Murmurs

Back in the office today after a great Bizcamp over the weekend. Between Cork Open Coffee on Friday and Bizcamp on Saturday its been a great few days for networking and meeting great people. All my business cards are gone.

Cork Open Coffee on Friday was Sponsored by CityLocal Cork which allowed us to call in Mr. Cotton’s Coffee and Delicious’ foods for the moring which was brilliant.

Well done to the organisers of Bizcamp! The Guinness Store house venue was excellent. It was pretty big and I think everyone figured out pretty quickly that the lifts in the center weren’t the fastest to arrive so the stairs were pretty popular for the day.

At any given time during the day, there were 5 talks going on at a time in different rooms. It was physically impossible to attend them all which is a pity, a few of them which I’d like to have attended were on at the same time.

For me the best talk of the day was Alan O’Rourkes talk on Email to Sales: Conversion in Email Marketing.  Alan gave plenty of numbers showing how an email marketing campaign to around 1000 recipients could result in 1 single purchase of your product or service to a value of €1000 euro. This shocked a couple of people in the audience but rang true to a few other members of the audience which were familiar with this return on what is on average a €10 investment per campaign. Alan highly recommended reading “Predictably Irrational” by Dan Ariely which is now on my wish list.

Steve Gotz spoke about how not to create a start up business. Steve bought a BMW Z3 and a new house before starting his company leading up to the dotcom bust and recommended doing things the other way around.
I missed Ger Hartnetts talk on Simple project management unfortunately in favor of Joe Drumgooles’ talk on Startups in Ireland. Joe highly recommended trying to take advantage of grants coming soon from the National Digital Research centre.

I missed Kate O’Beirnes talk on Time management for Start ups in favor of the panel discussion in the main hall. This panel discussion was excellent; Kevin Traynor, Colm Lyons, Asheesh Dewan and Jerry Kennelly spoke openly about the ups and downs of trading in difficult times from their own experiences and answered questions from a packed hall all the while sharing one single microphone.

At the end of the talks I attended a talk from the Bizcamp Team on how they organized the day. Overall the cost for Bizcamp was around €8,000 which covered the venue, audio / visual, food, wifi, teas / coffees and the teams highly visible T-shirts. The sponsors; Microsoft, Bank of Ireland, Mason Hayes+Curran (Thanks for the mints!) and 3 covered the costs of the day.

Around 500 people registered for Bizcamp, around 300 arrived on the day which isn’t bad at all for a weekend with an All-Ireland final on. I took plenty of notes on their organizing of Bizcamp for the upcoming organizing of the third Barcamp in Cork in November.

Check out Mark Cahills pictures from the day on Pix.ie

Other Bizcamp related blog posts

Bizcamp Dublin by Keith Shirley

Keeping an eye on the ball by Fran Hollywood

Google has opened an Internet Statistics site bringing together 3rd party statistics into one place.

The Hierarchy of Digital Distractions.

From the same site, a Timelines visualisation for time travel in popular film and TV. Read the comments too, some nerdy people out there.

Im trying out Outlook 2007 at the moment as my email client after using Thunderbird for years and years. This morning I read about Postbox, built using the Mozilla engine. Postbox are on Twitter too. Read a Postbox review on ReadWriteWeb.

Have you old PC parts knocking around your home or office? Give them to Bluekop.

Nominations for the Realex Payments Irish Web Awards are now open!

100 handy keyboard shortcuts for Windows.

Want to know what the Americans are up to all day? Have a look at this graph of How Different Groups Spend Their Day.

For the 8.0% of visitors to this blog using Googles Chrome browser, you can now get themes for Chrome.

A few weeks ago, Microsoft announced that they would use Word to render the HTML in the next version of Outlook.  The email standards project aren’t too happy about it and started a Fix Outlook campaign.

Lobsterpot Solutions created a Silverlight version of all the people on Twitter who responsed to the Fix outlook campaign.  Check it out and zoom in, see if you can find anyone you know.

Hint : “T”.

I created a survey using Polldaddy about 3 weeks ago to get a rough idea of peoples attitudes to some of the questions I have about newsletters.

32 people took the survey. I promoted it mainly using Twitter and thank you to a good few people who retweeted the message. I wouldn’t have received the responses without your retweets.

I also promoted the survey a little using a Wordpress plugin called ‘What would Seth Godin do?‘. This plugin allows you to display a short message to new and returning visitors to your blog. I updated the message to ask new users to this blog if they could spare a few seconds to take the survey.

It got 3 people to take the survey as a direct result of this plugin so it was worth the couple of minutes to set it up

Now to the actual newsletter survey results

How many newsletters do you subscribe to?

53% subscribe to 1 – 5 newsletters
40% subscribe to more than 5 newsletters
6% associate newsletters with spam

How long do you spend reading a newsletter?

50% take just a quick glance
43% read for less than a minute
6% read for a few minutes

Does it bother you if the links clicked in an email are recorded?

53% say not at all
34% say it bothers me but I click them anyway
12% are bothered by tracking links and don’t click links for that reason

Do you use a webmail client like Gmail or a client like Outlook?

65% use a webmail solution such as Gmail
34% use an email client such as MS Outlook

Do you preview your emails or read them based on their subject?

This was 50:50 between previewing and reading based on Subject

Do you forward newsletters to someone that might be interested?

68% have never forwarded an interesting newsletter
31% have forwarded a newsletter to someone else in the past

Do you trust an Unsubscribe option?

75% trust a newsletters unsubscribe option
25% believe an unsubscribe option could pass their email address on to another party

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The main question in the survey that I was looking forward to seeing the result of was the last question about trusting the unsubscribe option. I must admit, any time I go to unsubscribe from some email list, I worry that I’ll soon see some new unsolicited emails flying in. There seems to be a healthy trust in the Unsubscribe so I’ll breathe a little easier.

My ongoing research

Rather than close this survey I’ve decided to leave it open for a few months. I’d like to see if a few people will take the survey over time and to see if attitudes change any little bit over time.

I have a couple of other ongoing information gathering projects going on too. I’ve added a link to each of them on the sidebar on the right under the heading ‘My Ongoing Research’.