I created a website about Metaverse Strategy. All the articles were generated by AI and all the images too. I’m going to see how well it ranks over time. If at all.
Category: Blog
Briefing Paper on A.I. Image Generation
Briefing Paper on A.I. Image Generation
Exec Summary:
Machine Learning / A.I. software now exists that allows businesses and organisations to create photorealistic images, drawings and illustrations in-house for free or at a very low cost.
Business Advantage:
Costs of using stock photos, sourcing basic illustrations and designs can be reduced to zero. Smaller businesses will be more competitive.
Business Threat:
Stock photo production companies may see sales impacted in the medium to long term but they will also see a massive decrease in production costs allowing them to infinitely expand their collections
Business Opportunities:
A new creative economy can be created where people with just an idea can will the imagery to life. Create that poster, that comic, the new brochure by typing a few words. The same way the likes of Photoshop and an internet connection unlocked so much creativity, now people can make art like professionals without having creativity suites.
Background:
In the past few months we’ve seen A.I./ Machine Learning advances so that you can type a few words into a website or desktop app and images will get created for you. Or someone takes an existing image and has it modified or “outcrops” it so the A.I. creates a new world around the image.
How this A.I. software works:
This software uses images and text descriptions downloaded from the Web. Billions of them. This is then put through machine learning/A.I. software that links words to the content of images so that it eventually understands plain english commands e.g. draw me a tree or create a photo of a tree.
Malcolm Gladwell talked about putting 10,000 proper hours into something to get good. A.I. is putting those hours in so you don’t have to. The author of the paper Gladwell cited says he oversimplified and there was also another crucial aspect – having a very good teacher. Who are the good teachers in A.I?
4 main A.I. image systems
Currently there are 4 main image systems but there will be dozens soon.
- Dall-E from Open A.I. which was the first, is web based and invite only. First few images are free. Then you pay for credits.
- Crayon – a clone of Dall-E – Free website.
- Midjourney is in Beta, can be accessed via a Discord web server. First few images are free. Then you subscribe.
- Stable Diffusion – Open Source, desktop version. Free.
Dangers and Deep Fakes:
Dall-E has checks to prevent the creation of deep fakes and creating violent imagery but many of the others do not. It can be very easy to fake a person, a celebrity or a politician and have them endorse a product or movement or show them in a compromising scenario.
Ethical Issues
As this “tech” is based on billions of images that have been scraped from the web, these images are biased toward the white male gaze of course and with pornography also downloaded, what this software considers to be a woman can be corrupted. The likes of Dall E does error corrections by adding in women so searches to decrease all male images as well as trying to remove violent and racist imagery. Copyrighted images are also in this giant set of images. Read and follow the work of Abeba Birhane.
What comes next:
Video creation and editing e.g. a text command can change the colour of the sky or reorder a city. This is already happening.
In the medium term people will be able to conjure up their own worlds by just telling their VR device. Think will be a jump from Fortnite to a world like in Avatar or any elaborate computer game.
Domain Flash Sale
From now to December 5th 2022
Contra deals will be considered.
You pay the transfer fees which work out at about €70
First to email an offer, gets that domain. dm@43.ie You can pay via a Stripe link on the spot or you don’t get it. I can send the invoice after.
Two letter domain names
2k.ie
zc.ie
c4.ie
oc.ie
52.ie
Countries
Andorra.ie
Luxembourg.ie
Bahamas.ie
Phillippiines.ie
acne.ie
butt.ie
ceos.ie
classroom.ie
cremations.ie
december.ie
drag.ie
entertainmentawards.net
entertainmentawards.tv
hugs.ie
independents.ie
insulin.ie
LifeCoach.ie
Mattresses.ie
mitchelstown.ie
mortgageadvisor.ie
norm.ie
oncology.ie
paediatrics.ie
preaccelerator.ie
psychiatrist.ie
RiverLee.ie
rub.ie
rubber.ie
Sepsis.ie
subs.ie
suck.ie
tourist.ie
web3.ie
workouts.ie
LinkedIn Updates – How many Words Before the Text Disappears? 25ish
You have 25 words/140 characters to get your message across on here before “See More” needs to be pressed. The space of an old school tweet.
