As I’ve noted here a few times, we’ve been beavering away organising a technology conference to take place in Derry this September. Well we’ve finally worked out all the details and ready to unveil it.

Et voila … we have SHOWCASE

SHOWCASE is a free one-day conference showcasing fresh ideas in cloud,  mobile and web-based apps taking place at the University of Ulster, Magee campus on September 16th.

The event features project demonstrations and product launches from twenty of the most exciting developers, startups and growing companies from across the region, alongside industry workshops from Microsoft, Ubuntu and others.

The aim of the event is to showcase the best of NI technology and give those from outside the industry a chance to see how these technologies can be applied to their own work. For those working in the technology sector, it’s an unmissable opportunity to network, get inspired by exciting new projects being developed and get ‘hands on’ in industry workshop and panel sessions.

Due to the support of Derry City Council, InvestNI, Londonderry Chamber of Commerce, NORIBIC and the University of Ulster, SHOWCASE is completely free – but places are limited. So if you fancy a spot, head on over to the website and book it now.

www.showcaseconf.com

If you would like to apply to demo or launch your own project at Showcase you can contact me directly.

As I’ve hinted here a few times, we’re hosting a technology conference in Derry this September (Thursday the 16th to be precise) – we’ll be announcing the details and opening up registration (it’s free) on July 20th 22nd (Thursday).

As part of the conference we’re looking for people with interesting and innovative new software projects to demo them at the event. Here’s the gist of it:

• It should be a cloud, mobile or web-based app or startup business in this space
• It doesn’t have to be the finished product, works-in-progress with an interesting angle will be considered
• Client projects will also be considered but the demos will be very public so make sure you clear it with them
• Demos will run to about 15 minutes + questions
• The more innovative the idea the better

It’s worth pointing out that we’ll not be taking everything – just the stuff we think brings something new to the table – but we’re inviting anyone who’s interested to get in touch.

For those that do present it’ll be a great opportunity to get your new projects in front of a roomful of smart folk who can help you get the word out and provide feedback. Each project will also be featured with a profile on iddictive.com and in a very cool conference guide which we’ll be making available in both print and ebook format.

If you’ve something you’d like to present – or know someone we should be speaking to – then drop me a line to mark[at]ownbrandmedia.com for more info.

New week, same stuff.

The aim is to announce the event officially sometime next week, so this week the focus is on pinning down a venue and starting to pull together a running order. On the venue front, the debate is between an arts venue or a city centre hotel – the hotel would certainly be easier (as it’s well set up for conferences) but I think an interesting venue adds something to an event.

Logistics vs aesthetics really.

The running order might take a little longer to work out. The aim of the event is to combine both the business and technology angles of our chosen topic (more on that next week) but without boring anyone. The likely solution looks like a dual-track event with a single group session to kick things off and a central space for refreshments and lunch to help lubricate the networking. Again, I’ll make sure to let everyone know when we’re ready to ‘launch’ and your help in getting the word out will be hugely welcome.

NB: If you’re involved in the technology space in Ireland (the NW in particular) drop us a line for more info.

So, the last week was pretty much as expected – sponsorship proposals for our Autumn tech conference alongside some work on the first Iddictive Guides, which I’m hoping to release into the wild in July.

Great news on the conference front – we’ve secured our core sponsor / partner, so now the focus starts to shift from pitching the concept to lining up the first few speakers. The plan is to announce the event in about 2-3 weeks, giving us a nice 2 month run in.

For those of you who’ve been asking for details, I’ll make sure to announce it here first – but in the mean time:

• It’ll be happening in Derry on Thursday, September 16th
• It’s a full-day event with some interesting ‘fringe’ stuff being discussed
• It’s a broad theme with something for techies, business folk and startups
• It’s free and we’re aiming for 150+ attendees

I’ll more than likely dribble out some more info in the next couple of weeks, but if you might be interested in helping out or want to know about sponsorship / exhibition opportunities, just drop me a line.

It used to be that the web was the web and ‘real life’ was something quite different indeed. Online we sent emails, played games and surfed the web in search of distractions. Offline we did our jobs, chatted with friends and met new people.

Social media, the mobile web and always on networks have blurred those lines. You can chat with friends on Facebook, send snaps via Twitpic and let people know where you are via Gowalla and Foursquare – and you can do it whether you’re sitting in a pub with an iPhone, on the bus with a laptop, in front of the TV with an iPad or at work with your desktop.

