Click Here to Not Feel Like a Wally

So I’m booking tickets to and from Brussels on AerLingus.com and Ryanair.com (we can take our time coming back via Charleroi, but need to be City Centre quickly for a business meeting on the way in). I book away nicely on Aer Lingus, even get to pay to choose emergency exit seats (Robert is coming along for this meeting and he’s over 6 foot 7), until I get to the confirmation page. How I managed to miss the Click Here to Remove Insurance option, I really can’t imagine. Except that most everything else on the page is Click Here to Include and the Click to Remove instruction is buried in the middle of 6 bullet points of text.

Only 10 Euros, I can afford it, but man, did I ever feel ripped off. In comes the e-mail confirmation from the insurance company with the policy. It tells me explicitly to ring them on a particular number if I need to cancel the insurance. Monday-Friday, 9 am to 5 pm. Just to make myself feel better, I rang them this morning. 20 Minutes on hold only to then be told by the operator that any cancellations must be received by e-mail. Ya Wha?

Now that just makes me cry.

9 Phrases Women Use

I enjoyed this post on IrishBusinessWomen.com – the online network for business women in Ireland – see if you can relate!

9 Phrases Women Use

The network is an online network and is a really interesting picture of what women in Ireland (and some men and non Irish) are doing in business.

How to Increase Your UNSUBSCRIBE Rate

Yes, I did say Unsubscribe rate. People often ask us how do you get people to subscribe, and we go to great pains to come up with new and novel ways of building their permission based e-marketing database. One of the things we try and get across is that it doesn’t matter how much effort you put into building a list (and you really have to build the list, not buy it or rent it) if you don’t treat your list with care, you’re going to lose it fast.

An example – I’m on the mailing list of one of the large event managers in Ireland and they regularly send rather bland and irrelevant ads for events that they are promoting. But I put up with them normally because it’s kinda good to know what else is going on. But just now, when I checked my e-mail I received six copies of the same ad which were large enough to take minutes to download. Six copies. Sorry, that’s me outta there… I hit the unsubscribe button.

We’ve seen this so often – with NEO Ireland, the Network for Event Organisers that we run, we try and send fewer than 2 emails a month to our database. Every time we increase the frequency we lose people. On the one hand, it’s good to clean out the list on a regular basis, but on the other hand – each one of them is potentially a precious jewel. Treat ’em keen – you don’t want them turning mean!

PayPal – You Were Never a Friend of Mine…

:@ – Every time I have to hit that PayPal button I end up seething – why does it have to be soooo unfriendly? I once made a Paypal account with my AIB credit card – lost the password and have since retired the e-mail address. So I went to create a new one with my BOI credit card (I know, pathetic!) but hubby had that card number registered (he’s an e-bay hound). So I gave up and had to pass on anything that would only take payment through PayPal. Then they brought in this new Pay by Credit Card without having an account feature. Great, thinks I. Did it work? No, the scarroll email address had been registered before, and the card number belonged to a PayPal account so nope, sorry, no go.

Last week I successfully managed to pay for some software using my company credit card through PayPal – so I was pleased. But today – I go to pay for registration at the MashUp event (can not wait to see Tim Berners-Lee) and I’ve just spent 45 minutes battling with PayPal again! Mash up – I’m sending you over an e-mail with an offer to sponsor the online registration for the next Mashup Camp – although the whole tone of the event sounds a little too Californian for the cynical Irish, the line up is fantastic.

If you’re interested, Mashup Camp is for software people who are interested in, well, mashups. Mashup is the generic term for web applications which are built by using other people’s applications – if you get me. For example, embedding google maps into your web page could make you a mashup candidate. Many of the other software as a service providers do what is called “exposing an API” – sounds a bit rude, but it really means that they provide a way for developers to access parts of their application and/or data behind the scenes. API is Application Programming Interface.

