You are cordially invited to join us for New Year’s Eve Festivities as we welcome in 2009, hopefully with something between a whimper and a bang.

• There will be wine, beer and bubbly. If you want anything harder than that, bring it, although we may bust out the scotch at some point.
• There will be food. It will probably be yummy. (Oh hello, winter carbs!)
• There will be peace on Earth and goodwill towards men.

There will very likely also be music, count downs, noise makers and all that good stuff. We would love to have you, so please RSVP in the comments. You are very welcome to bring people along; just let me know how many, so I can plan accordingly.

Where: 18 Gilabbey Street, Cork, Ireland
When: 9 PM until sometime after midnight
Who: You, and whomever else you would care to bring
RSVP: In the comments, as soon as possible :)

You know that deeply irksome trend where people make charitable donations on your behalf instead of giving gifts? Well, we’ve done that very thing with you in mind, dear Internet. You were going to get coal in your stocking, but instead we’ve stuck a few bucks in the g-string of the following very worthy online organisations this year.

• Wikipedia: Does anyone not use Wikipedia? There is simply no better, more accessible or better resource when you suddenly need to know who the hell Lansana Conté is at 4 o’clock in the morning.
• Electronic Freedom Foundation: A lot of current issues including DRM and network neutrality emanate in the US. A donation to EFF helps to fight the good fight on the front lines of the battle for electronic privacy and freedom.
• MySociety works to make government open to the public - transparent, accessible and accountable . The code base it’s built on is similarly open, and is what John is using to bring some of this kit to Ireland.
• Scarleteen: Because abstinence only sex education simply does not work, and no matter how good your relationship with your mum, you probably don’t want to be asking her any questions that include the word “lube.”

If you’re looking to give in the spirit of the season but don’t know where to drop off your hard earned dollars, euros, or drachmas, you might consider the above. Organisations like these can take a beating during a recession, but unless you’re planning to give up your internet connection, your digital rights or sex in the face of economy, we hope each of these organisations will make your 2009 a better place to be in some way.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all, a good night.

We’re beginning to vaguely think about the new year here on Gilabbey Street, and we are pondering perhaps having a party of some flavour. Since, you know, everything is closed and there’s sod all else to do.

Since you, dear Internets, would be invited, please let me know which of these two events you might prefer to attend:

We’ll do neither if there isn’t enough interest, but assuming there is, I’ll add a new post with details accordingly. Comments welcome if you have any suggestions!

PS: By “brunch” I mean a complete civilized hour, like say noon or 1 PM.

One of the most predictable questions clients ask just before their new site goes live is “How do I get press coverage for my site launch?” My uniform but depressing answer is “Why would you get press coverage for your site launch?”

The harsh reality is that few news outlets are going to cover the launch of a site, because guess what - it isn’t news. New web sites launch daily in their thousands, and no matter how special you think your unique snowflake may be, it just isn’t that special.

Therefore, if you want media coverage, you need to actually make news. Here is how we did that for Ciara Crossan at WeddingDates.ie, where you can search for available reception venues based on your chosen wedding date and location. The hook in Step 2 will be different for every site, but the basic methodology is the same for all the clients I’ve been through this with.

1. Relate your product or service to something current in the news.

We’re diving head first into a recession, and the media has an endless appetite for recession stories. Weddings cost an average of 20K, so there’s probably a news story nicely nestled between big ticket items and topical budget cutting that we can tease out.

2. Find or create a hook that legitimately ties in your business.

To create our news story, we designed the 2008 Wedding Budget Survey using a free PollDaddy survey, and asked brides and grooms if the recession was impacting their wedding budgets. Ciara got a lovely prize sponsored by one of her hotels to lure 100 people in for the survey, and then we crunched all the data to get some nice beefy stats.

3. Write a really good press release.

There are two tricks here. The first is: do not write a press release. Instead, write the story you want the papers to run. (See press release here.) Format it like a press release and call it a press release, but make it easy for busy journalists to see the whole story by writing it yourself - preferably really well.

The second trick is to make the press release about your news story but work your client into it so seamlessly that it is almost impossible to cover one without the other. When done well, you’ll have about a 90% success rate with this.

4. Distribute it to a hand-picked media list.

Ciara’s homework assignment while I was doing 1, 2 and 3 was to buy all the papers and magazines for a full two weeks and start pulling names and contact details for people and editors covering this kind of story. Regional contact details came from the book. We targeted lifestyle, business and women’s sections of national and local newspapers and magazines.

5. Be available to respond to media calls and emails.

Ciara got loads of calls and contacts after sending out her release. Some outlets just ran the press release; others were more interested and called for interviews and sent photographers. Some ran the survey story and some ran more general pieces about her. It doesn’t matter; they would never have run any of these stories if she’d simply sent out a standard new website release.

So the press release did its job and generated several news stories:

• The Sun
• The Echo (full page in Women on Wednesday)
• The Cork Independent
• The Kingdom
• The Kerryman
• The Corkman

Bridal mags print quarterly, so we’re still waiting to see what, if anything, pops up there, but that’s a nice result with a good regional spread.

One thing I would encourage anyone to do before embarking on a campaign like this, however, is to really consider the benefit of traditional press. Because honestly, for a lot of businesses, there is no benefit. Read that again: there is no benefit.

Newspaper mentions and even radio and television coverage will not result in the traffic bump on your site that you expect. Let’s face it -  The Sunday Business Post is not The Colbert Report, so if you’re hoping for a Colbert Bump from a mention in the Irish media, you’re likely to be sadly disappointed. Online links are likely to bring you far more traffic, so for most small businesses, time is better invested generating online coverage than offline coverage.

However, there are at least two instances where it is worth pursuing traditional media:

• Investors - If you have a pool of investors or a board of directors, these people just love being handed a big fat press clippings file. It’s a tangible result they understand.
• Stakeholders - In Ciara’s case, the hotels listing on her site are her stakeholders, and all this press lends huge legitimacy when she goes out to sell to them. As Mulley points out, this kind of traditional PR is about reputation.

I am not a professional PR person and I don’t have the contacts that might have resulted in more national coverage for this story. However, I’ve also seen some of the big PR agency price tags, and I’m pretty confident that with our little DIY press campagn, we got 80% of the bang for about 10% of the buck. If you’re a bigger company or situated more offline than online, it’s probably worth it to bring professional PR onboard. But if you’re bootstrapping your online business, it’s worth knowing that like Irish brides, you can DIY it for less.

In about 12 hours, I leave for glorious, rainy Italy, where I’ll be for a week. I’m sure it will be delightful - after all, it’s Italy, so who cares if it’s raining? - but right now I’m mostly concerned with finding clean underpants, locating my passport, and remembering what flight I’m getting on.

John will be observing Eimear the Wonder Dog’s protest hunger strike while I’m away, and providing emergency support to clients in the event anything goes seriously wrong, which isn’t that likely. You can reach him at john [at] handelaar [dot] org, and he also has the super secret MAXroam bat phone number for me while I’m away. Honestly though, I don’t know how useful that’s going to be, since nearly every call is likely to be met with “Dude, I’m swimming at the bottom of a bottle of Chianti, I don’t have a clue.”

To my great surprise, everyone including my mum is whinging for good old fashioned postcards. Since I find this amusing in a Victorian kind of way, I’ve decided to launch Operation Postcard Florence. If you want one, just fill in your name and address, and it’s quite likely a missive from Italy will turn up in your postbox in due course.

Above are the presentation slides for yesterday’s Blogging Master Class. Though they only formed a small part of the course, I fully intended to get them up last night. This was fine in theory, except we retired to the nearest available pub at the conclusion of the day’s proceedings, and after one pint I could no longer feel my face.

In previous incarnations, this would have queued a wild night of drunken antics complete with table top dancing, a shoe left in a gutter, and possibly my knickers left on a lamp post, but I am older, wiser and vastly more tired these days so the only thing is queued was me going to my bed at an hour suitable for very small children.

Lightweight drinking escapades aside, it was a wonderful afternoon and I greatly appreciate the ten nine people who turned up (some after long drives) to be the guinea pigs for the maiden appearance of this course and have their blog posts picked apart by a roomful of weirdos off the internet. Joe Scanlon, Mike and Matt Kane, Julian Alubaidy, Aedan Ryan, Gordon Murray, Ger Hartnett, Keith Shirley, and Linda FitzPatrick all deserve kudos for braving the Master Class format, which is a bit of a scary prospect all on its own. It’s not for the feint of heart - as Joe Scanlon noted in his Twitter stream, “Well that’s my test post fucked out the window.” (That wasn’t quite true, for the record, and he did get points for a hysterical post title.)

But the anonymous feedback forms at the end of the course were spectacular, and the people who left comments all noted that they loved the Master Class format, which I’m completely delighted about.

My one regret was that I fully intended to also have a brainstorming session for topics each business could be covering to appeal to their audiences, and that just slipped my mind when I re-shuffled the running order at the last minute. I’m very sorry about that, so if you attended the course, you can drop me a phone call and I’ll gladly throw some ideas at you if you like.

PS: Cheers for the room rental whip round, guys! For anyone else interested in meeting space in Cork, the Lancaster Lodge is an excellent venue, highly recommended.

So the fabulous Katherine and I are leaving clients, partners, children and dogs behind for a Ladies’ Holiday in Italy, where we’ll be hanging out in Pisa and Florence for five glorious days, doing not much of anything at all except possibly peering at a keeling over tower and booking tickets to the Uffizi to avoid the queues. Since my previously planned Prague jaunt got cancelled, this will be my first holiday in four years.

I am actually gagging to get on a Ryanair flight, it’s that desperate.

