A pair of long days

OK, so I worked yesterday and today I took a day off and went to Wales to see the WRC circus.

Thursday I went to a session held by one of the darlings of the UK PR and marketing agencies. It was all about e-marketing.... well that's what it was sold as.... sold as £100'S worth of session that was going to get us all squared away and up to speed with a range of techniques that would enable us to compete in the UK online market.

So, two sessions. The first delivered by Dave the Digital Guru. Now if I was setting myself up to deliver sessions as a digital guru and I was trying to deliver value to an audience I'd make sure as hell that I got busy telling the audience how they could get business value out of each of the techniques I was talking about. These were the key messages that were missing from each of the techniques the man was talking about.

It's immaterial that I know what blogs are, what viral marketing is, and what white papers are or do, if I can't go back to my business and tell them how it's going to deliver prospects, new contracts and cash into that business. Want an example? Tell us about white papers, Dave. Oh they're great - they 'deliver intelligence into customers' so you'd better put them on your interactive website. So you're there delivering intelligence into your customers (I dunno what it is - how to refine uranium or something).... so what? They've downloaded your white paper and you've off-loaded your intelligence into them..... so what?

You don't know who they are, do you? Unless you gate the content and they have to give up their contact details to get the paper then it's worthless to you. Gate it and pull their contact info through a form that hoses it into your telemarketer, who then calls them while they're reading your white paper and WOW - that might actually make them speak to someone and find out why they pulled the white paper and what problems they're looking to solve - BINGO - you've got a new hot prospect, who might become a paying customer, cos you paid them some timely attention - you demonstrated you were sharp and you were cute.

The problem with Dave is he didn't dispatch these 'follow-through' tips - hey a white paper plugs intelligence into your customers. Well done, you've offloaded that information - that'll be a weight off your mind.

So, having sat through this a guy from Doubleclick came in - a slick, smooth-talking salesman. He told us how big Doubleclick was - it's HUGE. Really huge, they deliver TRILLIONS of adverts. Their customers are big - HUGE customers, it's incredible to hear just how big some of their customers are. They can deliver loads of data about their campaigns. They can deliver so many ads that smallest amount of money you can spend with them per month is £1,000 per month.

So what?

This guy's just vomited about an hour's worth of stuff about BIG into an audience of 30 delegates who, as far as I can make out are all from SMB sector - they aren't interested in big, because they can't afford it

So, one pitch that didn't connect through to deliver any business value and another pitch that was a totally inappropriate sales pitch to a paying audience. Way to go PR agencies - further vindicating Brian Solstice's world view. The pitch is dead and those two were stone cold, too.

The afternoon I spent down in IBM Hursley, listening to a guy deliver an excellent three hour session explaining how to sell Connections - he talked about IBM Lotus's social networking tool designed to enable the use of social networking tools in business, to deliver more innovation and value into business - kapow - business value, all the way. IBM's supposed to be a big, dumb giant, it's not - it's moving with the times and it's pretty sharp, actually. Let's hope their software can deliver on their marketing promises. I actually really want it to.

So, that was yesterday. Today was spent in a forest, in Wales, with some colleagues, watching rally cars tearing through what's known as Walter's Arena. It's been over a year since I was in the Neath valley. Last time I was there I was driving rights of way, now extinguished by the NERC Act. We stopped in a McDonalds in some services, it was only when we'd parked up that I realised it was the place we stopped on the way to drive Sarn Helen and The Gap, the evening the lower part of Sarn closed in Autumn and then moved on to The Gap after midnight, when that opened, after midnight. This was the last occasion when it was possible to do this legally and that's a great loss because those people using the rights of way legally weren't doing any appreciable damage, it's the people driving with no knowledge of the rights of way who will continue tearing up ground, off rights of way and illegally.

I wouldn't have thought a McDonalds could be such an evocative setting, but it took me back for a moment.

The rally was OK, but not a patch on getting out and driving stuff in person. After the first stage had been run, it being Wales it started raining heavily. Eventually, we realised it was serious about the rain and it wasn't going to stop, so we went home. I was missing my daughter anyway.

The internet - what a load of rubbish, is it? maybe not, don't know.

According to an article on the BBC news website here only half of UK small businesses have a website. That's an astonishing number of either 'refusniks' or 'can't be bothered'.

As an example, my parents, who run a number of holiday houses have had a website for about the last 2-3 years. As you may/may not know holidays are where Britons spend the most of their online cash. To improve their reach, they've signed up for various sites that actively promote the sort of holidays they offer. They've also signed up for a Google Adwords account (well, actually I did it for them). They spend a few quid each month and probably get a few enquiries as a result - I'm yet to get them on to Joomla and get Joomlastats up and running so we can close the loop on this, and then see proper ROI - it's on the cards.

On Busgoons I spend quite a lot of time analysing where people come from, using Joomlastats - the amazing thing is how linear the cause and effect is within the traffic stats - post on a site, with a link in your signature and people come calling. Post a link in a post and generally even more people come calling!

The key take-away message from the BBC article is that you can't expect to just slap up a website and sit back and wait for business to roll in - you've got to work hard at promoting it to make it work (just like people have always had to in business). This means creating a search engine friendly website, doing stuff like Google Adwords, creating gated entry points for valuable content like whitepapers, so you can gather visitor (marketing) information and so on.

