60% of technology companies do not check social media profiles of potential employees and 63% do not have corporate blogs.

Some interesting research was released yesterday by global public relations firm Eurocom Worldwide, on  the use of social media and blogging by European technology firms (it can be found here:  http://www.eurocompr.com/prfitem.asp?id=12519 ). It found that:

- 60% of technology firms do not check the social media profiles of potential employees;

- 63% of technology companies do not blog

- almost a third (32%) of technology companies do not see the point of corporate blogging; and

- 39% said that blogging was too time consuming.

- 65% didn’t have a company Facebook page

The survey, which was conducted by Eurcom Worldwide during January and February 2010, only surveyed 286 senior level executives in technology companies, mostly across the European region. Whilst this is a very small sample it still shows either a lack or ignorance or low priority given to social media and on line marketing.

I find these figures astounding. After all I would’ve expect the use and awareness of this technology by technology companies to be much higher.  Of all the sectors that you would expect to embrace social media and blogging you would think it would be the IT sector.  I bet that if a similar survey was undertaken in the world of the FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) sector that the results would be a much higher because  this sector is much more forward thinking and cutting edge.

It appears for technology companies there only positive response was that 73% network on LinkedIn.

I’d be interested in a similar study in relation to how much use public relations and traditional media technology companies undertake and perhaps this would’ve been more apt for a PR company like Eurcom to undertake, but still it gives a very interesting insight into how technology companies think and act.

Part of the problem is their lack of knowledge and disinterest in marketing and PR. But it may be more to do with the fact that there is a perceived lack of need to focus on this. With a lot of technology start ups things move very fast and sometimes companies only think about PR and marketing when there is a lull to drum up new business.

Also with technology start ups the focus is on new technology. This is their priority and rightly so. Marketing could be seen as a luxury. In my experience a lot of tech companies do not know a lot about SEO, surprisingly so, and therefore, don’t appreciate the benefit of blogging.

Blogging is one of the single most beneficial ways for a company to boost its Google Ranking. And it is especially easy for companies to do because they have so much going on and so much information that can be put on a blog. Content such as the obvious media releases, but also press coverage, commentary on industry issues, product focuses, photos of events, video, all of which can also be automatically be sent to a corporate Facebook and Twitter feed.

With all my clients I ask them to incorporate a blog into their websites, which I then help them update with all their news,  not just the more traditional blog posts on the issues in their industry. I think this is an essential accompanyment these days to more harder copy / traditional forms of PR, that is still a priority to clients.

If a client is having some news covered in the media it is vital that they have full details on there website for when people look them up after they’ve read the article. If they don’t then they’re missing a major trick. Blogging software allows me to do this for them, without waiting for the client’s IT department to it, because I can log in to the blog element of website, without having to go into the main back end (content management system) of their website, which the IT guys don’t like (and rightly so) as the blogging software is kept in a different sub-directory with a separate login. Importantly clients should not make the mistake of having the blog hosted by the blogger provider, as this would do nothing for the search engine optimisation as it is kept on blogging providers website and not their own company site.

But this does not explain why companies do not use social media to analyse staff. Whilst 73% are in LinkedIn 60% do not check out the LinkedIn profiles of their potential employees. Why not? This is the obvious thing to do. After all many people have a LinkedIn account for that very reason, it is the equivalent of an on line CV. It’s the first place I would look to get background on potential employees.

On the whole there is sometimes a misnomer about the technology industry, whilst the products and services are very cutting edge sometimes the thinking isn’t. It reminds me of the scientific industry. There can often ve a very blinkered approach and people stick to their area  of expertise. The specialists in the industry know how to make their product, but don’t know how to market it and sometimes don’t even appreciate its wider application. That’s where people like me come in to help them get their product to market, get the word out and get them up to speed as to what they need to be doing internally to help them promote themselves.

It’s not hard but sometimes it takes someone from the outside looking in to point this out especially when a company is so immersed in launching it’s new product or service.

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“Open season to help save on IT spending” The Sunday Business Post covers Dublin software firm Openplain

As a freelance public relations adviser I often dread opening the papers on a Sunday morning. Over the years many a restful Sunday has been ruined by coverage of client that wasn’t quite to their disliking, even due to the minutest detail. However, there has been equally as many Sunday’s where I have been pepped up by good coverage for clients.

Thankfully yesterday was the latter. As well as a mention in yesterday’s Sunday Business Post  for Anthony Joyce & Co in my previous post  my client Openplain, the Dublin software company, received more deserved recognition in a great feature on them in the People In Business section, which focuses on Irish businesses that have a unique angle. In this case Openplain are the only Irish company that make software that companies can use to get a holistic view of their IT costs, thus allowing them to save a good chunk of cash on software licenses and programmes that they don’t use. This is an all too familiar occurrence in Ireland at the moment where companies weighed down by their Celtic Tiger Hangover with too many costs weighing them down from the boom.

