Barcampdublin - speaker notes

As with all barcamps you get to a couple of talks that you wish to see and miss loads more! Here are rough notes, taken on the day, from the talks I saw.

Conor Halpin, Le Cayla,  Pricing Talk

Conor's business is based on facilitating an alternative way of charging for software (on demand). Ironically his talk was based on his own experiences of how to charge for the Le Cayla service :-)

* first 4 customers are reference sites so charge them a tiny bit of money, service them well and learn from them to refine your service and your charging model. You contract that referencing with them. You do not hide your size. You cover their risk in siging up to you.
* 5 to 15 are the difficult ones - where you sell the full price version of your service. Here you establish the validity of your model.
* 16 onwards is proving that you can roll it out

[met Conor when I was working on a start-up 2 years ago and he was really helpful and accommodating - thanks Conor]

Capulet - Business Blogging
Give by Darren Barefoot

Key words - authentic, transparent

Good corporate blog - www.opushotel.com/blog
Boutique, top end hotel in Vancover. They are open about the challenges and the stuff that happens behind the scenes

Good viral campaign for "corporate" blog
www.desmogblog.com/stars_and_stinkers (flash game with embedding and source code to play with it)

Tips

• Listen and read first
• Comment and engage
• Use passionate people
• Multiple authors good - to cover fatigue.
• Recommend 2 to 3 posts a week
• Incoming links really matter

Capulet manage blogger relations in the same way that PR co's manage journalists - they call it their Social Media Outreach. They reckon on a 20% to 40% success rate.
Pick top relevant blogs (go for 50 max)

• Email them with story
• Lead with a link
• No shite
• Go for topic focused blogs rather than personal or corporate

Tips for a good viral Social Media Campaign

• Go where the users are (gas co in canada put video up on youtube to explain gas price rises)
• Combine things that don't usually work together
• Humour works
• Do not go for slick
• Reflect conventions of the medium

The Future according to Darren - with whoppingly big disclaimer :-)

• Twittr - the emergence of micro blogging
• Second life - not viable at the moment for corporate stuff but a variant on this will be really relevant soon. UPDATE - link to post here covering 6 different "immersive online worlds" as referred to by Darren.

Eoghan McCabe - Usability 101

Core message:

• Any questions for a visitor adds to their mental workload - BAD
• Visitors should never have to ask
  • where am I
  • Where do I start
  • Where can I find ???

• Design for scanning, design for reckless frantic browsing

1. Kill the clutter
choose goals
prioritise them
remove every thing else

2. design clear visual hierarchies
- use visual clues
- things that are related logically, should be related visually
- solid visual hierarchies let us parse pages quickly

Example
jobs.ie - no priorities shown

3 Use Conventions
- do not have your visitor have to learn new things
- give them a sense of familarity
- conventions exist for a reason

4. Break up pages into well defined areas
- categorise, organise
- Help the user filter
- Do this with content too

Examples
Halifax Banking - Good
BBC News - Bad

5.Make links look like links

6. Write Less

Krisna De - the business of blogging

[My notes tailing off here and what I have taken down combined with leaving half way through does not do Krisna justice so am not going to include them]

keith

Comments

[Siasy]

I was also at Conor's, Darren's and Eoghan's presentations,
great synopsis there of each - saves me a packet of writing.

[Krishna De]

Keith - great to see you again on Saturday. And thank you for referencing me on the blog.

Good luck with the event this week - a really important subject for us all to know about.