Krishna De: Insights From Ireland On Digital Marketing, Social Media And Entrepreneurship

Quickly share the events you are participating in using Plancast.com - and it's free.

1. Register your account at www.plancast.com - you can log in with your Facebook or Twitter account or start from scratch

2. Update your profile and your own calendar of events - what events are you attending in the months ahead?

3. Look for friends, subscribe to their updates and see what they are attending - then decide if you plan to join them

4. Tell your network - share events that you are attending to your friends by email, through Facebook or Twitter

5. Share events that you can not attend but think your friends would be interested in knowing about - again do this via email, Twitter or Facebook.

You can find my profile at http://www.plancast.com/krishnade

What great events are you attending in the months ahead and are you using Plancast.com yet?

Would you like to have the opportunity to use a premium press release service for free?

Well on Friday 22 January 2010, Jack Murray and his company Mediaexpress.ie is offering to distribute thousands of news releases for no cost from Irish businesses, organisations and charities, with just one catch: your press release must be about something positive.

Jack is calling this initiative ‘Good News Friday'.

All good news releases sent with the Mediaexpress.ie press release distribution service on January 22 2010 will be free.

You can participate in Good News Friday by logging on to www.mediaexpress.ie.

Mediaexpress.ie is a press release distribution service where you can send releases to over 150 bespoke media lists. But going through the Mediaexpress.ie.

Disclosure: I know Jack as I spoke at one of the conferences he organised last year - you can see my presentation HERE which covered 20 social media best practice tips.

How did I get to hear about Good News Friday? Well Jack sent me a press release!

So now it's over to you - what news story can you create for your business to help you increase your visibility?

Perhaps you can Model what Jack did - he created an event that was worthy of being talked about - that's why I am sharing this story with you.

How about Tweeting the first part of your postcode, the rate of snow fall and then along with fellow Tweeple create a realtime map of the snow fall?

That is what developer Ben Marsh has done in the UK.

I could imagine that the travel industry could put this to work - such staying with the idea of snow - what about Tweeting about the snow conditions for Skiing?

We'd have to take a different approach in Ireland though as most of us don't have postcodes!

What ideas does this give you for crowd sourcing information over Twitter.

I love it - blogging and podcasting about the weather!

The Guardian in the UK has a live blog about the weather and transport called the Big Freeze Live Blog - and they also include AudioBoo's.

Here you can listen to Martin Wainwright the Guardian's northern editor talking about the side roads being impassable and there being no chance of gritting.

AudioBoo.fm and iPadio.com are definitely in my top list of podcasting applications at the moment and a way of getting a message out quickly to your audience.

What could you use them for? Or are you already using iPadio.com and AudioBoo.fm

Seesmic.com has just announced that they have acquired Ping.fm which currently has about 500,000 registered members and from which about 200,000 status updates are made a day.

Through Ping.fm you can send an update through email, text message, post pictures to Flickr and Facebook.

In this video Ping.fm co-founder is in conversation with Loic Le Meur about the service and how to use Ping.fm. I understand that Ping.fm allows developers to use their API - something that might be worth exploring if you are a developer.

I've used Ping.fm, Seesmic desktop and Seesmic on the web - it's just not my favourite application for posting to Twitter at the moment because I really like the functionality in Hootsuite and it's a web based application so I can use it anywhere. This acquisition and integration of Ping.fm in the forthcoming weeks may just seduce me back to using Seesmic and Ping.fm.

What's your preferred way of posting to Twitter?

Late last year you might recall that in the US the FTC issued guidelines for social media disclosure - covering endorsements and testimonials. You may not be aware that the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) helped shape the guidelines.

As a next step in the process, WOMMA is now developing best practices for social media disclosure for both marketers and bloggers.

They are actively seeking comments through until January 5 2010 and final guidelines will be submitted shortly thereafter.

Their goals are to facilitate dialog around and provide explicit recommendations around:

* Where and how marketers can effectively and transparently disclose — and be in compliance with FTC Guidelines

* Where and how “bloggers” can effectively and transparently disclose — and be in compliance with FTC Guidelines.

I've posted my comments over at their blog - don't forget to share your thoughts here: http://womma.org/ethicsreview/2009/11/27/womma-guide-to-social-media-disclosure-feedback-requested/

And for more details of the FTC guidelines go to their series of online videos here: http://www.ftc.gov/multimedia/video/business/endorsement-guides.shtm

Wordpress 2.9 has just been released - there looks to be some great upgrades relating to:

- managing your plugins
- image editing
- media embedding with very simple video editing
- a trash tab so if you accidentally delete a post or comment you have 30 days to recover it.

Find more details online at: http://wordpress.org/development/2009/12/wordpress-2-9/