“Why bother” “cannot see the point” “takes too much time” just a few quotes I have had from clients recently when I mention using Twitter to help promote their business products and services. So is Twitter loosing the social networking war? The jury is still out on that one but there do appear to be a few jumping ship.

On the other hand there are also a lot of companies using it and quite successfully. The great thing about Twitter is that it is many things to many people. It allows you to keep up with friends and family. Follow local events. Interact with companies and stores where you are already a customer and get questions answered. And even better you don’t have to turn on the lap top every time you want to look at or publish a new tweet. Just set it up on your phone and off you go. So are you using it and how successfully.

Thanks to all those who sent get well wishes over the past few weeks – I am returning to the blog temporarily to update, having just been ‘released’ temporarily from St James’ Hospital where my leukaemia treatment seems to be going well. In  my absence the team is doing brilliantly and has been strengthened by Julianne Hand who joins us to cover for Caitriona’s maternity leave from August as well as covering some of my work. More treatment to come and a bone marrow transpant if one is found so it will be late autumn before I return to work.

Lots of people have asked how they can help and there are two key things that can help people in my situation big time.

Firstly you can register to donate bone marrow

Secondly please give blood.  I need platelets daily to keep me alive right now so stocks need replacing!

Got the results of our ETP evaluation through today and although I actually think our clients don’t much care so long as we are there when they shout. But a one percent increase in overall score to above 94% is something to shout about. It nets us the two year award again and this time I  turned over a new leaf and delegated a lot of the systems management and paperwork to Fuze HR so Suzanne Healy is sharing the credit.  I met her through BNI in Kildare and she has taken the strain for the last year or two on a lot of HR stuff.  Leaving us free to grow the business. And recruit the best possible people with her expert help!

Today is the closing day for the Irish Internet Net Visionary Awards and at the risk of seeming to repeat myself – would be great5 if all my blogfollowers could champion the champion of SMEs and  vote for John Toland of  TalkTourism

On my way up to Donegal this weekI caught John McKenna of the Bridgestone Guides on RTE bemoaning the faceless character of ‘developer hotels’. I like John a lot and am working my way steadily through his guide recommendations – I even call him now and again to get a tip for a good party venue. And he does have a pretty good blog too.

By co-incidence I was about to check into Gallaghers Hotel in Letterkenny and I recall that some 20 years ago as THE place to get posh tea in the town. Boy has that changed.  Its fine for me as I need space, value and wireless broadband in order to fuel my work up here but ask yourself – would a tourist like this view from the window? Is that why they come to Ireland?

Moving this discussion on now to Talk Tourism !

The second of our SFA Shortlist prizes was two day a Strategic Management Masterclass at Hodson Bay.  An amazing prize for a mere finalist!  And a great opportunity to network with the other finalists – a humbling experience! This is really what awards should be about and I cannot speak highly enough about the organisation and contributors.

Trisha Murphy (fresh from her sponsored head shave) got us into networking mode with her inimitable style. Fellow Going for Growth participant Sandra Lawlor of Alternatives gave practical advice on marketing on a shoestring.  Gerry Moan of Constructive Intervention , SFA’s own Patricia Callinan , John McQuillan and Yann Harrison gave us an hour’s snapshot in each of their areas.  The finale was the memorable Michael Comyn showing us just how our brains do or do not work. Catch this guy if you can – you will leave breathing deeply!  His morning show on Saturdays starts on the new radio station 4fm in February (but Michael where is the website!?)

Those white dangly things that miraculously pick up 3g broadband are called Dongles. Thats a fact. Just like those storage things you stick in your USB are called Jimmy Dogs are they not? And its also a fact we are dependent on our Three Ireland Dongles as we troupe around the country sorting out the websites of the tourism world for Failte Ireland.

So when RTE’s The Business asked us to compete for broadband speed tests we were keen to participate and it was great. Listen to the podcast here. We took bronze – but only because I sought out the signal from the Three map (which incidentally does not print!), below are the results of the speed tests over the three days previous:

Connolly station 6pm 14 January – 364kbps – got to be joking guys can’t even access the VPN

14 Jan Ostan Loch Altan Donegal - OK guys just want to pick up email no bother – no damn signal

15 Jan Falcarragh Arasain Bhalor Apartments, Donegal – Nowt! – needed to access client’s broadaband

15 Jan Carrickfinn Cottages, Donegal – perfect 1,290kbps – client very impressed and no time wasted getting to sorting her website.

15 Jan Ostan Loch Altan Donegal – same again but happy out- their own broadband not working either so free to enjoy the Celidh this evening rather than pick up emails

16 Jan Donegal Holidays – great speeds but not quite as good as Mountain Top (guys I was right under the mast!!)

16 Jan HillCrest B&B and Cookery School - not a client – just a great night’s sleep and a good connection enough for email, nice foodie discussion and a breakfast fit for the Bridgestone Guides

17 Jan Willow Farm – Milford - not bad folks but I can see Mountain Top aerial on far horizon

Just completed a day’s media communications training with the excellent Communications Clinic. Now (I hear several of you saying) I am not backwards in coming forward…but this was a great opportunity to be forward in the right way. Like all those shortlisted for the SFA awards this year we were offered a day’s media training culminating in an interview for Newstalk’s Down to Business.

Now we have been shortlisted for, and even won a few awards over the last decade but I have to say I am well impressed with the SFA policy of treating shortlisted clients (I get a strategy workshop this weekend too – watch this space!). Never mind the award (and I see the excellent 3Q catering is up for our category and deserves to win it more than us – good on you Cora please win and let us work on your web one day!) the results of being shortlisted are just great.

You can hear interviews from all the finalists in Down to Business on Saturday mornings and ours will appear soon, but they are all compulsive listening and the one common question is how are you dealing with (the R word!) good listening.

Yesterday afternoon, just as we were winding down for our client festive party someone turned the lights out in Hosting 365 again!  Yes that recurring theme of power issues to the data centre recurred once more – the third time in a year. SitesToGo websites were not affected, (although blogs did not function). Windows hosted sites like our own GiftGallery online gift voucher business were down for about three hours .  Its the email outages that cause the most grief and that hit clients badly. Updates were not possible as phones were answered by voicemail queue and did not progress further.  And the useful Hosting365 status blog has been discontinued.

We are actually in the process of moving our client domain management and emails to a host with a better track record and will probably accelerate this. But its a mammoth job with more than 750 domains to relocate manually and there is the potential for client email disruption.

We are taking the step of allowing clients to nominate themselves for priority transfer – especially when we know that timely email is critical to their work processes.  More than one client was actually happy enough to take a break from emails once they knew most of Ireland was affected!   For additional communications support we have also set up a status blog on WordPress who have servers outside Ireland and will always update this for clients in the event of further incidents.

We don’t plan to  move our web hosting though as the service we get from Hosting 365 has always been good in this area and the new blade infrastructure seems very stable.  We use external monitoring though because in an outage like this there were no outage alerts from the Hosting 365 servers.

Mail now functioning well but there may be backlog, all sites back up. Report next week will be sent to all clients affected when we are fully briefed by Hosting 365