Open Coffee Sligo

Enjoy the August bank holiday week. We’ll be taking a break for August. We’ll be back in action soon. Keep track of us here and on twitter: @opencoffeesligo

Please leave a comment below and tell us what you’re up to? Any buzz for your business and new ventures you’d like to share? Looking for some help? Any community events or other opportunities you’d like to tell us about?

At the June meetup of Open Coffee Sligo – there was a lot of discussion around the benefits there would be for some co-ordination of online marketing activities in the region – particularly with the Leonard Cohen/Westlife concerts looming.

In this weeks Sligo Champion (print version) – there was further indication that retail and hospitality pulling out the stops for the concert weekend.  A committee has been formed to capitialise on the retail and hospitality opportunies – and part of this is an Ambassador Programe.

With that in mind, Sligo Leader Programme have been in touch to make Open Coffee attendees aware of the following :

Volunteers Wanted! Ambassadors for Sligo to act as walking, talking information points during Sligo’s big weekend of July 29th to August 2nd needed! 30,000+ visitors can have a really positive experience of Sligo if met by your helpful, smiley face. They might choose to come back as a result and hopefully spend plenty on the weekend as a result of your input. Interested? Love Sligo? Free that weekend for a couple of hours? feeling Civic? then drop a line to ambassadorforsligo@gmail.com

Let’s hope that this committe is also carefully considering the online options that are avaialbe to them in terms of using relevant local and regional websites, facebook and twitter.

Thanks to everybody who turned up (over 50) and contributed to the discussion on Social Media – and particularly to Denise and Aoife who put a lot of time and effort into the event.

One of the main things to come out of the day was how some of the potential for what people are doing for their own businesses, could in some way be tapped positively for use by all businesses in the Sligo and the local region.

As an example – most people were keenly aware of the number of visitors that will come to Sligo this summer for Leonard Cohen and WestLife concerts. While indivudual retailers may have a plan and an online strategy to take account of this – collectively, there seems to a vacuum.

If you have any thoughts on this – please tag your thoughts online with #ocsligo – or leave some comments here.

Just a small group attended our April meetup in the Business Innovation Centre in the Institute of Technology.

Mary Darlington of Darlington Consulting gave an excellent 30 minute overview of office ergonomics – it’s amazing what you can learn in a session like this – as I write this – I am sitting posture perfect in my chair!

The link up with some of the people in Limerich Open Coffee also went very well. While this was just a trial of the technology – which performed flawlessly (thanks Online Meeting Rooms) – it was also interesting to find out a bit more about how other Open Coffee meetups self organise and interact. The consensus was that we should try this again.

On a related item – Enterprise Ireland have made us aware of the upcoming Propel Programme which is focusing on Life Sciences and ICT – full details for applicants is on www.propelprogramme.ie – and applications need to be in by 23rd April.

Next meetup is on Thursday, 6th May @11am in the Clarion Sligo. We are in the process of creating a monthly newsletter to make more people aware of the meetups. We will be adding all of the people who have supplied their email addresses over the past 12 months or so.