Use the inverted pyramid. Headline and takeaway first and then go into more detail. An update for all screen sizes that includes an image, video or link preview will be seen if it is about 140 characters.
This 140 character rule is a simplification because this all depends on the size of a screen. You have more words/characters for desktop users compared to mobile. Blank spaces/blank lines are also counted.
And so if you are the type that spaces out sentences
so they read like this, the spaces and line breaks seem to be counted too.
Doing it this way you might actually only have 10-15 words to get your takeaway/exec summary across.
I prefer adding a video, image or link to updates as you get more real estate on a timeline and capture more of the gaze of a scroller. Keeping it to 140 characters gets my text and image/video/link preview seen too.
So choose your intro text very carefully.
Shut Up LinkedIn – How to stop LinkedIn Notifications on the timeline
LinkedIn has become really noisy in the past few months. Much more than before. It’s just like Facebook now in terms of updates. You can quieten down your LinkedIn feed though. There are lots of settings that allow you to do that. In fact there are 100s of different ways LinkedIn pushes things into your feed and you can turn all of these off or just some of them. LinkedIn will become a lot more peaceful as a result.
To start with you can go into your Settings by clicking on Me at the top right.
Then click on Communications on the left
Then click On LinkedIn or go here: https://www.linkedin.com/mypreferences/d/notification-channels/on-linkedin
Then you have all these settings to play with
There are literally 100s of options across each of these. Disable most for a better LinkedIn life.
Luckily you can just turn all of them off in one go
And this makes life a lot easier. Some of those you might like to keep on some settings so then you’ll have to turn off each one in that section instead but not that much extra work really. The Network category to me is the worst offender. Direct link.
You can unfollow the really noisy people in your timeline too. This means you are still a connection but you don’t see their constant activity liking and commenting on anything and everything. You know the types. The performative “Bert likes this” “Ernie celebrates this” and Bert is commenting on every update from everyone. You can do that right in the timeline by clicking on the dots next to their name. The person is not notified you unfollowed them. It can be bliss.
This should actually save a lot of time on a daily basis.
Startups and Ryanair. Ryanair, really?
854 words
I recently read Siobhán Creaton’s book on Ryanair. It was a great read. While Ryanair copied the operations aspect of South West Airlines, they didn’t copy their humanity and empathy. Ryanair and O’Leary bullied and harassed everyone. A very hateful company. Anti-union, anti-customer and literally told staff and customers to fuck off. As bad as Dunnes if you were a supplier too. South West were the most unionised, the most loved airline with happy staff and were still highly profitable. You can be a winner and be nice.
This is a good article from HBR called Building a Startup That Will Last and I’m going to summarise the article and compare it to Ryanair’s rise.
Point 1: Have a sense of purpose first and then profits will flow
Ryanair’s purpose was to be the biggest low fares airline (certainly not the most loved) and their drive was all about that. Michael O’Leary was Tony Ryan’s PA and was the bag man sent in to fix a badly in debt Ryanair. O’Leary actually suggested letting Ryanair die but Ryan pushed him to sort it and O’Leary got him to agree he’d get 25% of the profits if he did.
There seemed to be one question guiding O’Leary and Ryanair and that was “will this make us the biggest low fares airline?”. Other airlines mocked them for flying to airports in small towns that were basically sheds. Michael O’Leary’s attitude was that if they fly to an Airport 150 miles from Paris, people will fly with them if the price is low enough because a lot of their customers wanted to fly but couldn’t afford to. A whole new type of customer.
Point 2: Have a long-term vision. Plan the next steps after this step.
Europe’s biggest low fares airline was their goal after turning the business around. The next steps were that they built a playbook for an airport and a country and then replicated it. Screw airports, staff and suppliers, pick public fights that got you PR. Ryanair in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy etc. all followed this playbook. They then established hubs in these airports if they got even more concessions. It’s worth stating that Stansted was seen as a bit of a joke airport until Ryanair flew in 100s of 1000s of people. 1000s of jobs have been created all around these small airports because of Ryanair.
