Oliver Dempsey from Tradesmen.ie got over 14,000 views of his ‘Funny Cow Video‘ on YouTube.  The video wasn’t just about getting views, it was designed to help him to get votes for the 02 Ideas room sales pitch competition.  He went on to win netting €5,000 worth of prizes.  We were delighted to welcome him as guest speaker to this months KLCK Bloggers Network meetup in Portlaoise this month.

Oliver’s enthusiasm is viral in itself.  He showed us his videos and talked us through the process of making them, how they evolved to adding sound effects and music and how they became so addictive he even made one when on holiday.

Daisy the cow is his top viewed video and he credits this to the title ‘Funny Cow Video’ the keywords he included and the power of Facebook.  It was his Facebook friends that helped it go viral, sharing it with their friends who shared it again.  Not only was it a funny video but it was short (1 min), amusing and included bloopers.  Other videos that got lots of hits also included ‘funny’ in the title.

The big question is did this campaign bring business to Tradesmen.ie and Oliver believes it has, it has spread the word about the business, leads and even friends have found out more about his business because of the campaign.

Oliver recommends the Flip camera for making simple videos and the free Movie Maker software for windows for editing.  If your on a Mac iMovie is good too.  He also recommends investing in a good tripod and credits much of his success to Daniel Beere his Intern, camera man and quality controller.  Working without him has been more challenging.  I’m pretty sure we’re going to see some more video coming from members of KLCK in the future.  I might even try and do something a bit more creative myself soon.

RSS Feeds and converting WordPress.com to WordPress.org

Our round table discussion started by talking about RSS feeds.

What is a RSS Feed?

RSS or ‘Really Simple Syndication’ often called a ‘Feed’ is, in simple terms, a link that is attached to a website that has regularly updated content (blogs etc).  This link can be used to distribute content to other sites.  Doing this allows sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc to automatically post your blog content when you add a new post.  Users are also able to subscribe to your feed using tools like Google Reader.  This means that instead of having to visit your site to check out if you have posted recently they can check their reader for updates from all the blogs they follow.  It’s a great tool for both keeping up with blogs and sharing your own content.

How do you find your RSS feed?

There are lots of ways of finding an RSS feed, some sites publish a link on their sidebar or at the bottom of a page.  My personal recommendation is to use Firefox to surf the web.

When you are on a site that contains an RSS feed a little symbol appears in the address bar.

If you click this it will display the RSS address rather than the web address and you can cut and paste this into any RSS reader.

WordPress.com & Blogger v WordPress.org

A common topic at KLCK is what blogging platform to use.  The most common amongst our members are Blogger and WordPress however some people want to move from WordPress.com (hosted by WordPress and with limited customisation options) to WordPress.org (self hosted and fully customisable).  Some members were worried about how hard this could be but luckily we had a WordPress expert in our ranks.  Beatrice Whelan assured us that it wasn’t that difficult a transition.  It is possible to move the whole database of blog posts over from .com to .org and although it would require a small bit of technical knowledge it is quite simple if you have the time to put into it.  I found this handy article online that could help the transition.

Next Meeting

The next meeting is in Kilkenny on 14th March 2011 at 7pm.  Our guest speaker is Keith Bohanna who will be talking about commenting.  How to get more comments and how to comment on other blogs effectively.  Keep an eye on the KLCK Bloggers Network Facebook page for more details.  We’ll be announcing the venue etc. over the next few days.

Thank you

Finally a big thank you to all the people who made the Portlaoise meeting possible.  The Portlaoise Enterprise Centre who opened up their facilities to us.  The room was fantastic and they even provide tea and coffee, a big hit with our members!  Food was provided by Laois based marketing company Aos Si, I’m still dreaming about the chocolate cake I managed to resist! and of course the members who attended.  You can see our meeting blogroll here.