The Dublin camp promises some interesting discussions on topics which are decided on the day – very participative (is that a word?) and open – probably very earnest too. I’m showing my age, aren’t I? But probably most interested for a semi-geek like me is Tim Berners-Lee, the man who was responsible for the internet (well, more or less). It’s a two day event, only costs 25 Euros for developers, and it happens over the weekend of the 10th/11th November so I don’t even have to take a day out of the office. More information and registration are at the mashup camp 5 Wiki. If you have to ask what a Wiki is, you probably don’t want to go to Mashup.

And I really do have to say this – the registration process for the camp is just ghastly. I’ve gotten my receipt from PayPal, but I’ve no idea whether or not I’m actually registered. I did tick the box to have my name published along with the other 63 listed, but it doesn’t show up – presumably they have to go through each registration and remove the mickey mouses and george bushes. I took a look behind the scenes to see what they were doing and I suppose at least the data is going into a salesforce.com database. The payment data is then going in to their paypal database, and I do not envy them having to reconcile up the payments and leads in salesforce.com.  Lads, here’s some software as a service that will make your lives a lot easier : www.eventznet.ie

Ho Ho Ho … Santa Claus is Coming To Town!

I’ve just had almost as much fun as a girl can have with her clothes on – when she loves new technology! Particularly new technology which is useful and simple to implement. We’re launching our new Christmas E-Cards @ Eventznet this week, and to help us market them, we’ve enlisted Santa. A fantastic little gadget with a speaking Santa which is also a contact form. Take a look at http://www.eventznet.ie/em_overview.htm and let me know what you think!

 The animated character can have any background, say anything at all, and also be an FAQ engine. Brilliant – in my rather biased opinion…

We’re having lots of fun with Christmas E-Card designs, although we haven’t got our own ones sorted – always last on the list. Anyway, I refuse to think about it until Halloween is over.

Ah – That Friday Feeling … on a Monday

I genuinely got that Friday feeling today – after arriving late for a meeting in Park West because I stuck it in my head that I was going to City West I was just about ready to head home to have a weekend. Then I realised it was Monday… the week has only just begun!

There was another senior moment left in me too – I got an e-mail from someone who’s name I simply could not recall. It was a lovely chatty e-mail, sort of it’s been too long since we caught up and I hadn’t a clue who she was. This person was looking for recommendations for conference bags and branding, and I was more than happy to recommend our friends in Bound to Impress (see their NEO Ireland directory entry) so I replied. I had to say “good to hear from you” but thankfully didn’t allude to anything other than that it was good to get her e-mail.

Often, people feel they know me from speaking at an event or from our NEO Ireland e-zine, so I thought it could be that. Anyhow, the upshot of it was that she then e-mailed me back to say that she had forgotten to say who she really was, having moved jobs she was using someone else’s e-mail address temporarily. I was mortified!

Meet Mark Three

Just over 5 years ago, I sat in my kitchen in Blackrock with Philip Byrne of Sharpshooter Design when he revealed our “Mark” – or the Juggler that you see representing Eventznet. It was really early days then, we were just finalising the prototype of what would become the Eventznet Events Software. We started out with a really pretty purple and some greys – Philip designed a beautiful identity for our very first phase in operation:

In 2004 we moved to NovaUCD – the Innovation & Technology Transfer Centre at University College Dublin. We were a little further along the path then, with more than 100 events under our belts, and a better knowledge of who our customers were and what our sales proposition was. It was time for Mark Two. This time, we kept the purple, but added in a new trademark blue. Again, Philip did a wonderful job of producing a corporate identity that was fresh and pretty…

In August this year, we “graduated” from NovaUCD and moved to our new offices in Dun Laoghaire. 5 years on from our initial incarnation as a web based platform for event organisers, we now do a lot more than JUST the events software. It was time for another refreshing of our look and feel. This time, I had the look and feel so strongly in my own head that I just adapted what Philip had done previously – so any mistakes are mine and not his! Meet Mark Three:

We’ll be unveiling our new website and promotional literature this week, so keep your eye out for Mark Three – the latest incarnation of the Eventznet Logo Juggler!