Point 3: Spot new opportunities based on data/experience, is there another customer need you could fulfil?
In 2020 Ryanair made €2 Billion (PDF LINK) from things like priority boarding, paying for drinks and food on board. Reserving seats. Scratch cards. Booking buses, trains, cars and hotels through them. As well as removing flight bookings (that cost them a fortune) from travel agencies, they started taking the ancillary products that travel agents sold.
Point 4: Scale up
Ryanair got the systems perfected and then added more airports and more planes. Ryanair makes money when planes are in the air so they got turnarounds down to 25 minutes and were able to do more flights per plane per day. Their profit margins were 23% when other airlines were 5%. The same planes across the fleet meant it was cheaper for training pilots and repair crews. Easier for parts etc. Boeing did a stress test on their finances and no matter the scenario, Ryanair never did worse than breaking even.
Part 5: Hold fast when the bumps happen.
Ryanair’s reaction to 9/11 was to reduce prices and increase flights. They flew their way out of the recession
Before 9/11 Ryanair cancelled an order with Boeing for new planes and put ads in Flight International looking to buy 50 7-14 year old 737s. They got 100 offers. When 9/11 happened they got 400 more offers from the ad. While they got cheap planes, they also used this as leverage for buying new planes from Boeing who were haemorrhaging money with canceled orders from everywhere. Ryanair had massive cash deposits and used that to get great deals. They knew they could weather this. Boeing allegedly gave them 30%-50% discounts to buy new planes. Much more recently they used the issues with the 737 MAX to get better deals from Boeing.
Even when they lose, they manage to win. Ryanair opened up a route to Hahn in Germany. Hahn was not Frankfurt but they called the route Frankfurt (Hahn). Lufthansa formally complained about saying they were flying from Frankfurt when Hahn was at least 120km away and Lufthansa’s complaint was upheld. This gobby startup/upstart created nonstop noise with their public fights about this that they were always in German media. They put “Auf wiedersehen Lufthansa” on their planes flying in and out of Hahn airport generating more complaints and more press coverage.
The book is worth reading and I’m sure some will admire O’Leary and you see so many (morons) say he should run the country. It would not be a good country to live in but he’d be super rich. What is good to take away from Ryanair is perfecting a system and then being highly disciplined about it.
Mulley Communications – Reviews made by A.I.
I used Rytr to make these. Input was company name and what it does: Digital Marketing Strategy.Freaky.
I’ve been a client of Mulley Communications for over 5 years. They’re the best digital marketing agency I have ever met. They helped us navigate through all our campaign strategy and made sure we were always up-to-date with the latest trends. They really know what they’re doing and it shows in their work!
– Damien
Mulley Communications has been the best company I’ve ever worked with! They know everything about digital marketing strategy and they are always on the cutting-edge. They care about what they do and their clients, which is why you can trust them to help your business. They are so knowledgeable, I would recommend them to anyone looking for an expert in digital marketing.
– Damien
Are Facebook Ads worth it for SMEs? Yes
Are Facebook ads, worth it for an SME/small business?
Yeah, I probably think, for an SME, where you just don’t have enough time to be constantly updating Facebook (and you do have to constantly update Facebook to keep in people’s feeds) then advertising is actually a better way to use your time and use your resources.
Updates or ads – the costs
Work it out. How much do you pay yourself or s staff member an hour, how may hours a week or a month are then tending to Facebook just to keep people seeing you are there.You could have an ad campaign that maybe just cost 40 or 50 euros and you can have that run over a week or two. When you run that campaign, you’re going to (see my other post on Facebook advertising) you want to run a campaign, you can set it to go off and we go back to the main parts of your business, so you don’t have to worry about what content to put up today, or tomorrow, how to create engaging posts, or, or anything like that.
