I spoke on Saturday last at the BNI annual members day in Cork and I promised anyone who sent me an email or text a list of 10 things to do for free on the web right now. my one condition was that the email or text must be sent within 48 hours. Why? Well the stats say that 85% of all responses to an email campaign will happen in the first 48 hours. A few cunning members probably figured that knowledge was already up on our web knowledge area as traffic took a spike today…

This conference was pretty good. Well in parts stunningly good. This afternoon (after I have followed up all these referrals)I am instigating a review of our own marketing having realised from Frank De Raffele  the blinding truth.  Last time I was a Marketing Director and did intensive training in the area of marketing strategy development – the Internet was not even invented. Oops – how mortifying! Listen to Frank live Mondays 5-6 pm EST time (5 hours behind Dublin). No nonsense blinding truths a speciality….

I recently wanted to find out how to convert seconds into
days , months and years. As usual I Googled it by typing in
“seconds to years months”. I got 490,000 results.
I don’t know why but I thought I’d try the same query with cuil.

So i did and guess how many results I got?

One.

Thats right Google finds 490,000 and cuil finds one.
The mind boggles. The one cuil result wasn’t even relevant.
Remember when some people were suggesting we might have a new
Google killer. Seems a long time ago now…

I am a pretty avid networker, but I network to grow the business and gain referrals rather than just passing the time of day meeting people. BNI is an important part of our referral generation strategy here in SitesToGo and we belong to two chapters; Tullamore and Naas (Cill Dara).

This weekend I was asked to speak about the BNI web channels at the national conference, celebrating 10 years of the organisation in Cork. So I took the opportunity to research them thoroughly and found out that we were missing out big time on some interesting international networks as well as national ones.

Here for fellow BNI members is the gist of what is out there:

BNI Europe website (annoying that to get to Ireland you put in www.bni.ie and it brings you to eu home page rather than directly to Ireland) way to Ireland is to click on the map and then the flag…. but some great stuff here including:

• Network central directory listing
• Downloads of Successnet the BNI mag (a good way for BNI members to get free PR coverage with interesting stories)
• Training and events diary

BNI.com website

• Audio downloads
• Details on latest news
• Details on international chapters
• Online shop for cardholders
• International version of Successnet

Also see

• www.bnipodcast.com Podcasts – Dr Ivan Misner talks in short bursts about all aspects of networking and referrals and right now there is an offer of 6 months free membership (which I grabbed!) to  Networking Now
• www.networkingentrepreneur.com – Dr Ivan Misner blogging on all things networking

Underpinning our ‘ride the recession strategy’ is our continued investment in our people, their skills and knowledge. All these resources give us more for free than I expected!

Its been a hard week and I think we need to return to fundamental humour. Most bankers will be too young to remember and this dates back to 30 years before the Internet, but I was raised on it and here is probably the best Goon Show extract. what time is it Eccles? Enjoy! And find more on www.thegoonshow.net

I get asked a lot – why Clonbullogue? The stock answer is as quoted by another blow-in neighbour (with only 30 years residency under his belt), ‘half way to everywhere (and half where to nowhere)’ I can rationalise living and running a leading website provider about as far from the sea in Ireland as possible by pointing out just how close it is to most points. Making exceptions for Letterkenny and Bantry we are talking 2-3 hours driving to anywhere.

But the reality is that the spot was chosen by chance. Unable even then to afford a Dublin property, we put a pin around Dame Street (my then commute) allowed 40 miles worth of string and drew a diameter. Excluding that which was in the Irish Sea, that gave a range from Wicklow to Drogheda via Kilcock, Edenderry and Kildare.

Each weekend was spent interrogating auctioneers in these towns. And researching the rail commutes. Unheard of 11 years ago when I was one of two people commuting to Dublin from Kildare. Luckily we found the right place.

But it really was luck. And even then there was not a lot of choice in our price bracket. Now we are all spoilt for choice, and there is great value to have, but getting the right advice can be a challenge. So when Liz O’Kane asked us to build her new property finding website I was delighted. Had there been this sort of assistance around all those years ago I would have handed the task over to her and saved a lot of time and disappointment. Just a couple more years and maybe I will get her find me that bolt hole in the sun!

The Monread website launched this week got me thinking about CRM. Customer Relationship Management has become a fundamental of our own marketing strategy and we like to think we do it quite well but there’s always that busy time when you don’t follow up a meeting or make that pre-renewal call to make sure all is well.

Its more than five years since we first invested in ACT and for the first year or so we thought it was an excellent way of managing contacts. Then we found that we had been sold an out of date version and Sage were a bit embarrassed so offered to upgrade us for free. I spent a whole Christmas setting up the new version only to lose the whole lot as it crashed and burned. And somehow the Sage support team (at this stage in the UK) got less enthusiastic, then I looked at the forums and saw that the new version had problems. Big ones. We have struggled for two years with this monster of a piece of software that interferes with Outlook, makes computers run slowly and frequently loses data.

Then we were offered another free upgrade which we turned down – seems this would solve all our problems but by now we really did not believe and checked the forums again. More trouble.

Monread do Goldmine and tailor it for your own needs. They have offers on until the end of October too. Any views on Goldmine vs ACT??