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.