Here’s a few words from Oliver Dempsey, founder of Tradesmen.ie, after his company was announced as the winner of the O2 Idea’s Room competition recently.
What tips or tricks did you employ to rally support for voting?
To rally support for voting we used a number of tactics. We used YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, our own Blog, Twitter, Google News, Yahoo News and a number of other online services. We placed articles, videos and appeals to ask people to vote for us if they liked what we were about. We tried everything we could think of and we were really just learning as we went along. The Internet is changing rapidly on a monthly basis and we find that what worked to sell our products and services 6 months ago isn’t the same now. You need to use a variety of tactics and see what works best for your business. Video accounts for a large proportion of Internet usage these days so we created funny videos that people could watch and enjoy and hopefully pass on to their friends if they liked them. The idea was to create very funny video content that could become viral and spread throughout the Internet. My own favourite was one we did with Daisy the cow. The idea was to create something unique, innovative and funny. What we didn’t expect is that Daisy had other things on her mind that day and she wasn’t as co-operative as we had hoped. The bloopers on the Daisy video were absolutely hilarious and at the time of writing this video has been viewed by over 4,000 people Worldwide and is being viewed by more and more people each day even after the competition has ended! Other funny videos that we did were with the American Football team, the Jazz band, baby Heidi, the salsa dancers and Jedward!! You can see all our videos on our YouTube channel which is called “Tradesmen1“.
How will winning this competition impact your business?
Winning the competition is very important for our business as it gets our name out into the public domain. People will find out how they can receive help if they want to find a tradesman or trade professional. People can discover how they can save time, get a number of quotes and compare prices from rated service providers by simply posting their job on Tradesmen.ie. Gone will be the days of ringing numbers from the phone book and getting no answer, an answering machine, or an answer saying, “sorry can’t do”. The aim of this system is that the customer posts the job and the tradesmen contact them so it saves a lot of time. Reviews from previous clients help customers when deciding which tradesman to use.
On a wider scale it is hoped that the software that is used to drive Tradesmen.ie can be used further afield to benefit people in other countries and that it can be used to bring in much needed revenue into Ireland from overseas. At present our business provides highly skilled jobs in the areas of web application development, digital media and accounts. Our hope is that more highly skilled jobs like these can be created as a result of this increased exposure and that this will be a benefit to the Irish economy as a whole.
Oliver Dempsey