A lot of the issues with websites is that they're created by enthusiastic developers, who generate a beautiful looking site, that isn't as focused on the business aspects of the site. A close friend has recently set up a business to deliver business-focused SME sites and is having a lot of success, simply because he focuses on providing solid business-focus and ROI.

With this sort of business accumen the internet can and does work - it changes from 'brochures on a shelf' to people on internet street corners shouting about your business and handing out virtual flyers all over the place and however annoying that may be - it works.

Old news, caught in a bubble - Solent.tv

I was reading up on the Isle of Wight Act (it's about fesitvals) as part of responding on VZI about something called Dub Island when one of the links took me to the Solent.tv website. Just in case it's not still up (in which case it'll be self-explanatory exactly what it is) - Solent.tv was a local TV station broadcasting to the IOW and surrounding areas. Sadly the idiots running the parent companies managed to run them into the ground and the whole lot fell apart at the end of May 2007.

I found this company going into administration very sad. I've been involved on the periphery of Solent.tv pretty much since it's inception - I drove the Head of Production there around the IOW so he could film the round the Island race before the station was on air. Shortly after that he became one of my lodgers. I then got involved with the 'Island Broadband' project - we did roadshows and there were information shorts on the station about broadband at a time when it was a relative mystery and not available in such a ubiquitous manner as it is today. A while after that one of the editors became my other lodger.

Both of these guys were exceptionally dedicated and professional people, who worked incredibly hard and produced genuinely professional television that they were very proud of. When they lost their jobs I lost a tennant and a close friend lost his raison d'etre - annoying and sad respectively.

Probably the saddest thing about stumbling across the solent.tv website randomly and so many months after it was shut down in such an abrupt and stupid manner is how professional and positive it still looks, with various programmes on there still available to watch and my friends waving nervously in the final news show. What a waste and what an insult to such a dedicated team - I take my hats off to you guys and still feel sick to the pit of my stomach towards the idiots who robbed the IOW of such a fantastic media flagship.

More blogging noise

I forgot this link, so thought I'd better post it up.

While I'm here I'd better post up some more useful blogging references, or this might be a bit of a short entry....


Old public relations vs new public relations

How to do PR without press releases

Top 10 reasons PR doesn't work

Destructions on corporate blogging

Blogging ethics code

More blogging ethics

A veritable feast of new-media-douchebags

Clever quotes

I love 'em.

Alan Kay once said, "technology is anything that was invented after you were born."

This week could be quite an interesting week in work - I've got the go ahead on a corporate blog, so now I just need to make it work. Now I need to sell the idea for this internally. Should be fun.

I've picked up some really useful tips from here - which is actually a really useful PR-type blog. I've also been digging around here where there is loads of really interesting stuff and great links, too.

Meanwhile I've been walking through treacle for the past few days, as my parent's have been visiting.

Did you ever?

Just reading Ed Brill's blog and this quote jumped out at me:

A customer who is looking to integrate a .NET application with Notes and hold fast against users demanding Outlook...

When d'you ever hear about users demanding Notes? H'mmmmm. Is IBM doing as well as they say? I'd kinda like them to as in many ways the Lotus crew come across as a world weary lot and I'll normally root for the underdog. Also I'm using ND8 and it's one helluva lot better than the previous antiquated UI. There are still sucky things about it, especially the horrendous crashes that occur sometimes, but there are also some cute things about it, which I like a lot.

Just in case you wondered, I didn't get the singlecab fit last night. Of all things it's the horn that's stopping me taking it in for MOT - I'm getting no volts at the push button and it seems to be the ring on the wheel that's at fault. I didn't have a suitable switch in the hole that is my workshop, so I'll be off to an auto-factor soon to remedy that. To stop myself descending into a pit of despair I cleared out a few more bits from the Passat shell outside the front of the house - stuff I could see myself having to buy, or get made up if I'd let it go with them still attached. I came in at about 11:30, after I dropped a spanner and a neighbour screeched 'for f*cksake!'. Don't know whether it was at me, or someone else, but it was enough to make me realise how late it was!

On the subject of Media.....

While I'm examining stuff like Blogs and their impact in the PR media-sphere, I watched this last night on BBC2 and didn't want to forget about it, so I'm mentioning it here: http://www.rts.org.uk/Information_page_+_3_pic_det.asp?id=2443

Blogging - is this something I should be doing?

I've just been reading up on various blogs about 'doing PR' in the new media world of social software - Christ, that sentance needed more quote marks in it! I've always been terrible about keeping diaries - in many respects I'm just getting on with life, rather than writing about it. At least I'm having a good time doing it.

I'm all of a jitter right now cos I've just booked my long-term pick up project in for an MOT and now I'm wondering just what I've forgotten to sort out on it and what it's going to fail on - ah well, it'll be fine, I'm sure.


So how do you 'do PR' these days? I'm kinda struggling to find my feet. When I was last doing it (about three years ago) it was all press releases and chatting to editors, but who reads magazines these days, eh? It's all blogs and social networking sites. Go figure.

More probably months later ;-)