Online (Earned!) Media and Dublin Web Summit

Had a good, educational and inspiring day in Dublin yesterday!

In the morning I caught Damien Mulley’s talk on the benefits of Social/Online Media and although I’m fairly heavily involved in this area already there was plenty to learn, proved by all the notes I took! The new idea is that you have to “earn” your online space and give great value in return for followers, connections, search rankings and sales leads.

Damien covered the basic and advanced reasoning and features behind the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin and gave some great stats on just how important and effective this whole area has become for businesses.

Of particular interest to me was when Damien spoke about the amount of targeting you can do in both Facebook Ads and also Status updates. It was also nice to hear him suggest that websites weren’t a thing of the past just yet and that they need to be optimized correctly. His movie and comments (below) on exactly where people look in Google search results was sobering. It seems if you’re not in the top 4 or 5 then forget it!

Following a nice lunch and catch up with an old friend in The Cedar Tree Lebanese restaurant it was over to Trinity (slightly drunk!) for the well attended and anticipated Dublin Web Summit.

Matt Mullenweg’s appearance at the summit was what brought me to Dublin from Leitrim. How could I not go see and hear the man who has revolutionized my business!? He created and continues to work on my CMS of choice, WordPress. A legend. He didn’t disappoint either with a lively talk and fantastic shoes! He was responsible for one of the quotes of the night – “Learn to code. Scripting is the new literacy.” I hope to take up that particular challenge.

The summit was interesting, inspiring and educational with excellent and entertaining talks from all speakers and was well chaired by RTE’s Mark Little. Craig Newmark of Craigs List said: “We need a business culture that doesn’t stigmatise failure,”. Final and best quote of the night came from Wired UK’s editor, Ben Hammersley who said: “Whatever you do, make it Beautiful”.

Off to change the world now!

Leon.

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Posted in General on February 8th, 2010
Tags: craig's list, dublin web summit, matt mullenweg, social media unspun, wordpress
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