One of these major costs are IT, with companies paying for too much software that they don’t use, which can be a very expensive mistake to make. On average Openplain can IT software costs for companies by 25%; back in Novemember they estimated that a medium sized company of 100 employees could cut €42,00 per year in software costs alone: http://www.republicpr.ie/2009/11/24/save-fortune-electricity-costs/

Yesterday’s featured focused on the good work that award-winning entrepreneurs Jon Mulligan and Damien O’Brien are doing helping Irish financial services companies cut their IT software costs. Here is a link to the article http://www.thepost.ie/peopleinbusiness/open-season-to-help-save-on-it-spending-48635.html which has also been pasted in below.

The Sunday Business Post: Open season to help save on IT spending
18 April 2010 By Dick O’Brien

As Irish businesses struggle to cope with the continuing weak economic environment, the focus for many is on cutting costs in a bid to maintain their margins.

It is a prime market for any company promising to help clients to save money. One of them, Dublin-based software firm Openplain, said it had experienced strong growth over the past 12 months.

According to Jon Mulligan, managing director of Openplain, the company specialises in analysing customers’ IT expenditure and identifying areas in which they can make savings. One of the company’s main products is Office metrics, which looks at an organisation’s entire business process, from the initiation of transactions, through back office processes and on to how a product or service is delivered.

‘‘Managers know how many transactions are being completed every day, and how long they are taking,” said Mulligan.

‘‘They can compare agents or teams, and identify inefficient work practices. That can be as simple as identifying excessive personal web browsing or discovering training requirements.”

Openplain was founded by Mulligan and technical director Damien O’Brien in 2006. The pair are both software industry veterans, having previously worked together at Baltimore Technologies.

In 2008,Openplain won the Inter Trade Ireland All-Island Seedcorn Business competition, which it followed later that year by winning first prize in the Docklands Innovation Park awards. Backers of the company include the AIB Seed Capital Fund, a number of private BES investors and Enterprise Ireland.

Mulligan said Openplain’s main focus at present was its Licence metrics software.

Managing software licences is a headache for most businesses, involving issues such as ensuring that money isn’t being spent needlessly on software which isn’t used, and avoiding penalties for running unlicensed software.

Licence metrics monitors a firm’s software usage in order to identify any licensing issues or under-utilisation. ‘‘We’ve just completed a project with a company in the financial services sector which we rolled out to 1,000 desktops,” said Mulligan.

‘‘It found that it had Microsoft Project on 450 computers, but in the previous three months it had only been used by 80 people. The company was paying subscriptions and maintenance on those subscriptions which were totally unnecessary. Another example is that it had 200 copies of Adobe Acrobat, but only had 45 people using it.”

There are about 80,000 users of Openplain’s system worldwide. Some of those are using a pared-down, free version of the software, and the challenge for the company is to persuade them to upgrade to the paid version.

‘‘Recently, through our own direct sales activity, we have been picking up a number of larger Irish clients,” said Mulligan.

‘‘They are mainly in financial services, but we would serve all markets, especially anyone doing a lot of back office processing.”

He said Open plain was already profitable and was on track to achieve a fourfold or fivefold increase in turnover this year.

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Cork’s 96FM post news transcripts on it’s website

Yesterday I released a big announcement for Sheehan Medical, the private hospital operator who are developing the Cork Medical Centre in Cork; they have signed a $1m deal with Boston IT company MEDITECH.  The full media press release is here. http://www.tinyurl.ie/mt. This was covered very widely in the media yesterday, here’s The Examiner’s coverage http://www.tinyurl.ie/mu.

The story was covered on a number of local radio stations and, thanks to the internet, I was able to listen to monitor their news coverage myself from Dublin. It is very esay to obtain copies of radio coverage in MP3, the cost is about €40 from a media monitoring service, and it is quite easy to rip them from the internet yourself these days. But what is great about one radion station namely Cork’s 96 FM http://www.96fm.ie is they put transcript’s of the news coverage on their website.

This is great for us as we have a written record that we can link to and it makes a lot of sense for the radio station because they have already written scripts so they might as well us the text to add news content to their website. What would be great too if they provide the MP3 on line next to the coverage. Here’s a link to the details Cork’s 96fm covered on the Sheehan Medical announcement.

