I’ve just read a superb post by Darragh Doyle about being proud of who you are. I have to say that it’s rare to get such an insight into the context of a person and it’s quite inspiring.

To say that I’ve liked Darragh since I first ran across him only in January this year would be an understatement. His first email to me was a quite long (it was an essay) explanation of why he didn’t blog and what his background in building communities for brands was. Since then I have never failed to be fascinated or stimulated by a meeting with him and he is a truly lovely and extremely genuine guy.

It almost inspired me to share similar experiences of my own but you’re not that interested I wouldn’t say and it would feel a bit like a vanity project as well. I am proud of who I am though even if that is relatively recent. Thanks Darragh for another bit of inspiration though.

For good measure I’ll add a photo too.

And a map

So lets see how it goes

I have CrunchLudd going on in the evening. It should be a great buzz with 7 great companies demoing on the day and obviously the buxx of meeting a whole bunch of new people again.

I’ll be heading up early though to the dublin open coffee in the morning and I’ll try to drop in to the Silicon Ireland  event at some point.

Then on Friday I’ll be attending a panel at the Darklight festival featuring Damien Mulley and Niall Larkin on privacy in the digital world and later on at 12 to 1:30 I’m standing in to chair a panel  on the future of the web. See here for details

As an entrepreneur and as anyone who knows me will tell you, I approach everything in life with enthusiasm and vigour and passion and that goes double for this area of my life. Wish me luck in my latest endeavour and I’ll see you all on the other side.

I run a little networking event called Techludd. For an event we’re doing in Dublin with TechCrunch I decided to try out a new registration method for our meetup with TechCrunch on the 26th of June. Normally we use a comment hack to allow people to say who they are and that they’re coming. While this was fine I like to think I’m open to using a new service to see how it fits. Enter Amiando, a company operating in the same space as Eventbrite in the US. Also in this space is Mobaganda which takes a VERY minimalistic approach.

There are of course plenty of services like this (see Pingg, Socializr, MyPunchbowl, etc.). Mobaganda got started as a conversation between Web developer Jason Stirman and Twitter founder Evan Williams. the question they were pondering: “Would it be possible to create a better Evite, without even requiring a signup or login?”

Amiando is what we’re testing though and I have to say the setup is simple and the features are superb out of the box such as photo upload, carpooling and message boards. Importantly for me is that it’s free for free events, but if you have a commercial event and don’t want to handle the ticketing and payments they’ll do all that for you for a (very) small fee on a per ticket basis.

All-in-all I’m pleased so far but I will update this if anything changes my mind or based on the comments of those who use it.

Having worked with and designed standalone CRM systems and supporting office systems while setting up Credit Control functions in various sized firms I think the value here is really obvious.Think about the lfecycle of the customer and all the interactions that customer has with a firm from query to pipeline to purchase to customer service and repeat purchase, interactions about faults or returns, complaints and son on, the whole kit and kaboodle. Jeremiah rightly points out that at the moment

“…we’re just at the early days, as many of these systems are deployed by marketing units with little interaction or support from IT. In many cases users are forced to create a new user ID, as these systems are not tied to existing enterprise software.

Thinking towards the future, I realize how important it will be for IT departments to think holistically about social media, especially large areas of customer and prospect congregation.”

So lets take a slice of this big holistic pie and answer a question. Why would a company do this?

CRMs are used by those in your company who interact with your customers or potential customers. Interactions are largely a stream of comments, details, emails, letters etc, all entered by the agent in time/date order. Obviously taking a holistic approach at this level even and integrating financial and CRM systems allow you to get a snapshot of the customer and his interaction with the company at a given moment. This is socialising your systems internally.
Now imagine your company turning this active profile over to the customer in a social environment and allowing them to co-own the relationship and share as much or as little of it as they want with fellow customers. IM, email, blog comments, and even voice-to-text translation services like dial-to-do mean that users interaction with you can be updated automatically freeing up agents time to concentrate on the customer and their issue. An integrated socialised system would allow that agent to really know the person they’re talking to and also to make the customer feel like they’re really involved. As a customer, imagine never having to worry whether the agent recorded what you said and started an action on it, because you can see it too. Imagine how you’ll feel when the person you speak to recognises your number says they spoke to you before, ages ago and knows every interaction you ever had with the company. Imagine not feeling that the someone has an advantage on you because you have that information too. As a company why NOT share this data it’s the customers data too anyway.

