Irish company and recent winner of the O2 Ideas Room Sales Pitch competition, Tradesmen.ie, used Youtube to help them win €50,000 worth in prizes. The O2 Idea’s Room ran a competition where they asked Irish companies to pitch their business idea in 140 characters or less via Twitter, SMS or on the O2 Idea’s Room Blog. Six finalists were chosen and people could then vote for their favorite business to win the grand prize of €50,000 worth of business support.
Oliver Dempsey, founder of Tradesmen.ie, entered the pitch “Want to save time and money on tradesmen and trade professional services? Get up to 4 quotes and compare prices on www.Tradesmen.ie”.
During the campaign, Tradesmen.ie used both Facebook and Youtube to help gain votes for the competition. With daily updates on their Facebook profile, the company was becoming more active online than it previously had been. As video accounts for a large proportion of Internet usage these days, Tradesmen.ie began to produce a number of videos to reach out to people with the hope that they will spread online and thus help their chances of winning more votes and winning the competition. Oliver Dempsey (founder of Tradesmen.ie) featured in the videos but what was unique about these was that they were made in an upbeat and humorous manner as each video had a similar script but was set in a complete different setting. Actually, what helped to make some of these videos so popular were the Bloopers that they contained, as scenes of mishaps were included. The company felt it was best to enjoy the moment and have fun instead of getting too caught up with the competition. The videos contained american football players, a brass band, salsa dancers, cows, members of the public, a baby and the infamous Daveward.
The idea behind each video was to try and make something that people would like and they then could pass it on to people they know and hopefully get the ball rolling. Surprisingly, it seemed to work as not only were Tradesmen.ie announced as winners of the competition with the most votes but also one of their videos with ‘Daisy’ the cow has over 4,100 views to this day. With Youtube, videos can be uploaded within a matter of minutes and by adding annotations to each video, Tradesmen.ie could get their message out to the public quite swiftly. Many of these videos are still circulating the internet as they continue to help promote the company even after their recent success of winning the O2 Ideas Room competition. You can see all of Tradesmen.ie’s videos on their YouTube channel, ‘Tradesmen1‘ or visit their website at www.tradesmen.ie.
