I work regularly with IADT on recruitment drives and creating awareness for their Open Days and Grad shows. I love working with them – the students’ work is really inspiring and it makes me feel young again going into college. It’s also satisfying to see the returns we get with social media, using a combination of influencer outreach (they have a good stable of alumni who help us out) and advertising.

APEROL SPRITZ is a hugely popular aperitif drink in Italy – with 300,000 spritzes being served daily in Venice alone! It was launched here in Ireland last year and Febvre approached me with a view to increasing their profile on Social Media. They knew me from the South Africa Uncorked project I’d handled for them and wanted to do something similar, but with a much lower budget for Aperol Spritz. We agreed a channel strategy, and the communication pillars and I maintained and monitored their Facebook and Twitter pages for them. The objective was to enhance brand awareness and association with Italy, educate our target about the Spritz way of serving Aperol, and to promote aperitifs as a new way of socialising.

SOUTH AFRICA UNCORKED is a project I worked on to promote South African wines in Ireland. Working with three wine importing agencies and their advertising agency Publicis Dublin, we established a very clear target – male foodies who are interested in wine and who would like to broaden their horizons and improve their wine tasting skills. Our objective is to put South African wines on their consideration list when they are shopping for wine to go with a meal that they are preparing. The facts are firstly that this target is currently more familiar with wines from other countries, and secondly that South African wine is a robust tipple, best appreciated with food. I recommended that we create a blog and use that to feed through to a South Africa Uncorked Facebook page and a Twitter account. After identifying the best channels within their budget I recommended a content strategy for the social media communications with four pillars (or topics of conversation). We also of course want to build awareness of the brands within their respective portfolios and we will also use Facebook and Twitter to engage with and promote the brands where possible. Tone of voice is important as is the need to not blatantly promote the wines in a way that is overly commercial and self-serving. Above all, we want to remain useful, relevant and engaging, all the while promoting the wines and helping our target enjoy them to the max. The channel and content strategy was agreed and I managed the sites. We ran a Facebook ad campaign to promote the site and get initial traction. I provided a content calendar on a monthly basis for sign off and was responsible for sourcing and posting the content, monitoring the sites and submitting a fortnightly report analysing progress. Wine runs in my blood (not only because I love drinking it) as my dad has been a wine merchant for over 50 years now, so this client was a particular favourite!

IRISH OWNED My Irish Jeweler is an online jewellery store targeting predominantly American and UK adults with an interest or links back to Ireland. They run a tight ship with the two owners taking care of the whole business leaving them little time for Social Media. Peter and Ciaran approached me with a view to hiring someone who could take care of creating an online strategy and providing regular content across all their social media sites, managing competitions and monitoring any activity. My Irish Jeweler has a strong digital footprint, being present on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Google +, LinkedIn and they have a lovely blog. We agreed to place an emphasis on Facebook and Pinterest as their target are heavy users and the visits to the website are the strongest from these two channels. It was very rewarding working with such direct results where the return on investment into social media can be clearly seen.  It’s also great working with such beautiful products – this is my favourite, from the Jean Butler range.

A YOUNG COMPANY expanding in Ireland and hoping to go across the waters to the UK and the States, BFree are riding on the gluten and wheat free crest with a range of the best tasting bread products available on the market. I helped the BFree team to agree a cohesive set of brand guidelines – a manifesto, personality, tone of voice and vision for the brand, getting buy in through a series of workshops and branding exercises. I have also advised which social media channels are appropriate for them to achieve their goals and am updating the channels following an established and agreed content strategy and conversation calendar, as well as training the BFree team on how to use: