Hurrah! Martha Rotter’s moveable feast know as Ireland Girl Geek Dinners is coming to Cork on the 7th of September, 2008. We’ve booked a table for 20 and we’ll be meeting up at Proby’s Bistro, which has a dire website. Despite this, Proby’s has been the scene for many geeky get together dinners of one sort or another, and the quality of the website does not reflect the quality of the menu.

What is a Girl Geek Dinner and how do you know if you’re invited?

Girl Geek Dinners are a chance for ladies in technology to get together, enjoy some nice food and drinks, and have fun meeting other women in their field.

“Ladies in technology” is a rather wide remit, so as far as I’m concerned if you’re doing anything from coding software in C++ to blogging on a default WordPress template, that includes you.

The table is booked in the private dining room upstairs for 7:30 PM, and there will be a set menu with vegetarian options for €24. Proby’s Bistro is located on French’s Quay, and there’s a map if you need one. So RSVP by leaving a comment at Girl Geek Dinners and we’ll see you there!

I spent the afternoon at the fairly wild and fabulous Cork Airport Hotel (pictures) taking part in Damien Mulley’s very generous Train the Trainers event. This day was interesting in a lot of ways, but for me a very valuable part was listening to and taking part in the back and forth conversations about content. It helped me to formalise some of my thoughts about the process of blogging.

Basically, I think there are two approaches one can take when blogging as part of a business communications strategy, both to engage readers and attract links:

1) Be a Resource

Ice Cream Ireland and Tast.ie are examples of this kind of blog. While both Kieran Murphy and Deb Hadley blog about their businesses and their experiences in ways that help keep the content varied and lively, if asked to sum up either of these sites most people would say “they’re recipe blogs.” They provide a very specific resource that helps them to pull a very specific audience.

Damien made the point that one of the most popular and link-tastic formats for resource posts is the Ten Step How To. People love this stuff; just look at all the inbound links and Twitter chatter on yesterday’s How To Demo Your Startup post at TechCrunch.

But you can’t produce that kind of post every day; it’s tremendously time consuming to create, which is why the successful blogs have that “varied and lively” content. More importantly, however, people take in a massive amount of information from scores of blogs each day. I suspect your average reader can manage maybe one or two “heavy” posts from across all of their sources in a given day. If your blog is always the blog with the big ask for time and attention, you will actually lose rather than win readers with your dense but awesome content.

2) Be Personal

This does not mean you need to share your ovulatory cycle with the internet. Rather, it means putting a lot of your personality, experiences and individuality into your blog posts. The best ways to do this are:

• Be funny.
• If you can’t be funny, be controversial or at least opinionated.
• If you can’t be opinionated, be intimate.

Again, intimate does not mean spilling your sex life online - and unless your profession is among the oldest in the world, this probably isn’t a great topic for a business blog anyway. But being intimate does mean giving readers a way to connect with you.

One of my favourite dislikeable people is Penelope Trunk of The Brazen Careerist. She gives excellent career advice, and if you skim through the entires in her blog, you’ll see that she almost always relates advice to experiences in her own life. Being fired, embellishing resumes, getting divorced - a continual litany of her personal failures peppers her instructions and lends a lot of authenticity to her posts. You learn a lot about managing your career, and a lot about Penelope.

Intimacy in this case is about the reveal, but it doesn’t have to be personal. Companies, and the individuals blogging for them, can tell stories, too - about the company, its employees, its relationships with outside vendors… all kinds of stuff.

Either way, the point is that a business blog is not about press releases, not about products, not about job vacancies. Can you name one blog you regularly read that’s about that stuff?

No, me either.

The tiniest bit of internet sleuthing reveals that Dublin based marketing firm Inspiration were the SEO company behind Irish Greeting Card’s recent debacle. Their homepage proudly declares it, in fact.

The part that made my jaw drop, however, was the next notice on their home page:

Cathy McGovern, Inspiration was one of three guests invited by Enterprise Ireland’s eBusiness Unit to participate in a round-table discussion on issues surrounding eMarketing and how it can be exploited by SMEs in Ireland.

Emphasis mine. I don’t have a problem with Enterprise Ireland and I think they’re providing key help for a number of high potential start-ups. Given the state of the economy, God knows bright businesses need the help now more than any time in EI’s history.