The web has become such an integral part of so many of our daily lives – both personally and professionally – that it would be amazing if it didn’t start making in-roads into our offline lives and businesses as well.

But it’s not just the functionality of the web that’s affecting our offline lives, but also the ideas, business models and ‘web culture’. In short, for many people the conversation has become, “if I can do things one way on the web, then why can’t I do them that way offline too” and it’s this thinking that is driving innovation in both business and culture.

Let’s take a uniquely web-based idea as an example: open source. Open source simply means that the materials and information used to create something are made open to anyone to use and adapt to their own needs.

Usually this means that the code used to develop a bit of software is made available to anyone to improve upon and change, often on the understanding that whatever changes they come up with are in turn made available for anyone else to build upon.

Online, open source is a movement and has resulted in wholesale changes to the way in which software is developed. Offline has, until recently, been a bit different. If you happened to be a car company for example, your designs, schematics and tech were are all super-secret. The process was a closed shop. This is undoubtedly still the case for the vast majority of car companies – with the exception of c,mm,n who just happened to have developed an open-source car (www.cmmn.org).

“C,mm,n follows the open source model: as with open source software, we focus our services around the product. Anyone can use it to offer mobility services, just as long as any derived work produced is released back to the community under an open source licence.”

And it’s not just cars. Open source has begun to make its way into everything from events (OpenCoffee, BarCamp, Twestival, Idea Hacking) to sustainable housing (www.os-house.org). Open source isn’t the only web idea making which is leaking offline either. Web-driven concepts like peer-to-peer networks (see Pirate Bay or the original Napster), crowd sourcing (a la wikipedia) and even cloud computing are all beginning to make their presence felt in the world of bricks and mortar.

Where Napster enabled people to share digital music, bypassing the record lables, companies like WhipCar, RelayRides and DriveMyCar allow people to share cars, bypassing car hire companies.

And if you don’t like the idea of owning your own clothes, you can now tap into the cloud-computing inspired ZeroBaggage which allows you to put together a wardrobe of clothes sourced from local retailers anywhere in the world. So the next time you jet off to Rome, you can ditch the luggage and pickup the latest Italian fashions when you arrive, before having them collected again when you’re done. You can do the same thing with children’s toys, family members in Japan even pets in America (Flexpetz.com).

So what does this mean for businesses? Simply put, let yourself be inspired by web culture and the kinds of business models the web has produced, then look for ways to make those work offline too.

Nothing particularly strange or startling in the last week. The majority of my time was spent drafting sponsorship proposals for our super-secret-but-not-really tech conference planned for mid-September. On the back of that were a handful of meetings along those lines.

Locally, last week saw our home town in the international spotlight, following the release of the Saville Report and on the national stage as part of the UK City of Culture 2013 bid. I’ve been helping to get a hyperlocal opinion site, Listenderry.org, off the ground so we attempted to provide a little coverage of both events there.

We were lucky enough to be involved at the fringes of the City of Culture bid and so got a nice little invite to a private screening of the bid DVD, a snippet of which is above. Top class work by some impressive local talent.

This coming week brings a little more of the same – more sponsorship proposals, more meetings – alongside a focused effort to get our first few Iddictive guides a step or two nearer completion.

The focus for last week was to get caught up on some writing work and organise a Digital Derry exhibition for the local Foyle Days festival. As they say, 1 outta 2 ain’t bad.

Foyle Days went really well and you can see some photos from the event here. The premise was to showcase some of the local digital media talent to an audience of families and young children.

We were able to wrangle some great showreels from the local university, technical college and a topnotch local TV production company. We also brought a photographer and two very talented digital artists (pictured) to work live on the day – showing their works-in-progress live on the big screen. A little damp on Sunday, but otherwise a great success and good fun to boot.

Outside of my regular columns for the Derry Journal and Belfast Telegraph, writing took an unfortunate back seat – something that needs rectified this week. I’ll also be following up on some interesting meetings about rolling out a series of Idea Hacking events and a technology conference we have planned for the autumn – sponsorship proposals all ’round then.

]]> http://ownbrandmedia.com/2010/06/recently-at-own-brand-june-14th-2010/feed/ 0 http://ownbrandmedia.com/2010/06/recently-at-own-brand-june-7th-2010/ http://ownbrandmedia.com/2010/06/recently-at-own-brand-june-7th-2010/#comments Mon, 07 Jun 2010 09:22:58 +0000 Mark Nagurski http://ownbrandmedia.com/?p=485

I like the idea of weeknotes – weekly updates about what a business has been up to and is working on – as both a way of reflecting and as a way of keeping anyone with a passing interest up-to-date.

