Watch this video from Tony Hsieh the CEO of Zappos, which sold this summer to Amazon for $928m.
I have ordered the Zappos Culture book he mentioned (just email ceo@zappos.com and they’ll post you a copy) and downloaded the Tribal Leadership audiobook from here (use California 90210 for your address in the registration screen). Wonderful stuff.
Most Irish businesses are still a decade behind the US exemplars when it comes to customer service. But one of our clients who really seems to get it is Louis Fitzgerald Hotels.
The LouderVoice customer reviews system for business has moved into high-gear in 2009. Clients are deploying our EasyReview widget on their e-commerce sites every week. Our first US customer will go live this month along with many more Irish sites. Our second UK site will go live early in the new year.
The most recent research by Internet Retailer tells you everything you need to know about how important reviews are to businesses.
In order to expand the operational bandwidth of the company and aggressively pursue our channel partner strategy, we are raising finance through the tax-efficient Business Expansion Scheme (BES). Argolon Solutions, the company behind LouderVoice, is fully Revenue approved for BES and we will be issuing our investor pack in the coming week.
If you are interested in finding out more and receiving a copy of the investor pack, please contact Conor O’Neill on +353-23-8878257 or conor AT loudervoice DOT com.
He is not only hysterically funny but completely accurate too. Flying Ryanair is simple, you make yourself aware of the rules and work within them. I don’t think I’ve ever paid more than €60 for a Ryanair return flight. Treat it as a bus, set your expectations correctly and you’ll find them the perfect short-haul operator.
The stats around Facebook in Ireland are staggering, they are racing towards 1 millions active users here. That just blows my mind. Some are predicting they’ll have more pageviews globally than Google by next year!
Whilst I initially didn’t have much time for it, coming from the open blogging world, bit by bit its value for me has grown. Even at the simplest level, it is the only site where many people I know from school and college ever congregate online.
In our business, LouderVoice, we have hooked ourselves into Facebook so that when people review products/services on our clients’ web-sites, those reviews can be published to Facebook too. It’s an amazingly powerful marketing tool. You can see it in action here. That system can be placed on any web-site in as little as 10 minutes.
If you are on Facebook or you are thinking of joining, why not become a fan of LouderVoice there? You’ll see a sample of the best content from our site and customers posted there along with questions, ideas, polls and competitions.
If you are a small business, then you should really consider creating a Facebook Fan page. It only takes a few minutes and can be a great way of interacting with customers and fans. You only have to look at the success of the Hairy Baby one to see how well it can go!
I woke up this morning to read about Brian Cowen’s “Innovation” Taskforce and have spent since then utterly enraged.
In a time of crisis when men/women of vision and ability need to quickly agree a strategy and execute it with confidence, Brian Cowen assembles 28 people (plus the heads of Enterprise Ireland, IDA Ireland, Science Foundation Ireland, the Higher Education Authority and representatives from the departments of Education and Science, Enterprise, Trade and Employment, and Finance).
Yes my jaw hit the floor too.
A 40+ person talk-shop and travel expenses generator. That’s what Cowen and Coughlan think this country needs?
Because it’s worked so well in the past? Does the word agile mean anything to these people?
40+ people and two of them are women?
What century is this?
When Sean Lemass and T.K. Whitaker dragged this country kicking and screaming out of a hellhole from 1959 onwards, did they spend months (or years) prattling on with anyone who had on opinion?
I actually have a pain in my stomach with anger over this. These are our leaders? I’m not talking about C&C, I mean the committee. Did anyone who was asked say “NO, get a clue”? Did anyone who was asked question the utter stupidity of assembling this joke? Did anyone who was asked, reply “ENOUGH TALKING”.
Is there any senior person in the Irish Civil Service or Quango-sector who is tearing their hair out this morning and screaming in frustration too?
Yes? Then maybe it’s time for an alternative.
We need (possibly anonymously):
1 Senior Civil Servant, non-EI
1 Senior Civil Servant, EI
1 head of an FDI company with a large Irish operation in non-manufacture
1 head of a globally successful indigenous company
1 head of a startup
1 politician with a business or financial background
2 months. 3 max.
Outcome – a disruptive plan to rebuild the Irish economy and the business environment in a sustainable way around the idea of Constructive Capitalism. And a marketing plan to go with it. If our leaders won’t lead then it’s time to subvert from the bottom-up.
The ability of a country to feed itself and have a sustainable agri-business must surely have been a major motivator of Reddy Brennan and his team in Avonmore in the early 1970s. A man of great vision with incredible negotiation skills, he is one of the heroes of Irish industry. Our family will always be grateful to him. Reddy Brennan 1924-2009, RIP.
Those of us who are watching much less broadcast TV and more time-shifted or downloaded programmes are starting to become very uncomfortable with the monthly Sky tax just to get some intermittent BBC2/Ch4 etc.
Media companies everywhere try to stop piracy and block those outside of their borders from watching programming online on sites like Hulu. This is a battle they cannot win.
The problem they have at the moment is licensing. If broadcast rights to House MD are sold to Channel 6 in Ireland then the licensor cannot allow Irish people to watch the same media for free (and Irish-ad free) on Hulu or similar as they’d be subverting their own customers.
There are thousands of production companies, studios, TV stations and distribution companies involved in this mess. The thought that one company could do all the deals necessary to create a global on-demand PAYG online site for all media to be downloaded seems an almost impossible dream.
Unless we start offering them money.
What if Pirate Bay (or Mininova or Isohunt) provided a scheme whereby every time someone downloads an episode of House or Celebrity Apprentice or Top Chef etc, they are given the option of paying 50c? Once a month, they tot up the totals for each show, cut some cheques and send them to the production companies to carve up however they see fit with their partners/customers.
There would be no deals here, no agreements, no pricing arrangements, no permission sought or given. They’d just get the cheque in the post.
At what point would all of the players be getting sufficient income from this source that they are forced to join the 21st Century and realise that this is one global market and media should go to those who want it, when they want it.
Many of you have seen this video on YouTube where investment expert Peter Schiff is shown many times on US TV in 2006-2007 explaining why the US was in a property bubble and why it was all going to collapse. If you haven’t seen it, it’s hilarious and depressing at the same time.
I don’t claim to know much about investing but when we were moving from Dublin to Cork in 2003 and saw that our house had increased in value more than 400% in 9 years, we took the money and ran. Even in 2003 the valuations seemed idiotic. By 2007 they were in the realms of fantasy land. Of course many people told us we were stupid and if we’d rented the house out in Dublin we’d have made another €200k minimum when we went to sell. But when would we have sold? 2005? 2006? Or, gawd ‘elp us, 2008? Did I mention we sold our Eircom shares after 2 weeks? Maybe we do know what we are doing!
Then today I listened to this podcast of Peter Schiff speaking at the 2009 Austrian Scholar’s Conference. It’s long but utterly riveting. You think the worst is over? You think G20 is going to sort it all out? Listen to this and be afraid, be very afraid.
You eagle-eyed West Cork drivers may have noticed a big new sign on the back of one of the units behind Great Gas on the Bandon Bypass. It is the retail/warehouse outlet of newly launched Curious Wines. Mike Kane, the owner, has put together a brilliant selection of wines which are not your usual supermarket generic stuff.
Their web-site has just gone live and it’s a corker (boom! boom!). Another stunning creation by the shockingly talented Ms Dent. I think it’s probably the best looking and most effective wine web-site in the country and puts the major chains to shame. The wine value is also fantastic and you really should buy by the case and save even more.
I’m just looking forward to the tastings that Mike has planned since I’ll be able to walk to them!
