Advertising on Facebook is growing exponentially as an increasing number of entrepreneurs understand how effective it is – there is no other place where you can target your advertising so well. You obviously want to get a good return on investment – so how does Facebook advertising work?

Do you know everything you need to know about Facebook advertising?

Facebook advertising is just like any other form of advertising

You need to understand that advertising on Facebook is just like advertising on any other online system. Thus, to get the best results you need to find the most effective ad and the only way to do that is through split testing (see our OptimizePress review).

The first thing you want to do when advertising on Facebook is to find the ads that generate the best results, and the only way you can achieve this is by testing different options at the same time. The split testing approach to finding the perfect ad has been used for quite a while. When you advertise on Facebook, it is imperative that you understand that split testing isn’t something you only want to do once, it is something that should be done repeatedly to ensure that the effectiveness of your ads increases and implicitly your ROI. Finding a successful campaign can take some time and that is why patience is critical.

Build a list

If your Facebook traffic will be sent to a special landing page, make sure you are using it to build a list of email subscribers. People are more likely to make a purchase if they know you and less likely to buy the first time they see a sales page, which is why sending people straight to a sales page is less effective. It is more difficult to get someone who is visiting your sales page for the first time to buy than to turn a subscriber into a customer. Every Internet marketer knows the value of follow up marketing, where you aim to follow up with your prospects and try to close the sale. This approach is also referred to as “drip marketing.”

Pay attention to the detailed metrics

Facebook offers advertisers detailed metrics but if you don’t know how to read them, you might get confused about a few things. For example, when you look at the Facebook Ads Insights Dashboard you will see something called “Action” and you should know that this is the number assigned to how many fans you have gathered of this particular ad. Paying attention to and understanding your metrics will help you find sustainable success within the advertising system on Facebook. It will show you where you are going, both good and bad, and how to adjust accordingly.

Just like with every other part of your e-marketing plan, running an effective ad campaign on Facebook is much more than just writing and putting up your ad. To prevent failure you need to be patient and persevere by making wise and practical decisions and do some hard work. Ask any Facebook advertiser and he will tell you the same thing – test and refine and you’ll see results.

Twitter user base is massive and comprises of all kinds of people, have gained millions of users in the past couple years. As an Internet Marketer, what does this mean to you? How using Twitter for marketing get more exposure for your service and products? Of course you can! Twitter is one of the best marketing tools we have out on the market today, is can help generate exposure for your business if used the right way.

What is your Twitter marketing strategy?

Giving value to grow followers

One well-used method to gain followers is to begin by following those in your targeted audience. Well, there’s a particular flaw with this method and that is, the kind of followers you get like this are targeted, but not very responsive.

This approach is basically “you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours”. Is it possible to find followers that are going to be worth the effort? Start giving away more value than you can imagine – the important things is to try to engage your followers. Gaining more followers happens when you tweet things people will then want to re-tweet.

Create niche specific accounts

It certainly makes sense to create niche specific accounts in order for you to keep track of your product promotions when leveraging Twitter. This applies to you even if you’re targeting one broad niche, because usually such niches will have sub-niches, and having targeted followers for every micro niche will increase the probability of them responding back to your tweets and taking the action you direct them towards.

What happens after they visit your site?

You want them to visit your website, but what then? Do you have a main objective in mind? Converting traffic over to your site by Tweeting is what your ultimate goal is. Making choices in advance on whether you are getting a lead, making a sale or having the customer call you, should be decisions you make in advance. The more clear you are in this area, the easier it will be for you gauge from the response that you get.

There are lots of Twitter marketing strategies, but you need to branch out to other social media sources for the best experience. Make your Twitter account link with your Facebook or Myspace accounts so that your tweets are automatically transferred over to those accounts without having to repost separately on each site. It takes time to actually see the benefit of your efforts with Twitter and gaining followers but in the long run it’s an important part of your online marketing plan.

The Internet is getting as real as it can get as more and more people jump onto the social bandwagon. In the past years we’ve seen a huge boom among people using the Internet to build relationships and make new connections. People today are more willing to build those relationships online than they have been in the past. Not only can this be used to help you connect with your target audience but it also lets them give you vital feedback too. People who use the Internet today want to feel as though their messages are being received and acknowledged – savvy marketers are finding ways to do just that with free tools like Hootsuite.

Try the Hootsuite social media management suite

Find platforms that are incredibly active

The blogosphere has become an intense social experience – so many small businesses are now starting to use social media. If you want to market effectively through social media, you need to find platforms that are incredibly active where you can connect with your target audience, and one such platform is the blog. Blogs are effective at increasing your ranking in the search engines, which in turn brings you more traffic, as well as helping you establish relationships with your audience through your posts.

Interaction on a blog tends to live and quite a social experience because readers can also express their views, turning blogs into a complex communication channel that can be utilized for an improved social media marketing strategy. To enhance the experience, you can link your blog to other social media platforms.

What social media sites matter most?

To start with, there isn’t much out there that’s better than Facebook for most industries. It’s a unique way to create a strong conversation with your prospects and customers by giving them what they want in the form of high quality content. It is a distinctive method for creating a meaningful conversation with your prospects and by providing them with the high quality material that they want.

Initiate a meaningful conversation with your customers

You need to focus on initiating a meaningful conversation with your customers and gives them what they want in terms of good quality content. It is an exceptional method for starting a lasting bond with your prospects and giving them what they desire via good content. In order to use the influence of social networks for marketing, you have to be there to connect with your fans and group members.

Social media marketing isn’t the only thing that you will need

Lastly, it is important for your business to realize that social media marketing is not the only thing that you will need. You have to utilize it along with other tools such as Twitter to tweet your blog posts and to get a button put up under each of your submissions so that they can be re-tweeted. There are tons of unique ways through which you can make the most out of social media marketing. You just have to be open to the right opportunities.

Anyone looking to build a successful online business for the long-term needs to invest in social media marketing in a big way. This type of marketing may be in its earlier stages but the evidence and growth that stems from it speaks for itself. If you want to create a successful online business of your own then you really can’t afford to miss out on the opportunities that are represented by social media?

Any online business person with good experience knows that joint venture marketing agreements have the potential to provide explosive profits. What makes JVs so attractive is the prospect of realizing terrific returns and ROI in the fastest possible time. The best part about joint venture marketing is that it doesn’t have to be limited and you have the freedom to experiment with it as long as your partner is fine. This article will talk about several joint venture mistakes that tend to happen all too frequently.

Should you shake hands on a joint venture marketing deal?

Are you familiar with your venture partner?

First, you have to be familiar with your venture partner if you want success. You must make sure that your partner has quality products and is credible. This is because your joint venture can greatly impact your reputation if you are using the wrong one. It is a necessity that you recognize how essential it is to get the correct partner. All in all, your reputation is of the most importance, which should be amplified great methods for venture partner down on your partner’s share no matter what.

There needs to be a relationship with the list

That is precisely why you have to determine the strength of the relationship between the list and the person on the other side – social commerce is one of the new buzz words of 2011. In order to make any type of joint venture successful, there needs to be a relationship with the list, or else getting a response from your endorsement email becomes difficult. A marketing email list by definition is supposed to be developed in terms of a good relationship, and if it is not then anything you send will just sound like any other sales pitch. That is why you really must be positive that the other half of the deal has a solid email list and that you’re connecting as well as marketing.

Sell towards buyers, not prospects

Finally, selling towards potential prospects instead of buyers is a waste of time. Quite honestly, if you are setting up joint venture marketing, would it be a smart move to give your partner a list of buyers? Prospects will always be prospects, since they don’t have a relationship with you. Once someone has made a purchase from you, it is probably a good chance that they will purchase again. Be certain that you target buyers and not prospects if you want to gain the most from your joint venture. You will truly get more of a response.

All in all, this summary proves that joint venture marketing strategies will be around for a long time. It is the easiest method for leveraging the assets of your partner for mutual benefit. In order to get the best joint venture over time, you must really practice and understand what you are doing over period time. But the key to success lies in taking consistent action. So go ahead and apply what you’ve learned in this article and don’t make any blunders that may prove to be costly in the long run. Remember that your online marketing plan relies on your being consistent so do not stop this action.

All marketers would love to run successful viral marketing campaigns, and you the truth is you can if you know exactly what you are doing. So many people do not even consider bothering with viral marketing because they just do not know the truth about it – that it is not high level particle physics.

Can you persuade your existing users to tell their friends about your content?

Viral marketing frustrates businesses because they know it can work, it is just that most of them cannot make it work. This is the kind of thing that generally requires you to know a few important fundamental items. Just keep in mind that it is the market that determines if something should go viral, not you.

Provide something of very high value

The way to attempt a viral reaction is to provide high quality content that shocks people into talking about it. There are times when your idea will spread around virally, without you knowing at the start.

This is why you should focus on being patient when it comes to achieving results from your campaign. You never know which idea might work and give you massive returns. Think about it, how often do you hear about something truly becoming viral and setting the net on fire? Not often, really. Also consider that very many times what may become viral may not be confined to your target audience.

Be careful about overloading your hosting account

So you can do things you think will create a buzz in your market, and there’s nothing wrong with that. One danger about a viral campaign is that it can overload your hosting account if you are using shared hosting. This has encouraged many savvy webmasters to consider cloud hosting. It is hard to say if you could improve your viral idea, and we are not sure why you would want to do that, anyway.

