TBEX Dublin, Day 2

The festivities continued today at the Double Tree Hotel, Dublin as the TBEX Europe conference for travel bloggers entered its second and final day.

Once again the venue was thronged with enthusiastic, good-spirited and friendly travel bloggers from all corners of the world – who all seemed to be revelling in the Irish hospitality and were perhaps nursing a few sore heads after the Expedia ‘Get Wilde‘ party the night before!

Arriving around 11.00 am I caught most of IZEA CEO Ted Murphy’s (Twitter quote: “It is wayyyy too early to give a presentation!”) ‘Bloggers, Brands & Dollars’ delivery in the Munster room. Ted’s slides were quite complex and analytical and it would be useful to review them in detail so here’s hoping that he will upload them to his profile at SlideShare (I tweeted him a request!) as they contained many useful points for travel bloggers and marketers hoping to optimize their revenue streams.

Ted Murphy – Key Takeaways

Next up was my favourite presentation of the day – ‘Best Practices to Grow & Nurture Your Community’ given by Natalie DiScala and Shane Dallas.

The lovely Natalie commenced the session with a very perceptive list of 10 points on how best to execute an engaging social network strategy. One of my favourite tips was the advice to commit to a limited (but flexible) number of social networks (e.g. 2, 3 or 4) and not to try to be ‘all things to all people across all platforms’.

Natalie DiScala

Additionally, Natalie advised that metrics should not become an ‘ego game’ – a mistake she has seen enacted, when, for example, a business she is familiar with in Toronto, Canada became too focused on the number of Twitter followers it had – at the expense of quality content and real engagement with stakeholders.

Finally, Natalie insightfully pointed out that automatically scheduling tweets is not always the best approach (which goes against current social network canon) – because, for example, what happens if there is an international incident before a scheduled tweet is released? – could it make your business look insensitive?

Natalie’s partner-in-crime was the charistmatic Shane Dallas whose ‘The Travel Camel’ blog can be found here. Shane, reflecting on his experiences with TravelBlog poetically described a vivid analogy for the audience which compared bloggers, spammers and moderators to ‘Flowers, Weeds and Gardeners’ and offered many helpful suggestions on how to maintain a blooming relationship (free of weeds!) within the travel blogging community.

Questions and answers were expertly and humorously handled by Natalie and Shane, with Shane generously sharing his Trinity College-sourced Milk Chocolate Shamrocks with participants.

After lunch, I was delighted to meet up with my old friend Michael Connolly, owner of website design and SEO firm Marlton Media whose Dublin office is located just around the corner from the Double Tree at 31 Fitzwilliam Square.

Michael is the (as yet) uncrowned king of SEO in Dublin City (and in his picturesque home county, Wicklow) and has recently increased his Social Media presence, so as to offer his clients a fully integrated service which allows “businesses [to] create engaging content, optimise landing pages, measure campaign results and make more sales online!”.

Great to see you again Mick!

Me (on left), with Michael Connolly of Marlton Media!

I’d like to thank Dublin City Council for giving me the opportunity to attend TBEX, and to especially appreciate the assistance of their gracious representative, Ms. Sarah Moloney.

Here’s looking forward to the next edition of TBEX – in whatever corner of the globe that might be!