Somehow, though, I don’t think this episode is the kind of “exploiting” EI had in mind when they funded Irish Greeting Cards for online marketing consulting. A relationship between EI and Inspiration would seem to exist, but if that’s the case, my hope is that in the name of upholding best (or even acceptable) practices for online business, EI’s eBusiness Unit terminates it.

Post haste.

I started cringing as soon as the email hit my Inbox and it just got worse from there.

A fairly new business called Irish Greeting Cards has been dumping little email missives onto a number of Irish bloggers today. From the badly worded, poorly punctuated and grammatically convoluted copy, we have:

We’ve just completed a major upgrade of the site… The cards are unique in that you can personalize most cards on the outside and your own message on the inside. What we’re looking for is for bloggers to mention the offer and site to their readers (if you think it might be useful to your readers of course) and point them to the Greeting Card Site and perhaps encourage their readers to tell people who might think the cards are worth ordering.

According to Mulley, this contacting campaign was devised by a SEO strategist hired by the company. I have no idea who this SEO guru is, which is good - because if I did, I’d be sorely tempted to haul him out back and shoot him. Frankly, this company had more than enough going against it to begin with without his specialist help.

I am willing to bet that this SEO expert also advised them on their spam blog. And wrote all the “content” himself, lovingly filling it with re-constituted pork. It’s easy to see exactly how much effort went into this grand affair.

The only thing they did right was to mention in the email that “We’re not looking for better Google rankings” and invite me to set my links to no-follow. Which is the only thing they asked me to do that I’ve actually been happy to comply with.

The thing that pisses me off the most about this is that I would have used this service. I hate trying to remember occasions in advance, I hate going to the post office, and I hate filling out cards. I have been looking for a service like this in Ireland so that I can pretend to care enough to send cards by being horrendously lazy and doing it online.

What could they have done better?

• Emailed me an offer to try their product myself. I mean, it’s not like I’m going to forget I have a blog. If I liked it, I’d have blogged it, just like I do with other online services I love using.
• Dropped in a humble PS invitation to tell my friends if I enjoyed my card sending experience with them. Blatant solicitations to pimp their untried products to my blog audience is not the kind of transparency we’re looking for.
• Not shat on the entire concept of blogging with the absolute worst example of… I’d say blogging, but that isn’t anything close to blogging. That’s using WordPress as a CMS for spam.

Granted, not having a product that sucks out loud would have helped, and a little more thought about their “Irish cards, Irish diaspora” positioning wouldn’t have hurt, either.

I mean, know I’m a transplant, but I’m pretty confident there’s nothing particularly Irish about stock images of toast.

Having said that, I’m desperate enough that I probably would have become a regular customer of this outfit and sent the crappy cards to my friends and relatives, just on the basis that they’re better than the cards they are currently not getting at all. At this point, however, all I can do is tell all my friends:

Don’t use Irish Greeting Cards.

Update

It is rare that I make a supplier decision that makes me rave with happiness. It happens, but not often. This is one of those times.

The other day I blogged about choosing a project management system and my decision to go with Teamwork instead of ProjectPlace or Basecamp. Six days later I can report that Teamwork absolutely was the right decision - not only for the application, but for the team behind it.

In terms of functionality, there are a lot of things I like about Teamwork, but the things I love the most have nothing to do with managing projects. At the bottom of every page on my Teamwork site is a button that says Feedback/Suggestions. This isn’t just a form you fill out that disappears into the ether; it’s my feedback page. Every comment I make gets logged, timed, date stamped and posted there. And underneath every comment I make is Teamwork’s response to me. These people aren’t just filing away user feedback for some future user metrics calculation or later version rollout; they’re holding themselves accountable for responding to it.

I absolutely love that; it’s a real world, real value example of the transparency we all blather on and on about but so rarely see implemented in meaningful ways.

Way more than that, when these folks say “We take it all on board… seriously” they aren’t kidding. This morning at 9:06 I made a suggestion for a new feature. By noon, Dan Mackey had not only responded to me, but implemented my request:

As a product user, I’m really not sure what more I could ask for.

Alas, not everything is as flawless as Teamwork. Late last week Teamwork’s host, Hosting 365, suffered a denial of service attack and Teamwork was down for about two hours. Since I have quickly become a dedicated Teamwork junkie and am now using it to run my entire work life, I was on the phone to Teamwork in the first ten minutes. In the two hours that followed, I got two emails and a phone call to update me on the system status. That’s customer service - and I haven’t paid these people a single euro yet.

Today I caught up on some of my far-behind blog reading and read a post from Richard Hearne on another company doing things right: Intertrade Ireland is running around trying to get bloggers to raise the profile of Seedcorn, and managing to do it without pissing off the entire internet. Seedcorn’s got €280,000 for startups who are really going for it. I think Teamwork is a fantastic application with a huge potential audience. It’s an Irish Web 2.0 company with an actual, functioning revenue model, and I think they should enter.

The only thing that would make me happier is if they’d sign their feedback responses to me with “Lurve, Teamwork.”

After slacking off for a shameful uh, two years, I attended my very first Cork Open Coffee on Friday when Bernie Goldbach lied to me to get me to go. I had sort of imagined five spoddy boys and the divine smelling Conor O’Neill huddled round weak cups of tea, but it was actually a jam-packed, vigorous and entirely delightful event where I got to catch up with a ton of people and meet a ton more.

I will be a dedicated city centre attendee from now on, so between Open Coffees and the parade of other fun events scheduled over the next few months, it’s shaping up to be a fun summer here in the People’s Republic. Here’s what’s on my calendar:

• 17 June: A farewell dinner for Tom Raftery at Proby’s Bistro before he leaves for the warmer, spicier climates of Spain.
• 27 or 28 June: Lunch with Deb Hadley (formerly of the Humble Housewife and now of Tast.ie) in Cork at Cafe Paradisio.
• 16 July: The very first Open Coffee BBQ in Ireland will take place in Terryglass Village in Tipperary. There will be casual presentations, and I’m hoping to do a gig with Frank Prendergast provisionally titled How the Hell Do I Hire a Web Designer. Eimear the Wonderdog will also be in attendance.

So if you’ve any interest in food, technology or just some fun events with some really great people, sign your name on the appropriate dotted line and we’ll see you there!

Dear Internets:

I am completely willing to admit I do not know everything. I believe in taking advice on the things I am clueless about, usually from you and your pal Doctor Google. Foolhardy, possibly; but it’s always worked for me.

This year marks a transition for me from being part-time employee and part-time freelancer to being full-time self employed. It also marks the year in which we will, at some point, be applying for a mortgage. (Yes, I am 35 years old. No, I don’t own my own house. I’ve also lived in three countries in 10 years and been broke in all of them; give me a break.)

So while getting my financial ducks in a row is a high priority, the broader world of full-time freelance is also a bit of a mystery I hope to unravel with your help.

Things mama never told me about service providers:

• Where can I find an accountant or financial adviser in Cork to do my stuff and give me advice about setting aside enough money for taxes and paying PRSI and all that jazz?
• As my previous employer will no longer be paying my mobile bill, which I’ve never even seen, I need to know which provider and plan to go with. Hint: I like to talk. I do not believe SMS is a medium in which real adults can carry on real conversations. That said I really only use my mobile when traveling in Ireland (about once a month) but can rack up several hours in calls then.

Speaking of money, down to the nitty gritty:

I have no idea what market rates are in Ireland. I design sites, I code sites; I provide consulting and strategy for online marketing and positioning; I package and brand products; I write understandable web copy that reads like it comes from humans; I do site assessments, usability analysis, and user testing.

For all of these things, I have been charging a figure that is less than €50 an hour, except for usability testing - I charge test group costs plus the same hourly for that. The people who are paying me are telling me to charge more, and I know they’re right but I have don’t know what the right numbers are.

• What should I be charging for all of these various things?
• How can I keep costs accessible for people who have fun and interesting projects but low budgets? I often like those projects; they tend to refresh my creativity and I don’t want to price myself out of ever being offered them.
• If you’re booking clients months in advance, do you take a deposit now to block out the time for them at a future date? Usually I do 50% up front and 50% on delivery or go-live, depending, but getting 50% now for something I am not going to get to for three months seems a little dodgy.
• What do you do if you’re killing yourself to stay on top of a series of tight production schedules and a client doesn’t have their bits ready for their project’s agreed upon start date? My contracts state that if they can’t deliver their clearly articulated To Do list, delivery dates will be pushed accordingly, but what if you literally do not have room for slippage?

So, dear Internets, do you have any words of wisdom and experience for me? This is my year of Getting Things Done, and I’d like to do them right.

Yours, always,
Sabrina

The things I get myself into, I tell you.

Anyway, Ellie Parker and I are delighted to announce the upcoming launch of Sass.ie, going live sometime this month. We’re going to be aggregating posts from women bloggers in Ireland to help promote some of these great bloggers into bigger audiences.

But we’re going to build a ton of content around that, too. Our hope is that Sassie will also be a single point of contact for women (I hate the word portal) to find out about networking events like Girl Geek Dinners or to buddy up to attend things like CreativeCamps and Barcamps, as well as being able to access a well-written and well laid out body of information on running and promoting web sites from commerical enterprises to personal blogs.

We’ve actually got grand plans to cram a lot of high-value stuff in there, but right now all you can do is take a quick look, read what’s in the pipeline, and add your name to the alerts list so you’ll get a quick email when the site goes live.

And yes, by Jove, men are very welcome to join in, too!

Back from today’s Creative Camp and staying with my friend Katherine, who has very kindly let me hijack her cable internet. (Open wifi in Kilkenny: not so much.)

I was a bad, bad camper in that I turned up for lunch, did my two gigs and then turned around and went home to relieve the dog sitter. We travel everywhere with Eimear, but I’m just going to start taking her with me to these things so I can, you know, actually attend them.

Anyway, the panel went really well, and I panelled with brilliant women (Ina, Matha, Elly, Krishna moderating) although I’m a glutton for punishment and I like the hardball questions

I really had a great individual session on How to Blog Like a Boy, with a super responsive audience who laughed a lot and seemed engaged. If you’d like to see the presentation, its on Pix.ie. All of the text is in the first comment for each image, so you just need to click through them sequentially to get the actually content.

It was well attended by both men and women and afterwards, when I had adjoined to the smoking room (the great outdoors) a few of the men attending came up to me to say they were not, in fact, currently blogging like boys but felt suitably kicked up the arse now. That was interesting and oddly gratifying.

And for the record: yes, I speak like I blog and my language is just as salty, if not saltier, in person. Ireland has done bad, bad things for my potty mouth.

Here at chez moi we’re off to CreativeCamp a day early as we have plans for Friday night that will put us in Kilkenny on Saturday around noon. Given that little scheduling hitch, I have to say that Keith and Ken and the whole Kilkenny mafia have been 32 flavours of lovely dealing with me, because I have been a perpetual pain in the arse about this:

Is there public transport? Are there projectors and screens? How long do I have? Can you save slots for me? Which slots? What’s for lunch? When is lunch? Do I need a dongle? Can I have a pony?

And not a single one of them gave up and just shot me.

But that is not the end of Irish excellence today. I had two more stellar experiences today that really demand blog love.

First of all, the people at Blacknight got a name registered, DNS sorted and free sponsored hosting in place less then three hours after we faxed in a rush request for a .ie domain name. It’s for a super top secret, soon to be revealed web project Elly Parker and I are kicking off at Creative Camp. We’ve been working on it for a while, we just didn’t realise that this weekend was, uh, this weekend. Anyway: Blacknight. Awesome service.

Second of all, a couple of people have emailed me to say they can’t make CreativeCamp but are interested in my presentation on How to Blog Like a Boy. Since I refuse to read off my (very minimalist) slides, my presentation notes are the bulk of my gig and the slides are just summary backdrops. This means I can’t just make a PowerPoint download; it would leave all the context behind.

Marcus Mac Innes at Pix.ie to the rescue. I uploaded all of my slides as JPG images into an album and he entered all of my notes by hand in the first comment of each slide, one by one. Pix.ie users can’t use HTML like paragraph and break tags yet, and some of these slides have four or five paragraphs of notes and citations, so he saved my stressed out bacon. (Slides go live after Camp.)

Flicker, who wanted me to upload three test images and then wait more than a week until they’re reviewed so I can prove I’m not no longer a pornographer, can kiss my booty. Or just, you know, hire more staff.

Anyway, CreativeCamp, Blacknight, and Pix.ie all get 10 out of 10 for being outstanding, home grown examples of utterly fabulous people.

Give them your money and your love.

PS: