Back in October last year I was invited to Nottingham to speak at an event organised by the eBusiness Champions (aka eChampions), an organisation created to assist SMEs in the UK East Midlands embrace online marketing and all things webby. I had worked with the eChampions team in the past, and had been very impressed by their vision to transform the region’s SMEs, and particularly impressed with their use of ‘before-and-after’ benchmarking of participants web capabilities, or eMarketing Maturity as they refer to it.

My session was titled “Social Media for Business – What Works, What Doesn’t”, which is about as vague as it gets: above all I was keen to not feed the social media hype machine (i.e. no videos featuring soundtracks by Fatboy Slim), and wanted to get across the twin messages of matching the right tools with core business objectives, and keeping measurement to the fore of your thinking at all times.

The slides I used in my presentation that evening are available over on the EI Best Connected blog, but I wanted to gather up all the videos from the sessions in one place as well. I was interviewed by the charming Dorte for two of the clips (the third seems to have disappeared) – Dorte is off getting to know the new addition to her family at the moment, hope all is well!

It’s just over a year since I handed in my Masters dissertation – I can still remember the relief I felt as I walked out of the O’Reilly Institute as a student for the last time, leaving half a forest of printed and bound thesis behind me. For the most part I found the course enjoyable and worthwhile: I met some great people, pushed myself out of the comfort zone on quite a few occasions, and in general made the most out of being a ‘Trinner’ for the two years!

My hopes to get the dissertation published were probably overly-ambitious: I certainly didn’t have the resources to re-work it into shape for an academic journal, and work deadlines kept pushing thoughts of publication in the business press into the never-never. So, rather than have it languish forever on a hard-drive, I’m publishing it here, in full, warts and all.

The dissertation was an examination of the use of Social Media Marketing (SMM) by Irish SMEs. I’m proud of what I’ve achieved with it, and I still think it has a lot of value. Looking back at it, I think my biggest take-away was the natural fit between the ways in which the majority of SMEs tend to carry out their marketing activities (heavily dependent on networks, and the personality of the owner-manager), and what is seen to be “best practice” SMM – a moving target if ever there was one!

A massive thank you once again to everyone who gave their time in support of this.