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.

Whether working as a journalist is your dream job or you need to improve your business communications with the media, a new e-book from an Irish PR company has excellent tips.

Bvisible Communications, through its website bvisible.ie has issued a free e-book of a collection of interviews with media professionals giving a unique insight into how PR professionals and the media can work together.

The e-book, available as free download from www.bvisible.ie/ebook features contributions from a range of print, web and broadcast journalists.

Interviewees for the series are:
John Kennedy – Editor at Siliconrepublic.com
Adrian Weckler – Technology Editor at The Sunday Business Post
John Collins – Assistant Business Editor at The Irish Times
The team from Today FM’s The Last Word with Matt Cooper
Tim Desmond – Producer of RTE Radio 1’s The Business
Joe Walsh – Producer of TV3 News
Mark Little – Presenter of RTE’s Prime Time

Bvisible’s Managing Director, Bernice Burnside said: “There is no formal dialogue between PR and journalism and we have always found it odd that a profession built on bettering communications did not have this dialogue with its partners in journalism. We created this collection to breach that unspoken divide between the PR industry and professional journalism.”

The interviews had already been produced as part of the company’s ‘Ask a Journalist’ blog series.
Suited to those already working in the communications sphere or hoping to forge a career in the area, the e-book provides an insight into how a story might get picked up, major PR faux pas and examples of how to make your media pitch stand out.

It also highlights the use of Twitter as a news source. “Many interviewees have cited the service as highly useful for monitoring breaking news – a point that should be well heeded by those working in crisis communications,” added Burnside, a former media producer.

“Journalists are under increasing pressure with more work required to satisfy online and print, but fewer staff to meet it. This is an opportunity for the good PR practitioner and a major liability for a poor one. The messages that come across from the interviews will help ensure that PR approaches are more warmly received.”

The e-book is available as a PDF download online at www.bvisible.ie/ebook and will also be issued to third level institutions with PR courses

Separating work colleagues from other associates and friends can be difficult for most social network website users.

After signing up to almost every social networking website he was invited to, Conor Devine found that he was receiving information he did not need, sometimes even from his friends.

Now Devine uses social networking site Whispurr.com which encourages members to create a network of friends that have a common interest e.g. workmates or perhaps customers and provides targeted information based on a person’s interests whilst protecting people’s privacy.

Devine, who is director of the company, says that Whispurr isn’t the next Twitter. “Despite sharing a similar interface to Twitter, Whispurr is a different concept. We intend our users to share specific information and to create realistic relations based on both similar interests and offline activities,” he told the Prosperity Digital Ezine.

Members communicate with ‘Whisps’ which are 300 character micro-messages and it will soon be possible to send a Whisp via SMS. This feature will allow people who work in teams to communicate efficiently and quickly regardless of location. The RSS integration system will enable teams to incorporate important live feeds into their networks which will add value to their communication in real time, explains Devine.
One of the advantages of Whispurr is selective privacy and the fact that networks will contain very specific information.

“You can create a different network for the different groups you are active with and users will be able to protect the privacy of each network by choosing to hide networks from each other. In this way your soccer team do not need to see your quarterly sales and your workmates do not need to know who is washing the soccer jerseys this week.”

The Whispurr team plans to expand its own work network of six in Q3, 2010. “We will be looking to employ two more programmers as we intend to increase the languages available on the interface. We would also like to have a sales team of two people who work actively creating accounts by demonstrating the power of Whispurr to Irish companies.”

Sign up at www.whispurr.com

Every child’s dream is to make it in advertising . . .