Type of Facebook ads
You choose your audience, put up some content that you think the audience will be interested in, could be sales updates, it could be a video showing off a product could be a discount or anything like that can be just awareness, it could be a new business and a new town and you decide that the best way of getting interest is to run a Facebook ad, you can run that ad, you can run it to a certain age group, you can actually target any neighborhood, say in Cork or suburban Dublin, or just a whole county like Leitrim. You can run that ad, and it just goes out to those people. As the ad is running, you will actually see pretty much live stats on how many people have seen it so far, you can actually see what the device is whether it’s Android, whether it’s apple, whether it’s a desktop or a laptop. All that information is there for you, and you can see how many people clicked on that ad, or if you can send people to the website, or you can have the ad running so that you just get messages on Facebook or Instagram.
Facebook ads might be complicated to start with
The only thing that might actually persuade you not to run ads is the fact that setting up an ad on Facebook is slightly complex. You have to set up a campaign, and you have to put details in that, then you have to create an ad set and in that ad set you have to create an ad. So after the first couple of times you start to get used to Facebook advertising. The system is well designed pretty well. If you run an ad campaign before you can actually go into the ad system, click on that campaign, basically say duplicate that. So run it again but change the dates and change the budget.
Go for it
So for a small business with limited time, a limited amount of staff, you don’t have a full time marketer or you’re the marketer. In an SME you’re the manager you’re the accountant and everything else, then I think Facebook ads might actually work. So I advise a lot of clients to set up a Facebook page, and maybe do a bit on it to keep it ticking over, but actually to run some advertising and time them to go out. You don’t have to worry about that day’s updates and it’s just running there in the background. And hopefully you’ll get a return out of that. And I guess the beauty of all of these digital kind of ads in our systems, is you can measure it, to see, is it working or not and if it doesn’t work, you can just stop it or amended, make some changes and set it off again.
Try, fail, fail better, win!
With a newspaper ad that you commission and it runs once in a newspaper. For some say page ads in traditional Irish media you could be paying €3000 for an ad or €4000 or €10,000 for a full page ad. Once you committed to the ad, you can’t change it, if there’s a mistake or an incorrect website address, tough. With digital, you can change that straightaway. With digital you can make changes, measure what worked, make more changes and keep doing that until you get a very well tested ad.
Ads tested with real people and iterated
From that, then you have a data set, or in a way you have a crib sheet or a document or a template for future ads. So back to the question, I would actually suggest that they spend more time on ads than updates. Then maybe spend time on their website as you can get constant returns from ranking on Google.
Are Facebook Ads Worth It? Yes
Are Facebook ada worth it?
Yes I believe they are worth it, because they’re easy to set up and the targeting is really good. Facebook ads can target by gender, age, location, interests and then you can have the ad running on Facebook or on Instagram or on Facebook Messenger which are all owned by Facebook. You can choose your ad to be a video or an image, you can choose to place it in Instagram stories or Facebook stories, or just in the timeline of people. And because of the way the ads work, you’re guaranteed they’ll be seen.
Your ad is only seen by people that you’re targeting so you only get charged by the number of people that see it. You can pay a daily budget and close to 400 people 500 people or a few 1000 people could see it. All based on your budget. You can set a lifetime budget, which means that you can keep going for two weeks.
Once it runs out over those two weeks, it stops, once you set that. Those ads can direct people back to a Facebook page, or an Instagram page or you can get them to go to your website. I find the ads that work best are the ones that get people to click on the ad, and it brings them into a website where you’re selling something, or getting people to sign up to something. Video ads are very effective and what you obviously need is some of your own video content, and with video it means it starts playing in someone’s timeline and they start looking at that and if you have text in your video it means people will actually start reading that text, so they’ll pause maybe and start reading, and that gets them engaged.
So that’s a very good thing to do. And if you don’t have video content, you can just supply images and Facebook Instagram can turn those images into like a slideshow or a video or you can have multiple images and you can do a carousel, which means when people see the ad, they can swipe on that ad and see the next image. So, overall, I think it’s worth doing Facebook ads. And what you can do is because you can set your own budget you could actually set a budget to be just a euro for a campaign.
