Back from the Irish Blog Awards, and as the song says, “Oh what a night.”

Major props to the Cork Airport Hotel, which in addition to being stellar hosts for the IBAs, did a stupendous job for the Ladies Tea Party. The apartment was stunning, the catering was abundant and beautifully presented, and the Tea Party was a great vibe with tons of women, much mingling, and abundant consumption of gorgeous cupcakes and copoius amounts of organic wine.

(The official count was that we started with five cases and ended up with four bottles left over. That turned out to be slightly inaccurate but we did do a hell of a good job.)

As for the Awards themselves, I did not win in my category – Michele Neylon scooped Best Business Blog. Despite knowing I was a most unlikely contender, I was extremely grumpy about this and could briefly be heard threatening to burn one of the polystyrene Blacknight horse heads in effigy or possibly put it in his bed. This shameful, booze fuelled mini-strop stopped the moment Suzy was named for Best Current Affairs Blog and then again for the Grand Prix – I was so delighted for her, I cried. An entirely noble and well-deserved victory, that one.

I knew more people this year than I did last year, so there were fewer revelations, but in the tradition of last year’s Awards, I hereby submit the following 2009 Unofficial Blog Awards:

• Best Badges: Will Knott, for “Ledgebag.” Absolutely legend.
• Hottest Husband: Gingerpixel. Woah, mama. You go girl.
• Hottest Missus: Walter Higgins. (Seriously, have you seen Mrs Walter?)
• Most Aptly Named: The Sexy Pedestrian who is indeed smokin’. (And frankly, you wouldn’t chuck Mr. Sexy Pedestrian out either.)
• Most Adorable: Elfinamsterdam, who to my great surprise, actually is the size of an elf. I thought she just gave out random gifts or something.
• Best Swag: CuriousWines, who did swapable badges that were so popular, people were stealing them out of other people’s booty bags.
• Best Tune: John Handelaar, who spun How Sweet it Is with Marvin Gaye covering his own song in German. (If you ask @handelaar, he’ll probably share it.)
• Sorest Loser: Joe Scanlon, who was not happy to be defeated in Inflatable Twister.
• Best Dressed: Ciara Crossan. Because the bride is always the best dressed woman in the room. Hilarious.
• Biggest Sucker Dote: Niall Harbison, who bought the afterpartiers in Room 201 a bottle of Absolute from the hotel bar. For €80.

Many of these people, and many more, ended up in Apartment 201 for the impromptu afterparty, which carried on until I finally chucked everyone out at 5:30 in the morning.

I smell like a pub floor before the smoking ban, my headache is undefeated, there are not enough cups of tea on all the world right now, and hilariously I have 12 people coming for a full-on Sunday lunch in 2 hours, but I would not have changed a thing. This night was EPIC. Thanks as always, Damien and crew.

PS: Remember, people – what happens at the after party, stays at the after party. And no, I do not have your clothes / phone / shoe / camera / shit – call hotel reception, ye langers.

I lied. I completely cared if we won, which is good, because we did – CuriousWines.ie took home a gong for Best Commercial Website at the 2009 Digital Media Awards, beating out major national brands like Toyota Ireland, Three and Argus Car Hire. It was a stunning moment, and indeed, I was stunned and delighted.

I went with Michael Kane, who practically knocked me out with a right hook that turned into a giddy hug when his company name was called out. The Curious guys are over the moon, and fair play to them – their heart and souls are in this business and they deserve every success. They earn it, every day.

It was an interesting evening in other regards, too. I’m not overkeen on agencies as a general rule, and spending the night packed into a room with new media kids and multinational corporates is not really my idea of a good time. These people travel in packs (like wolves) and it’s more like going to 20 office parties all in the same room, none of which you’ve actually been invited to.

That said, Jermain Williams and the guys from Dialogue were great craic (and won, for Podge and Rog), Nick McGivney from Adland Ireland was an unexpected find and an utter delight, and AislingMcMahon from Strata3 was increadibly friendly and nice (and looked particularly fresh and lovely for a woman who’d been in heels since 6 AM.)

And of course, you can’t pull together three people and a pint in Dublin without Conor Lynch showing up. I keep telling him he should rename his company Shmoozer.ie because he does this with more grace and more class than anyone I know. Whenever I meet him these days, I just offer to hand him my knickers and skip to the fag, because he’s that good. I’m entirely unclear what he wants vis a vis Connector but whatever it is, I’m confident he gets it.

The absolute highlight of my evening, however, was going back to my hotel room just in time to hear the couple next door scoring. She was giving it the full throttle, porn star soundtrack treatment, and was either having a really good night or getting paid by the hour. Hers was the orgasm heard ’round the world, or at least throughout the hotel, and it was quite something.

