Our second mini-conference for DICE (Digital Innovation Creativity and Enterprise) was held on the 16th of October from 2pm – 6pm in the Helix. This conference was all about Social Media. A number of guest speakers came in to talk to us, including employees from Twitter and Facebook.
Our opening speaker was Dr.Theo Lynn from the DCU Business school. He opened up the conference by playing PSY’s “Gangnam Style” music Video. PSY, this well-known South-Korean artist has 591,364,368 views on YouTube. This is the most viewed K-Pop video on YouTube at the moment. It also has the most likes. Dr.Theo Lynn brought this video to our attention to show us the power of social media. PSY’s video conquered social media websites so quickly and he received a massive fan base all over the world. I found this very entertaining.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bZkp7q19f0
Following our opening remarks was the first guest speaker, Mark Cahalane, Managing Director of Edelman Europe. Mark spoke about the Edelman Trust Barometer. He presented figures and results from studies and surveys on trust opportunities. These figures were the percentages of trust in different institutions around the world:
- Government – 43%
- Business – 53%
- Media – 52%
- NGO’s – 58%
He also gave us the percentages for Ireland:
- Government – 35%
- Business – 43%
- Media – 35%
- NGO’s – 53%
The percentage for trust in the government is extremely low. However, trust in the Government is actually improving. I learned that trust protects reputation. People do not trust government institutions in Ireland anymore. The Banks at the moment in Ireland do not have a great reputation and they have lost a lot of trust in many people in Ireland.
The next speaker was Claire Wardle, Director of News Servives in Storyful. She gave us a talk called “Anyone can be a dog on the Internet.” Claire taught us all about the privacy settings on social networks. She gave advice on how you should behave on the internet and how you shouldn’t. She gave us tips on what to do when things go wrong on the internet. She put up a picture basically describing the title of her talk, which I thought was quite funny. I found this talk very interesting and entertaining. I felt that Claire made the talk amusing as she used humour to make the talk less boring. 
The third speaker was Jane White who works for Twitter. The talk she gave was titled “Twitter for Business”. I was really looking forward to this guest speaker as Twitter is my favourite social networking website. It is something I use everyday. I was also very intrigued by the fact that she was a former DCU student who graduated in 2007. This was very inspiring and made the talk more exciting and more anticipated. She described Twitter as a canvas for sharing your thoughts and talking directly to your customers. She showed and explained to us how powerful Twitter is. I found the power of Twitter unbelievable. There are 570,000 users in Ireland today and there are around 1 million tweets per day.Twitter helps business as well. She informed us that companies use Twitter to communicate with their customers. This makes the company more personal to users on Twitter. She advised us how to get more followers on Twitter. You are able to promote your tweets and when people search certain words or trends your page and tweet will appear. Retweets can be very powerful on Twitter. Once someone retweets someone else’s tweet it can be seen by many more users. She explained how you can buy the top trended topic for 24 hours. This can be very useful for business to promotes their products and services.
Our next speaker was Phillip Kelly from Electric Ireland. He was giving us a talk about Electric Ireland’s experience of social media. He explained how Electric Ireland are using social networking sites as an opportunity to promote the company itself. They are trying to improve their reputation and get more noticed and involved. He said that they have 33,895 friends and he also spoke about their Twitter campaign “Tweet Hunt”.
The fifth speaker was Darragh Doyle from World Irish. He gave us a talk titles “There’s never been a better time to be Online”. Darragh, in my opinion, was an excellent speaker. He lightened the mood and connected with the audience. He showed us funny pictures from social networking sites. This was very amusing. He told us to take full advantage of the use of online services and showed us how powerful it can be.
After the break, there was a Panel Discussion named “The State of Social Media in Ireland”.This was between Krishna De (founder of BizGrowthMedia), Conor Lynch (founder of Boss Metrics), Ciaran Treacy( employee for The Doyle Collection), and Darragh Doyle (Community Manager of World Irish). They answered questions in the conference. It was good to hear the different opinions of which they had.
The next speaker was Catherine Flynn from Facebook. She spoke about “Facebook for Business”. This was another talk I was looking forward to as Facebook is the biggest social networking site in the world. Catherine informed us that there are 2 million Facebook users in Ireland alone. This really amazes me. Irish companies are using Facebook for growth with 800,000 pages in Ireland for business. Businesses are promoting their products and communicating with customers using different techniques, example Music Maker. Music Maker resulted in their best sales ever. I enjoyed this talk because it shows that something so powerful and easy to use (Facebook) can help business. She explained the 4 steps to business success:
- Build your Facebook page
- Connect to people with Ads
- Engage your audience with quality content
- Influence the friends of your fans
Brian Herron, Community Manager from Google+ Local at Google Inc was our next speaker. Brian gave us advice on how to communicate effectively on social networking sites. He gave us advice on how to do so:
- Manage your expectations.
- Don’t talk nonsence.
- Connect.
- Manage your message.
- Have a passion.
Our final speaker was Eric Weaver from Spring Creek. He was there to talk to us about IPG Brand. He spoke about the importance of marketing.
Overall, I found this conference very interesting and useful. Social networking in so unbelievably powerful and we should use this to our advantage. I enjoyed the speakers presentations and found the speaker entertaining. I liked the way humour was used in some of the speeches. I learned that social media can be very helpful for business and it is a great way to promote enterprise. Social media is just going to improve and become bigger in the future.
DICE 