If you get a return on that, increase the budget and play around. I keep on using this phrase, fail fast, fail cheap. That idea actually works on Facebook and Instagram. The demographics on Facebook are probably people that are 40 Plus, which is still a couple of billion people and in Ireland, there’s two and a half million maybe on Facebook. On Instagram in Ireland, you have a couple of million and those people would be mostly under 40. In a way that demographic is ageing as well. The teenagers, they’re on Snapchat, and they’re on, Tik Tok.
So yes, do run ads on Facebook, try them. The Facebook ad system might be slightly complex to start with. If you find that is when you go into it, you could just start off by boosting posts on Facebook. Do a status update on Facebook from your business page and click on boost. From there it’s fairly simple, you put in your daily budget, how long it’s going to run for. You can choose targeting, age, location, gender, and interests. So start there. Start with a small budget, get a return from that. You can measure that return within 15 minutes of that starting to run. So go and enjoy playing around with those ads too.
Domains and business ideas
.ie domains for sale or rent
I have far too many domains these days so I want to offload them. I have many of these for years for projects I never got to start/complete. Make me an offer. Or if you want to rent a domain for a year to see if it works for you, let me know. domains@mulley.ie With a few exceptions I’d be looking for €500 ex VAT min for a domain. Transfer fees are €70ish and I’ll cover those. Some of these domains I would want 4-5 figures for. Or you can buy them in bulk from me in 5s, 10s or all.
15% referral fee
15% fee if you intro a successful buyer of a domain to us.
000.ie
Handy short url for emails
0@000.ie
65.ie
This age is used as the start of a demographic. Older people in studies are classed as those over 65 for instance. Could be very handy for a research project.
75.ie
Bought this for myself as it is a very very easy domain and email address to remember.
More two letter domain names
2k.ie
52.ie
4b.ie
zc.ie
oc.ie
Countries
Andorra.ie
Luxembourg.ie
Bahamas.ie
Phillippiines.ie
Cork Domains
Shandon.ie
Mitchelstown.ie
Dublin Domains
artane.ie
ashtown.ie
beaumount.ie
cabra.ie
coolock.ie
crumlin.ie
drumcondra.ie
inchicore.ie
santry.ie
terenure.ie
walkinstown.ie
acne.ie
abortionadvice.ie
abortions.ie
abortionservices.ie
abortionsupport.ie
abortioncounselling.ie
One of these blocking purchases. To prevent other orgs with an agenda from using it so spout crap about abortion and what a skewed view of what the bible says. A rogue agency used one of these domains too to ensnare vulnerable people.
Algorithms.ie
A conference in 2023 maybe?
artificialintelligence.ie
A one stop portal on AI/artificial intelligence in Ireland.
bears.ie
Gay culture, not forestry stuff.
brewing.ie
IPA fans?
brexit.ie
They got it done didn’t they?
butt.ie
carter.ie
Brand name for a future business. Named after Agent Carter.
cashandcarry.ie
Nice and easy to market domain for a cash and carry.
Ceoil.ie
I just saw it expire and it’s a great short domain name with lots of potential.
ceos.ie
CEO forum type site. Events for CEOs and specific training courses.
children.ie
One of these blocking purchases. To prevent other orgs with an agenda from using it so spout crap about the family and what a skewed view of what the bible says.
company.ie
Nice and easy to remember. Handy for a portal for something.
conferences.ie
Conference organisers?
contraception.ie
Another one of these blocking purchases. To prevent other orgs with an agenda from using it so spout crap about the family and what a skewed view of what the bible says.
consultant.ie
A perfect domain name for a consultant in any kind of area.
cremations.ie
For those that work in this business.
cyberattack.ie
For IT Security stuff?
daddy.ie
Gay culture or if someone wants to buy it for like new dads or something.
december.ie
Tis the season
drag.ie
And the category is, domain purchasing realness.
entertainmentawards.net
entertainmentawards.tv
Another idea for an awards. Like People’s Choice Awards for the Irish Market. The existing entertainment awards are shite.
expertise.ie
The idea for this was a database of experts that the media could call upon for media/radio/tv interviews. People would put themselves forward and link to their media coverage.
fag.ie
To prevent it being used to abuse people. Or to encourage smoking.