Then it was his turn. I was completely prepared for the standard Uh uh uh or possibly UhhHUUUgh or even, you know, Go Munster! What I was not prepared for, however, was:

Arf arf arf! Arf arf arf! AAAAAAAARF!

And this, kids, is why you should be respectful of your neighbours and not have loud, raucous sex in hotels. Unless, of course, you want the internet to know that you bark like a seal.

I am delighted to announce that plans have been formalised and the 2nd Annual Ladies Tea Party and Knitting Circle will be held at the Cork Airport Hotel. We will be swanning about one of their spiffy private apartments prior to the Blog Awards, which will hopefully be a nice setting and mean more mixing than last year.

The ticket price of €17 per person covers everything – venue, food, alcohol, and soft drinks – thanks to help from these lovely people:

Sponsor: Curious Wines
Booze for this event is lovingly sponsored by online wine retailer Curious Wines, who apparently heartily approves of ladies tippling (or toppling) into their teacups.

Sponsor: Campaign Monitor
The fine email marketing software folks at Campaign monitor have very kindly sponsored food for this event, and made managing the registrations pure bliss.

Donor: iFoods.tv
Brownies for this event are being hand made by Niall Harbison of IFoods.tv, so you'll get to say a handsome famous chef has personally baked for you.

Donor: Piosa Cake
Jo from Pisoa Cake is - oh joy! - bringing beautiful, yummy, fluffy cupcakes. Please confine your drool to your own cupcakes only.

Obviously, the title of this event is complete and utter farce. Having said that, Marian has suggested that anyone interested in knitting or crochet bring some work and we can have a bit of a stitch ‘n bitch whilst we’re there.

Registration is limited to 30 people. You need to complete a registration form for each person attending, and it’s first come, first served.

Who: You. A pre-event mixer for Ireland’s women bloggers.
When: Saturday, 21 February from 4 – 7 PM
Where: Cork Airport Hotel, Apartment 201 (NOT room 201)
What: Food, drink, occasional knitting, general merriment
How much: €17 per person.
Registration: NOW OPEN. CLOSED. Full.

Online advertising in Ireland is, frankly, an expensive pain in the arse. There are very few venues where advertisers can directly place ads, and when you’re trying to match the venue to your client’s product so the ad is well-niched, the pool shrinks considerably.

On top of that, advertising driven websites here are selling ad space in their ridiculously laden sidebars at a CPM rate of €10 and up – that’s €10 or more for every 1,000 times your ad is shown. Some of these sites have a click-through rate of .06%, which means that for every person who finally clicks your ad, you’ve paid a whopping €16.66. My response to that is “fuck right off. ”

For this reason, I like Facebook. Facebook is universally reviled for having the worst click-thru rate in the industry at an average of .04%, but here’s the thing: I don’t care. I’m not being charged per impression; I’m being charged per click. I don’t care that an ad was viewed 50,000 times before it got a single click – I care that I got a total of 606 clicks at an average cost of 24 cents each.

Compare 24 cents to €16.66, and you’ll start liking Facebook, too.

For its sins, Facebook allows a very nice level of targeting – country, age, gender, relationship status, orientation, and as a bonus, you can further refine by keywords in people’s interests profiles. That’s a real strength.

It also has a lot of drawbacks, so it can work well for some kinds of campaigns and not so well for others:

• It’s bouncy. The bounce rate off Facebook click thrus is very high. For a client with a bounce rate normally in the 30s, we saw bounce rates in the mid-60s from Facebook.
• It doesn’t convert. Trying to sell product off Facebook ads has resulted in a uniformly abysmal goal conversion rate and the ROI is crap. Non-financial goals do better.
• The billing is shit. Seriously shit. There’s no company name on the irritating daily email receipts, and no sniff of a VAT receipt either.

Having said all of that, I still like Facebook for some purposes. It’s great for:

• Pure traffic. If all you need to do is raise your visitor numbers, Facebook will deliver. They serve a massive number of pages, so even at a 0.04% click thru rate, you’ll see as much traffic as you’re willing to pay for.
• Brand Awareness. You only get charged when someone clicks, so as far as I’m concerned, the last batch of ads I ran got my client’s brand in front of people 742,000 times for free.
• Targeted Ads: If you desperately want to target gay people, married women, or men between 25 and 35 with a stated interest in Battlestar Galactica, Facebook can be very precise within the available parameters.

And frankly, even if Facebook was entirely shite, I’m still not paying €16.66 per click. As one client pointed out, “I’d be better off standing on a street corner and offering passers by a tenner to step into my shop.”