Giving the customers a way of socialising this data would be an invaluable resource for companys and customers as well. Imagine users could share their issues, queries, purchases. Users get to validate their experience as being common or unusual with other users.

The potential for companies is the huge opportunities from tracking these trends. Allowing them to prioritise action and get problems fixed, customers retained and products developed to meet real requirements. At the end of the day customers and companies have the same goal, a good experience for the customer, now and in the future.

Why Marry CRMs and Social Media? Well… you’d be mad not to!

The investors behind this are Pat Phelan of Cubic Telecom/MAXroam, Sean O Sullivan and Ivan MacDonald of Dublin based Dial2Do, Florian Seroussi of Global Roaming and David Marcus of Zong. The technology behind these companies is what powers twitterfone. Geneva-based VOX telecom provides calls routing, Redwood City, California-based Zong powers mobile enrollment and transactions, MAXroam powers the telephony intelligence system and Dublin firm Dial2Do supplies the core speech recognition which is at the heart of Twitterfone. Dial2Do CEO Ivan MacDonald who I had the pleasure of meeting recently at the Web2.0 Expo said,

“We’ve been involved in the space where the phone system meets the web for a long time now, and naturally we’ve been fascinated by the rise of Twitter. Increasingly, we’ll see “web 2.0″ services that people use primarily from their phones. Projections are that mobiles will become the dominant way of accessing the Internet, and a lot of this will be done via voice interfaces. We are very pleased to see Dial2Do add even more value to an already extraordinary service.”

Pat himself had this to say “We built this because we are all avid users of Twitter and have made some excellent business connections and friendships from it. We decided to see what we could contribute to the service and with our telecoms backgrounds the Twitterfone idea fitted perfectly”.

Like everything that’s cool, Twitterfone is in invite beta at the moment meaning that only those that have been sent invites can join up. I’m told that there will be regular releases of invites and as I said earlier Twitterfone says they have planned for a million sign-ups over the next year. Naturally enough it’s already on TechCrunch and been covered by Damien Mulley (who has had a deft hand in the PR) and quite a few other blogs and I expect there to be a bit of noise about this one.

It’ll be interesting to see how this develops…

(Disclosure: Pat Phelan is an advisor to Benchd)

Anyway, if you know me, you know that I am passionate about helping other irish businesses and I’m a huge believer in the value of networking, which is why I decided to start TechLudd in January this year and it’s exceeded all my expectations.

So I’m delighted to announce that, as of yesterday (21 Apr), I’ll be workingwith the guys at the Digital Media Forum to help develop an All-island Digital Media Network. Neil Leyden chairman of the Digital media Forum introduced me thus.

I am happy to introduce our new Project Manager, Anton Mannering, who has joined the companies in San Francisco. Anton will be looking after the All-Island Digital Media Network, a collaboration between the Digital Media Forum and the Northern Ireland Digital Content Panel and kindly funded through Intertrade Ireland. Anton is going to help us build the network North and South and hopefully become a key dynamo in our continuing efforts to build and strengthen the digital media industry on the Island of Ireland.

So apparently I’m a “key dynamo”!! Never been described as such before but it’s appreciated all the same.

There are some very interesting things in the works at the moment so watch out for that and if you’d like to chat with me about it please get in touch.

Edit: I’ll be blogging about the Web2expo Tour and other things for the Digital Media Forum and the Network project here 

The guys at Irishdev have surpassed themselves again and the lineup for those of you working with Microsoft technologies, and lets face it that’s quite a few people, is superb.
If you’re going and want something to do on Thursday (the 3rd) evening then head along to TechLudd in the Odessa. It’s come home to it’s birthplace where we had a great night in January.

P.S. The IMTC speakers dinner is on in the Odessa that night as well a little earlier so there should be some interesting people wandering around.