FuckyouPayMe.ie
Cos I love the phrase.
gay.ie
Very. Not sure was this a porn site before. Ideally this would be an online resource for the Irish gay community or a historical repository.
grief.ie
I want to specialise in end of life, dying and death and all of these come with grief. Perhaps an online space for writing on this.
hunting.ie
Bought it to redirect it
independents.ie
For a political party grouping, maybe? Or just coverage of them.
innovation.ie
Well, it’s a fine domain. So many options to use this domain around innovation.
insulin.ie
For all things diabetes medications.
kyl.ie
Kylie, this is perfect for you!
leather.ie
Gay culture? Be a good site for a leathersmith and leather products too.
LifeCoach.ie
As the name suggests. Nice and easy to remember domain for a Life Coach.
marriage.ie
After equal marriage came in, thought it would be best to nab this in case of the “not Adam and Steve” lot grabbed it.
maternity.ie
Future business. Will explain in due course. Lack of LGBT maternity options in Ireland, I would like to see that change.
mitchelstown.ie
mna.ie
Just thought it would be a good domain for feminist writings.
moneyAndJobs.ie
That’s what the media want to know, right? Perhaps a space that has media training and guides.
nightclasses.ie
Well there are 10s of 1000s of searches in Ireland for people wanting to know about nightclasses in Ireland. The competition is … not great.
norm.ie
Funny domain
oncology.ie
Straight up good information and options for those with cancer.
oxford.ie
Bit like carter. For a future business that will grow out of MulleyComms. Simple to remember.
paediatrics.ie
Another health related domain. Could be paired with contraception.ie, pregnant.ie, maternity.ie
passportoffice.ie
Surprised it wasn’t taken
Penis.ie
Should I redirect that to a politician?
politicians.ie and politicians.ie
Many thoughts on this. From a weekly ratings system for Irish pols to an aggregator when they are mentioned in the news. I had something like this for Politics In Ireland.
postgraduate.ie
Portal for postgraduate courses in Ireland would be the original idea. Great domain for a college/university to buy and use as a brand/redirect for their advertising.
preaccelerator.ie
Startups, pre-startup, accelerators, pre-accelerators, even pre-idea seems to be a thing as well. Someone else has nabbed pre.ie. This could be a handy and easy to remember domain for a pre-accelerator or a directory of them.
pregnancy.ie
pregnant.ie
Expired around the same time. I was worried that a fake pregnancy crisis agency would register them and give people bad advice. HSE, buy these!
psychiatrist.ie
Handy and easy to remember
reminiscence.ie
Reminiscence is a very important thing for those ageing or having cognitive decline. Easy to communicate website for reminiscence therapy for example.
RiverLee.ie
Did I mention I’m from Cork? I must have failed to mention it til now. Could be used for lots of things travel, tourism and activities related.
Sepsis.ie
Staying on things health.
shandon.ie
Another Geo, also surprised it wasn’t taken.
STEM.ie
Science, Tech, Engineering, Maths. Handy centralised site to focus on this areas.
subs.ie
Uhhh, sports? 😉
sun.ie
This was owned by the former computer company that got bought and wiped out by a database company. Ideally a competitor should buy it.
tribune.ie
Former domain of a Sunday newspaper. Amazing backlinks. Idea was to download a full copy of the old site from Archive.org and put it back online.
vaccinate.ie
See below!
vaccinated.ie
See below again!
vaccinations.ie
Cos I believe in them and didn’t want anyone to use it to spread fake and dangerous views.
webdesignandmarketing.ie
This site had good enough backlinks for this topic.
windfarm.ie and windfarms.ie
For a renewable energy client. And to prevent conspiracy theorists abuse it
Workouts.ie
Nice ideal domain where you allow people to buy various workouts from people. An online store of workouts from sports stars, celebs, bodybuilders.