I am saved from the pressure of having to come up with a blog post today by the fact that I’ve very cleverly already written one – a guest post over at Joe Scanlon’s place called Five Things You Should Know About Online Marketing for Broke Start-Ups.

Technically, it went up five days ago. I didn’t notice because I spent all of last week distracted by a jaw-droppingly overwhelming work load and being convinced I was going to die of cancer. (I’m not, as it turns out, so that’s a bonus.)

Anyway, when Joe approached me to do a Five Things, he suggested something about design and I said I’d get back to him with something else. I love design – I love seeing it, I love reading about it, I love hearing about it and I love doing it, but I am completely inarticulate when it comes to writing or talking about it.

I can talk about internet marketing all day, though.  I’ve been doing a lot of it lately, and having a great time – mostly thanks to my personal AdWords guru, Dave at Redfly, who in addition to being outrageously good looking, has been very generous with his time in sorting out my dyslexic thrashings through the terribly confusing AdWords user interface.

I totally love him, and the AdWords dashboard is officially my new crack pipe.

While taking a few minutes last night to search for yet more Unmitigated Tears of Joy Obama Political Porn, my attention was momentarily diverted when, on the front page of CNN, I saw an article that mentioned Twitter.

I’m always happy when Twitter gets the big press, but I was doubly delighted to click through and see Eoghan McCabe and the Contrast crew’s nefarious Qwitter mentioned – not once, but twice in this article about Twitter, its application in the corporate world, and the hellspawn of spinoff applications it has launched.

To my enormous dismay, there was no mention of Twitterfone, but I’m sure that was just a tragic oversight on the journalist’s part.

Anyway, getting ink on CNN.com is no small thing,  so it’s nice the boys have something to raise a glass to at their open get-together this evening. If you go, smack them with a newspaper or something and say congratulations for me.

(Previously: Qwitter is for Friends)

The above message appeared in my Gmail chat earlier this evening, much to my surprise and amusement. Pat and I are close, but we’re not that close, so I picked up the phone and enquired (at some volume) “Has your Gmail account been hacked or are you drunk?”

His account had, predictably, been hacked. (As Pat later pointed out, this was a problem, but not as large a problem as we would have had if my answer had been “yes.”)

Anyway, this caused me to look up some information on how, aside from brute force password attacks, a Gmail account might be hacked, and might be protected. There’s a fairly straightforward solution there, and Stewart Curry had a very smart suggestion on checking for re-directed mail if your account has already been compromised.

Moral of the story: Gmail is not invulnerable, and I definitely charge extra for some services.

It’s very nearly that time of year again, when ladies gather in their hats and petticoats, lift their dainty tea cups, and get absolutely sozzled in advance of the annual Blog Awards.

This year’s awards (and thus, the fabulous Tea Party pre-event) are being held in Cork, and are a slightly smaller affair than last year, with attendance capped at 200. In order to decide on a suitable venue for this year’s Tea Party, I need to have a rough idea how many people will be in town or are travelling down for the awards and are interested in attending.

Depending on how many people we need to plan for, the venue will be either a restaurant, a suite at the hotel, or chez moi. The cost will either be €10, €25 or free, depending on the numbers and resulting sponsorship. (I know it sounds confusing, but last year we announced at €25 per head, had loads of sign ups,  and then got a lovely sponsor and it ended up being free, so that could happen again this year!)

So, if you’re going to the Blog Awards and are up for the 2nd Annual Ladies Tea Party Pre-Event, please leave a comment so I can get rough numbers and firm up the plans. When details are confirmed, you’ll be able to register for the actual Tea Party, but if you don’t let me know you’re interested in coming, we may run out of room and that would be tragic.

When: Saturday, 21 February, 4 – 6:30 PM
Where: Cork City Centre or Airport Hotel
What: Food, Drink, Booze (See last year for details)

I am honestly not sure how we’re already halfway through January of 2009 because I could have sworn it was only three days ago that I completely and utterly failed to get a turkey in for Christmas dinner. (We had roast beef instead and it was very nice; thank you for asking.)

However, I did finally notice what year it is when Curious Wines, my favourite boozy client, was nominated for a 2009 Digital Media Award in the Best Commercial Site category. This is nice for me and nice for Katherine, who worked with me on the site, but it’s particularly nice for the Curious boys.  They are sincerely passionate about bringing excellent wine at brilliant value to the masses, they are working the balls off their business, and they deserve every accolade they can get their grape-stained hands on.

Obviously there’s no shame in losing out to major national brands like Argus, 3 or Toyota, but I’m crossing my fingers for the 13th of February and hoping they take home a nice big gong. (And give me a nice big bottle of champagne to celebrate, obviously…)

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.