James O’Sullivan’s Blog

Here’s a quick intro to me, James O’Sullivan

I was pleasantly surprised yesterday when I received two emails from the slideshare.net editoral team informing me that my slide has been featured on not one, but two prominent areas of their presentation website.

SlideShare Home Page Spotlight

Spotlight email

Spotlight - Slideshare homepage

SlideShare Humour Spotlight

My slide also got showcased in the humour category

To be honest I didn’t expect this slide to get featured by slideshare, I found the photos in an email I received and it took me 2 mins create and upload the slides! As always, the key is to know your audience and keep it relevant. As NiallH pointed out it’s a great way to get some free promotion and traffic from the world’s top slide sharing website!

Congratulations to Barack Obama on becoming the 44th president of the United States of America. I’m not going to write about the election campaign since I’m not an expert in American politics and don’t pretend to be. However this has been an interesting election in terms of online campaigns. Obama ran an extremely smooth internet campaign which consumed almost every large internet communication channel. The Obama camp more or less owned youtube over the last few months especially in the last few weeks. Political experts are saying that the Millennials won the campaign for Obama and where better to target these users but online! The Obama camp ploughed millions into online advertising and profiles, everything from a twitter profile to a myspace account the Obama campaign was covered. This was a long running campaign and if you run a trend  on Google for Obama V McCain Google trend actually predicts the result of the election!

The obama camp truly embraced online media, they connected with their target audience by creating content which entertained as well as getting their message across. I guess it’s alot easier to run massive online campaigns when you have the level of funding Obama had! Nevertheless, my hat’s off to the Obama team on a well run online campaign.

The internet has changed the way consumers preceive your brand and one group of users can have a huge influence over your reputation. Loss of reputation means loss of confidence which we all know in today’s economic down turn with the credit crunch results in lost revenue. So what can you do to ensure that your reputation is maintained.

• Listen

To what your consumers have to say, communication is 80% listening.

• Talk

Speak to consumers in a way they can understand. Don’t generalise.

• Engage

Don’t just sit there, get out and build a relationship with your customers. Start with building trust, it’s the cornerstone of any good relationship. Develop and understand your customer segments and build a personal profile for each one of these to help visualise the person your engaging with.

• Measure

Continuously monitor what’s being said on blogs, forums, social networks, customer service reps, sales.. Sort these into negative, positive and most popular. Take you course of action and measure the impact of your actions so adjustments can be made accordingly. Tools such as trackur, buzz logic, and many more can be used to help you organise this information.

I was listening to Newstalk as usual this morning and heard a nice piece on the new Tiger Woods 2009 game. The new game is deemed to have a glitch where Tiger Woods can walk on water and hit his ball back into play. Religious groups are calling for a bycot of the game as the game depicts Tiger as Jesus. I was wondering what EA sports reaction would be to the glitch and would they receive a huge negative reaction. I did a quick search on youtube to see for myself what the glitch was about and found a very positive response from EA sports below.