Bringing potatoes to Ireland may sound like bringing coal to Newcastle in terms of job creation here.
However, more than 100 jobs are to be created in Dublin thanks to the success of a virtual currency called gPotato and used by players of free online games published by the Digital Hub-based Gala Networks Europe.
The company which started in 2006 with a handful employees in Ireland currently employs 90 in Dublin and is to more than double in size, creating 103 jobs over a three-year period in Dublin city centre.
Jamie McCormick, English Marketing Manager, Gala Networks Europe, explains that the company, known to online gamers as gPotato, uses the Korean business model ‘free to play’. Gala Networks Europe, owned by Japanese company Gala Inc is one of the pioneers of this business model in Europe.
“Instead of the games being a product that you buy in the shops, it’s a service that’s all delivered online. You download our games, connect to our servers and play away with tens of thousands of other players at the same time.”
The company makes its money through micro transactions. A small percentage of players purchase, using real money, the virtual currency gPotato to spend on items in games e.g. something to make their sword into a baseball bat. What people can buy depends on the game, but they tend to be costumes, functional items or time saving resources for game play.

With 3 million users across Europe, it’s a market Gala Networks Europe is opening up. “We’ve gone from having one game in one market to having seven games in six markets: English, French, German, Turkish, Polish and Italian,” says McCormick.
“A lot of the jobs will relate to the game teams for that. There will be management roles like producers or assistant producers, I believe. The bulk of the jobs will be filled with what is called games masters, community managers or translators.”
There will be other roles in management, for system engineers, programmers and designers. But McCormick, stresses that the company is not a games developer, it’s a games publisher. “So for people who are looking to make games, it’s not the company for them. But for people who are looking to get into the games industry, we’re in a very particular growing sector.”
Play gPotato games online for free at gPotato.eu.

MUZU.TV ‘the music video site’ – will be coming to other websites near you soon, following video syndication deals with a number of major publishers including AOL Music, The Irish Independent, Communicorp, Telegraph Media Group and Bebo.

MUZU.TV is based in Dublin, Ireland, but available globally online at www.muzu.tv where music lovers can watch thousands of music videos for free including, concerts, back-stage footage, documentaries, tutorials, music promo videos, interviews and classic music TV shows. Fans can create their own music TV channel on MUZU.TV and share their favourite videos with their friends on their social networking pages.
One of the key differentiators between MUZU.TV and many other free music websites is that bands get a share of the net advertising revenue MUZU.TV generates.

The new deals, announced on January 25, mean publishers will have access to MUZU.TV’s extensive music video library and video player to power music video on their sites, including editorial.
The partnership will also include an advertising revenue share agreement through premium advertising formats. These deals are significant to MUZU.TV’s music industry partners, including the major and independent record labels, as they will drive revenue and promotional reach for their music video libraries.
The company already syndicates its video library to other major publishers as well as venue and festival entities. Traffic to the site is growing at 20-30% month on month and is currently serving over 14m music related videos per month in the U.K.

MUZU.TV will soon be available on television – Samsung televisions. In early January it was announced at CES in Las Vegas that it had partnered with Samsung. Owners of the forthcoming Samsung 2010 Internet@TV enabled devices can get free access to MUZU.TV through a specially created TV application of the hugely popular website.

Once selected, users can immediately search, browse and watch music videos from their favourite artists directly on their TV. Browse options include Most Popular, Recently Added or genre-based browsing. Users can also create and save their own playlists of videos on the MUZU.TV website and access them from the app on the TV via the My Videos option on the screen. MUZU.TV will also provide many pre-populated video playlists such as the Top 40 – which will be automatically updated on the TV app each week.

The importance of knowing your Adwords from your elbow was highlighted recently by one of the players trying to muscle in on the electricity market in Ireland. The Bord Gáis Big Switch campaign, an integrated advertising, marketing and PR campaign exceeded all expectations.

