Niamh Redmond

On the drive home the other night, I could have been forgiven for thinking that there was an alien abduction or a rock concert taking place as one stretch of the Howth Road in Clontarf appeared to be fully illuminated as if someone were shining a huge torch at it from the other side of the road.

Driving past the illumination revealed that it is a display with a long conversational-style sentence written across it.

“Patrick! You are absolutely perfect!” (more…)

I recently embarked of some further study. I am three weeks into a Diploma in Digital Marketing with Advertising, Public Relations and E-Commerce (Dip. Dig. Mkting) with the Fitzwilliam Institute. This is the first time that the Institute are running the course, which can always be a bit of a gamble. However, I’m not new to this having been the 2nd year group of undergraduate students to undertake the BSc. Multimedia degree at the School of Communications in Dublin City University in 2000, and that gamble paid off in the end. So far, the diploma course has been very good and has reached my (high) expectations. One of the key things that attracted me to the course, aside from wanting a formal qualification in the digital marketing and advertising arena, was that the Institutes approach in selecting lecturers that are directly working or involved in their area of specialisation and that can demonstrate their experience with examples related to their own jobs and companies. I was interested to see that one of the lecturers, Anthony Quigley, was recently interviewed by The Innovation Magazine, the monthly supplement of the Irish Times. Quigley, founder and CEO of Online-Marketing.ie, is considered one of Ireland’s leading experts in the areas of online and internet marketing.

I also attended my first “Marketing Breakfast” organised by the Marketing Institute of Ireland yesterday morning, which took place in the Dome Restaurant (more…)

A colleague sent me the below in an e-mail today…

“Dial this number and wait to hear option 3 - 1890 866 07″.

Pretty funny, livened up our days anyway (we are obviously easily entertained! - Ah, small pleasures!)… Turns out it is a marketing ploy for Perlico, an Irish Internet and Phone company.

The duck appears to have had the desired outcome anyway, people are spreading the word. But how successful is viral marketing such as this? There is a current post about this on boards.ie; http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055142608 . Some posters there believed that the Perlico phone line had been ‘hacked’ and were wondering if it would be possible to do the same to Eircom! Another poster thinks that this type of marketing is really unprofessional. Regardless of these people’s various opinions of the marketing ploy, has it proved to be a success? (more…)

A late night escapade to Q-zar and bowling in the Blanchardstown Leisureplex (how much fun! - I haven’t done that since my teenage years) saw me leaving the moped in work overnight the other night and subsequently having to resort to public transport the following morning i.e. get the train into work. Anyway, page 13 of my free copy of METRO contained an article about how open-source technology is transforming the economy, politics and science… so nothing new there exactly but it did get me thinking about mass collaboration, social networking, blogging and self-publishing on the Internet in general ( a lot to think about on a relatively short train journey!). And, I also learned a new term in the process, ‘wikinomics’.

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“Blogs Will Change Your Business.” Or so the May 2nd, 2005 issue of Business Week stated, but which blogging software should you use?

Undoubtedly, web publishing in the form of blogging has gained popularity as a legitimate business, communications and marketing tool. Furthermore, any internet web manager, developer, designer or digital media industry professional who is worth their weight should maintain a blog, apparently. I myself finally got around to setting up my new blog using WordPress. So… why a new blog? And why have I chosen the blogging software that I have? (more…)