business Post is not The Colbert Report, so if you’re hoping for a Colbert Bump from a mention in the Irish media, you’re likely to be sadly disappointed. Online links are likely to bring you far more traffic, so for most small businesses, time is better invested generating online coverage than offline coverage.

However, there are at least two instances where it is worth pursuing traditional media:

• Investors – If you have a pool of investors or a board of directors, these people just love being handed a big fat press clippings file. It’s a tangible result they understand.
• Stakeholders – In Ciara’s case, the hotels listing on her site are her stakeholders, and all this press lends huge credibility when she goes out to sell to them. As Mulley points out, this kind of traditional PR is about reputation.

I am not a professional PR person and I don’t have the contacts that might have resulted in more national coverage for this story. However, I’ve also seen some of the big PR agency price tags, and I’m pretty confident that with our little DIY press campagn, we got 80% of the bang for about 10% of the buck. If you’re a bigger company or situated more offline than online, it’s probably worth it to bring professional PR on board. But if you’re bootstrapping your online business, it’s worth knowing that like Irish brides, you can DIY it for less.

In about 12 hours, I leave for glorious, rainy Italy, where I’ll be for a week. I’m sure it will be delightful – after all, it’s Italy, so who cares if it’s raining? – but right now I’m mostly concerned with finding clean underpants, locating my passport, and remembering what flight I’m getting on.

John will be observing Eimear the Wonder Dog’s protest hunger strike while I’m away, and providing emergency support to clients in the event anything goes seriously wrong, which isn’t that likely. You can reach him at john [at] handelaar [dot] org, and he also has the super secret MAXroam bat phone number for me while I’m away. Honestly though, I don’t know how useful that’s going to be, since nearly every call is likely to be met with “Dude, I’m swimming at the bottom of a bottle of Chianti, I don’t have a clue.”

To my great surprise, everyone including my mum is whinging for good old fashioned postcards. Since I find this amusing in a Victorian kind of way, I’ve decided to launch Operation Postcard Florence. If you want one, just fill in your name and address, and it’s quite likely a missive from Italy will turn up in your postbox in due course.

Above are the presentation slides for yesterday’s Blogging Master Class. Though they only formed a small part of the course, I fully intended to get them up last night. This was fine in theory, except we retired to the nearest available pub at the conclusion of the day’s proceedings, and after one pint I could no longer feel my face.

In previous incarnations, this would have queued a wild night of drunken antics complete with table top dancing, a shoe left in a gutter, and possibly my knickers left on a lamp post, but I am older, wiser and vastly more tired these days so the only thing is queued was me going to my bed at an hour suitable for very small children.

Lightweight drinking escapades aside, it was a wonderful afternoon and I greatly appreciate the ten nine people who turned up (some after long drives) to be the guinea pigs for the maiden appearance of this course and have their blog posts picked apart by a roomful of weirdos off the internet. Joe Scanlon, Mike and Matt Kane, Julian Alubaidy, Aedan Ryan, Gordon Murray, Ger Hartnett, Keith Shirley, and Linda FitzPatrick all deserve kudos for braving the Master Class format, which is a bit of a scary prospect all on its own. It’s not for the feint of heart – as Joe Scanlon noted in his Twitter stream, “Well that’s my test post fucked out the window.” (That wasn’t quite true, for the record, and he did get points for a hysterical post title.)

But the anonymous feedback forms at the end of the course were spectacular, and the people who left comments all noted that they loved the Master Class format, which I’m completely delighted about.

My one regret was that I fully intended to also have a brainstorming session for topics each business could be covering to appeal to their audiences, and that just slipped my mind when I re-shuffled the running order at the last minute. I’m very sorry about that, so if you attended the course, you can drop me a phone call and I’ll gladly throw some ideas at you if you like.

PS: Cheers for the room rental whip round, guys! For anyone else interested in meeting space in Cork, the Lancaster Lodge is an excellent venue, highly recommended.