So, if you get any coverage on Cork’s 96fm and miss the coverage you should try their website, you never know what you might find (incidentally most media monitoring companies, such as Media Market, can get MP3s of the major radio stations for a month after they’ve aired).

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Sheehan Medical agrees $1m deal with MEDITECH for Cork Medical Centre

US technology firm awarded contract to provide Health Care Information System (HCIS) to Cork’s newest private hospital

The development of Cork’s newest hospital, the Cork Medical Centre (CMC) in Mahon, is continuing unabated. The facility will be the first private hospital developed in Ireland’s second city for thirty years and is the one developed by the Sheehan family in Munster.

The Sheehan’s have been at the forefront of private hospital development in Ireland; brother Dr Joe Sheehan and Dr Jimmy Sheehan first developed the Dublin’s Blackrock Clinic back in the early eighties. They then built the Galway and Hermitage Clinics.

The Cork Medical Centre is being lead by Dr Joe Sheehan, who is the Chairman of Sheehan Medical and his sons James Sheehan, Chief Executive Officer, and Philip Sheehan, Chief Operating Officer. The Sheehan’s pride themselves on bringing the latest best practices in health care from the US and crucial to this is leading technology; as part of their aim to make CMC the most technologically advanced hospital in Ireland the have today announced it will have  Ireland’s most high-tech IT system after they awarded the $1m / €740,000 contract to MEDITECH, the provider of health care software based in Boston, Massachusetts.

The new €90m hospital, which will open in the summer, will now include MEDITECH’s Health Care Information System (HCIS); which fully integrates the hospital’s clinical and financial systems. It is the most integrated hospital information system available and is in operation in 2,200 medical facilities across the World.

The paperless system means that all information related to the patient’s care is accessible by any of the team of consultants at hospital, from entry to facility through to completion of treatment and crucially it can also be accessed by all medical practitioners undertaking subsequent external after care, such as GPs or physiotherapists.

The use of next generation IT systems is a speciality of Sheehan Medical, which prides itself on the cutting edge technology at its facilities and makes it a priority to bring the latest US techniques and equipment to Ireland. MEDITECH’s system was adopted by their Galway Clinic in 2004, where it’s a great success and it is also in use at the Hermitage and Beacon clinics, and Mount Carmel Group hospitals. It has now been licensed to meet the specific needs of the Cork Medical Centre.

Philip Sheehan, Chief Operating Officer of the Cork Medical Centre, said: ‘‘We pride ourselves in having the latest technology in all our hospitals and aim to make the Cork Medical Centre the most high-tech hospital ever developed in Ireland. The success of this deal marks the next stage of the on-going six year relationship between Sheehan Medical and MEDITECH; their system will play a key role in providing the very best care for our patients at the new Cork facility.”

NOTES

About Cork Medical Centre – www.corkmedicalcentre.com

The Cork Medical Centre will be a 5 star facility providing 75 single in-patient bedrooms, fully sealed with the latest in infection control. The main focus of the hospital will be surgery; there will be four operating theatres and a same day surgery centre with 20 out-patient beds. The facility will also house an intensive care unit; radiology facilities with MRI / CT / X-ray scanners; a cardiology and neuroscience facility. International accreditation, benchmarking and auditing will be provided by an internationally renowned healthcare organisation. Further details can be found at www.corkmedicalcentre.com

About Sheehan Medical – www.sheehanmedical.com

Sheehan Medical was set up to operate private hospitals in the UK, Britain and mainland Europe. The company is operated by Chief Executive, James Sheehan, and his father Dr Joseph Sheehan C.M., who is Chairman.

Sheehan Medical’s aim is to bring best practice in US medical techniques and standards to Ireland. The company prides itself in combining the operation of first class medical facilities with a successful business model. The unique share holding structure allows doctors and consultants to buy into the ownership of their hospitals and share in the financial success.

An active surgeon for over 35 years Chairman, Dr Joseph Sheehan, a Dublin native, was one of the founders of the Blackrock Clinic in Dublin, which opened in 1984. In January 2006, he was part of a small group that purchased the controlling interest in the Blackrock Clinic from BUPA. An €80m expansion project is currently underway.

In 2004 he again partnered with his brother Jimmy to open the Galway Clinic, which received international recognition and re-established Dr. Sheehan’s commitment to raising healthcare standards through dedication to quality improvement and technological advances.

About MEDITECH – www.meditech.com

MEDITECH has been the leader in the Health Care Information Systems (HCIS) industry since 1969. MEDITECH’s applications unify clinical, administrative, and financial information across a health care organization, including acute care, long-term care, home health care, and physician practices. Today, more than 2,200 institutions worldwide use MEDITECH’s information systems.

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