So I’m going to give it a go here, ideally on Monday of each week. So, what is Own Brand up to?

Last week was mostly about the first Idea Hacking event which took place on Thursday evening. After a month of hustling around trying to put it together, we welcomed 7 speakers, 2 open mic guests and over 70 attendees. Overall it seemed to be a great success (you can see some of the feedback here), although there are certainly some things I’d change.

First and foremost, the layout of the room wasn’t as conducive to chit chat as it could have been – as most people took up their seats almost immediately. A ‘mulling about’ area will be a fixture of future events. Similarly, for future Idea Hacks we’ll probably go with fewer speakers and more Q&A.

That said, it hit the nail on the head in terms of diversity and the concept (diverse perspectives on one theme) works well. The aim now is to speak to potential sponsors about helping roll out the idea across NI, Ireland and then the UK – and given that theme, location and venue can be adapted to just about anything, I’d hope to see some interesting variations.

This week the focus shifts to a little catching up – writing in particular – and this weekend’s Foyle Days festival in Derry. The City Council have asked me to put together a ‘digital city’ exhibition – a showcase of all things digital media in the city. Short notice but it should be fun.

Everything associated with the web is about speed — download speeds, upload speeds, broadband speeds, early adopters, instant feedback and viral campaigns.

Fast is good. And fast is particularly good for marketers. A single tweet, blog post or YouTube video can spread across the Internet in hours, touching countless people, fuelled by nothing more than its own momentum.

But like the actor crowned an ‘overnight success’ after 10 years of waiting tables and bit parts in soaps, the speed of social media marketing can be hugely misleading. Is it possible to create a video and have it ‘go viral’ with no extra effort? Of course. Is it likely? Not very.

For most people, businesses and brands, it takes weeks, months and even years of consistent effort to build

engaged networks online. But once you’ve done the hard work, that network becomes an asset which can help spread your message extremely quickly.

So what are your options right now?

Accept it and get started:

So if it’s going to take time to build your social networks then you might as well get started now — and if you’re planning a campaign or launch, the earlier the better.

A simple strategy starts with time spent listening and getting the lay of the land (who are the main bloggers in your marketplace? Where are your customers and what are they saying?).

Next, set up a base camp (usually your website or blog) where people can learn more about you and access useful content.

Finally, use your chosen social networks to start participating in relevant conversations and adding value. Then keep doing it. It takes time.

Piggyback on someone else’s profile:

Social media is based on connections — and an endorsement or mention from someone with lots of relevant, high-quality connections can be enough to kick-start your own efforts.

Of course, everyone else knows this too and are busy trying to connect with big name Twitterers and Facebookers.

This can certainly be worth the effort but make sure your approaches are genuine, relevant and personal. And while big names can be great, there’s also lots of value in working with smaller bloggers and social media users with influence in your market.

The recent campaign by the Derry-Londonderry City of Culture bid to engage with 50 of NI’s most connected online influencers is a great example of this.

Look Beyond Social Media:

Social media isn’t the only game in town. Pay-per-click ads (small text or image ads that you only pay for when people click on them) in particular can be an effective way of driving traffic to your chosen online destination quickly.

You should also look at combining pay-per-click advertising with your social media marketing campaign.

Get Creative:

Of course there are plenty of creative exceptions that prove the rule. A creative campaign, packed full of exciting, useful, interesting, funny or simply ‘share-worthy’ content can take on a life of its own, get picked up by influencers with big audiences and spread like wildfire.

Certainly be creative and keep in mind what elements of your campaign people will be likely to latch on to and help spread. But, it would be a mistake to hang all |your hopes on the unlikely viral hit.

All of this should actually be comforting to most small businesses. Simple, consistent efforts build useful networks time and time again. It’s not rocket science, but it does mean you’ve got to be prepared to play a long-term game and do the work. And, after a while, your social media marketing can actually be as fast we’d all love it to be.

Mark Nagurski runs www.ownbrandmedia.com , hosts www.ideahacking.com and blogs about business ideas at www.iddictive.com

We’re finally getting to that point where we’ll be actively marketing our latest tranche of events and white-label guides.

If you’re so inclined, you can download a draft version of what we’re calling our ‘prospectus’ and see what we’ll be up to in the next few months.

Download Prospectus