Obviously when you’re in Florence, you don’t give a damn where you’re staying because it’s Florence and it’s all stunning, but we got a great deal on the four star Hotel Monna Lisa and there is a possibility I may die of gorgeous before I even step foot in the place. I’ve no idea if there’s WiFi, but it doesn’t matter because even if there is, I seriously don’t want to hear from you.

So I’m leaving on Friday the 5th and returning on Wednesday the 10th at 19:20 - alas, too late to catch the last train back to Cork. Thus I will be spending the night in Dublin at The Maldron in Parnell Square. Thus if you would like to meet up that evening for a drink, I am at your disposal from approximately 8:30 PM.

I can rarely be arsed to go to Dublin, so it would be nice to see the people I rarely get to see outside of conferences. I’m not fussed about where as long as it’s nearby and there’s the possibility of a bar snack since I won’t have eaten. Let me know where, when and who in the comments and I’ll be there!

Damien Mulley tipped me off to the Maldron’s current deal (thanks for all the suggestions, Twitteroos!) and may also be in town that night, so I suggest we apply the wisdom of crowds and simply demand en masse that he come out and play.

I like VistaPrint - I’m all about the cheap and cheerful. Because I do regular print runs, I subscribe to their annoying sale emails, since once in a while I actually want to avail myself of a discount offer.

This is what this past week’s promotional mails from VistaPrint look like in my Inbox:

• 19 November: 10 great November benefits for you, Sabrina!
• 20 November: 34 FREE products + 12 discounts = get started now!
• 22 November: Save 100% 12 times over - Last 24 hours!
• 24 November: FREE! FREE! FREE! (Postage too!)

To be perfectly honest, I’m normally so blind to these near-daily missives that I really couldn’t tell you if their subject lines were substantially different a year or even a month ago. But what I can tell you is that in the present climate we’re watching everyone from banks to airlines go under, and consumers are particularly sensitive to the scent of circling vultures.

At this point I’m fully expecting tomorrow’s email to be titled FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WILL YOU PLEASE JUST ORDER SOMETHING FROM US!!!!!!!!!

For the record, I do not think there’s any kind of financial issue at VistaPrint. But I do think you want to be particularly careful about your sale messaging in this climate.

I actually need to print business cards. But I’m holding out for the offer that comes with the free pony.

Everyone who attended the Train the Trainers course in August agreed to offer their own free class in turn, and I’m fulfilling my promise to Damien Mulley by holding a Blogging Master Class on 2 December, 2008 in Cork. This is an excellent opportunity to meet other bloggers, learn some new blogging skills, and get your arse kicked by me without having to pay for it like normal clients do.

What’s a Master Class? It’s a term from music education and refers to a particular format for learning:

The difference between a normal class and a master class is typically the setup. In a master class, all the students (and often spectators) watch and listen as the master takes one student at a time. The student usually performs a single piece which they have prepared, and the master will give them advice on how to play it, often including demonstrations, and admonitions of common technical errors. The student is then usually expected to play the piece again, in light of the master’s comments.

And whilst I’m not pimping myself as a blogging master (there is no such thing), that’s broadly what we’ll be doing. Over the course of the afternoon, we’ll take four people’s pre-prepared blog posts in turn, and edit for content, formatting, voice and technical details like images and linking. As with a traditional master class, this will be an actual, hands-on learning experience. Unlike a traditional master class, there will be no cellos, but there will be lots of group participation.

That will take two or three hours, and we’ll wrap up with a mini-workshop on maximising and marketing your blog, because when you put that kind of effort into your posts, God knows you deserve some readers.

The workshop will cover:

• What and when to blog
• Writing compelling content
• Using categories and tags effectively
• Learning from statistics
• Promoting your blog
• Strategic linking
• Cheap and cheerful tools

Although the exercises are always good practice, this course is more geared towards business bloggers than personal bloggers, and preference for hands-on editing will accordingly be given to those blogging in a commercial capacity.

Date: 02 December, 2008
Time: 1 - 5 PM
Venue: Lancaster Lodge, Washington Street, Cork
Cost: Free. Woo hoo! Parking also free
Bring: Laptop, wifi thingie, draft blog post

So if you’d like to come along, please click here to register - I’m happy to do this with a minimum of three people and maximum of twelve, and I promise it will be fun.

And that yes, there will be fag breaks.

Update: There are three eight people signed up already, so this gig is definitely on. Woot!

Michael Kane of CuriousWines.ie had a spec for his website that looked like a €25,000 custom back end job. Working with ecommerce goddess Katherine Nolan, we were able to pull 95% of his wishlist out of the bag with a heavily hacked off the shelf ecommerce system for a tiny fraction of that cost. We also added some very cool features like product tagging and reviews along the way to create a nicely dynamic site.

They’re launching with a very cool giveaway contest for Christmas, and a special 24 hour discount code on Twitter, too!