According to Eoin O’Suilleabhain, e-channel developer, Bord Gáis Energy, over 30,000 new customers in the first 30 days of the campaign were directly attributable to Google Adwords advertising alone.
“Within 30 days of launch over 30,000 sign ups were attributable to Google AdWords advertising and the most impressive measurement of our online channels was the conversion of over 100,000 customers via the Big Switch website in just four months, which rates as one of the most successful online campaigns in Ireland to date.”

Adwords was necessary at launch as microsite TheBigSwitch.ie which contained information on switching. As it was launched on the same day that the company announced its entry into the electricity market, it did not have an immediate presence in Google’s organic search results.

Working with its media buying agency MindShare, Bord Gáis Energy was able to generate online traffic from extensive media coverage and above the line marketing activities including TV, print, radio advertising, sales promotion and online marketing.

When measured it became clear that TV advertising had an almost immediate effect on search volumes and site traffic, indicating that more and more people are surfing the web whilst watching TV. One of the major lessons learned is that an effective online channel can continue to drive conversions well past working hours when combined with effective TV placement.

“On launch day searches for “The Big Switch” went from zero to thousands. Our Adwords campaign featured hundreds of ad texts and thousand of keywords to ensure that every relevant search user was presented with a consistent message, a simple strong call to action and the website URL,” explained Will Roche, Senior Digital Account Manager with MindShare.

Some people hate Mondays, right? Well even if Prosperity got you your job and you can’t wait to get out of bed, Monday, 25 January, 2010 could be different. “Blue Monday” has been calculated as the most depressing day of the year for employees everywhere by Dr Cliff Arnall of Cardiff University.

Whether or not there is any truth in the matter, staff in marketing, communications and public relations roles in companies all around Ireland can try to brighten up the preceding weekend by submitting good news stories to media organisations on Good News Friday, Friday, 22 January, 2010.

Good News Friday has been established by Mediacontact.ie to combat the current doom and gloom and get some positivity into the media.

For one day, Mediacontact.ie will distribute thousands of news releases for free from Irish businesses, organisations and charities, through its Mediaexpress.ie service, with just one catch: all the releases must be about something positive.

“On 22nd January we would like people to look at their business or organisation, identify some positive news, however small, and send out a positive message to the world about it. So have a think about something good you are working on, and send some positive news to the Irish media for free,” advises Jack Murray of Mediacontact.ie.

For more information, email: goodnews@mediacontact.ie. Not sure how to write a press release? The kind people at Mediacontact.ie have prepared a PDF on how to get involved and how to write a press release.

Why hang out with the people who pay into a venue when you can hang out with the cool people who get in for free?

Based on a recent report from Mulley communications, this seems to be the attitude of Irish visitors to Google. The conclusion is that the first 3 organic results are key - in other words the Gold, Silver and Bronze steps on the winner’s podium – and that the sponsored results hardly attract a glance from Irish Googlers.

The findings more or less reflect a survey done by Amarach Consulting back in early 2007. Back then it seemed that 2% of searchers clicked on sponsored links every time they did a search. 15% did so quite often. 48% rarely did. And 34% never did. And interestingly, 35 - 44 year olds were most likely to click on the sponsored links, and women were far more likely to do so than men . . . well it is a form of shopping.

However, things have moved along in the two years since the Amarach survey. As Damien Mulley points out Twitter and Facebook are shifting the balance of web power.

There is no doubt that these emerging heavyweights are diminishing Google’s attraction. The search engine have long been making noises about intelligent or semantic search, results that somehow manage to algorthymically (not sure if that is a word) deliver intelligent answers to questions (not sure if that is a possibility). However, Twitter and Facebook are already fulfilling that role. If you want real answers, you can now ask real people in real time.

For the immediate future anyway, Google will continue to be a prime means of attracting relevant visitors to your website and product, but the conclusion for marketers has to be that Adwords alone are not the answer. In the same way as organic vegetables, organic results are far better for you.

Jim Murray - Prosperity