You can easily go to the places where your market visits, and then do something to create a stir or buzz. If you can ignite an idea in a group, it will be a lot more easier for you to get the idea out in the market, and let the big influencers pick it up.

Finding your target market

Defining your target market is in theory easy, and you will find them in forums and at Facebook and most likely Twitter plus others. You need to do things to draw them to you, and once done then you keep their attention. Once you have that step done, then you will be in a prime position to do something virally.

There are already so many examples of succesful viral marketing campaigns that have happened because of YouTube. You can experiment with any viral idea you can think of and post it at YouTube and see what happens. This is not anything like film class, and the most important thing is that you test out your ideas as they come to you. You never know what will become viral, so just get things done and make them happen. You can use many types of viral marketing to achieve spectacular results in your own business.

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Our 68th podcast is an interview with Ed Dale, founder of the 30-Day Challenge. In this conversaton we talk about social media marketing opportunities, online reputation management and local search marketing.

Here’s the full Ed Dale interview transcript:

Ed Dale, Founder of the 30-Day Challenge

00:00 David Bain: I’m joined today by Ed Dale and Ed is a very successful internet marketer having already sold a portfolio of websites for several million dollars; and these days he is probably best-known for running the 30-Day Challenge, a high quality free introductory internet marketing course which has now been taken by over a hundred and fifty thousand people. Ed, many thanks indeed for joining me.

00:23 Ed Dale: My pleasure David.

00:24 DB: Could you perhaps begin by telling me a little a bit about your background and how you ended up getting into online marketing?

00:30 ED: Well, look, way back, last century… [chuckle] I had a very successful web development company which I ended up selling and that was certainly my first big break. And then… As you did… I actually came over to London and raised a whole lot of capital for an idea that we had and that all ended up pretty much in tears, great classic ‘.com’… we had a 150 people all over the place. And I suppose after that whole experience that left a pretty bad taste in my mouth, so I was thinking more on the lines of what can I do to help businesses knowing that I love marketing and so on. So I got involved, as sort of as an angel investor into different small businesses, coffee shops, soup businesses, a whole bunch of things. And that was great. But the trouble with small businesses is that they’re bit like the mafia in Godfather III. [chuckle] Every time you try to get out, they drag you back in. And so I was always just looking for what’s the best business opportunity out there, I was always interested and looking for it. And I went to a conference. I’d started learning how to do copywriting and I went to a Dan Kennedy retirement copywriting conference in Phoenix in Arizona, and ironical because, of course, he never did retire but anyway, but it was brilliant. It was a brilliant conference.

02:12 ED: And not only did I learn a lot about copywriting which I think is just one of the most important skills in business to have. More importantly, I actually met people there who were actually making money on the internet, selling real stuff to real people. My view at that time was that the only people who are making money selling stuff on the internet were people who were teaching people how to sell my stuff on the internet to other people and train them how to make money on the internet. And so I thought this is interesting so I’ll go home and try this. And it would be unfair me doing it because obviously I had a lot of the resources, so I got my sister-in-law and some friends and we thought, “Well let’s see if we can actually get real people to buy real stuff.” And the thing I did in hindsight which was a cool thing was that I decided that what we would do is we would have a very specific deadline and the… If it works that’ll be great and we’d have this little conference and we’d show friends and family and so on what we were up to and if it didn’t work, I suppose it’d be the shortest conference of all time, you know, “Thanks for coming, didn’t work. Yeah, stay safe on the roads.” And as it turned out, of course it did work and we did make a dollar and it was obvious that real people were starting to buy real stuff on the internet.

03:34 DB: So what year would this have been?

03:36 ED: No, no, no that was the… I suppose that was the key… Key understanding there that this was an… It had all the hallmarks of being the ultimate business because there was no stock, no silly teenagers. People actually read something that you wrote and pulled out their credit card over the other side of the world and paid you for, in those days e-books on different subjects.

04:04 DB: Yeah sure. No, sorry. I was just wondering what year approximately this would’ve been.

04:08 ED: Well, this is 2003, 2004.

04:12 DB: Right.

04:13 ED: Not that long to come into context of things but it seems like a lifetime ago now. And so, with that, that convinced me that that was… This was the business to get into and then we did.

04:27 DB: Okay, excellent. And with a lot of positive effects, obviously. And one of the things that I’m aware that you’re known for certainly is developing a big portfolio of websites. And would you say that… I mean, for instance, a lot of listeners to my podcast are actually marketing managers as well as business owners and that there are some people looking to earn maybe a part-time income, but a lot of people are working in perhaps a larger business. So would you say that building a portfolio of websites is a reasonable strategy for an existing brand, a bigger business as well to look at?

05:09 ED: Okay. Well, let’s look at the word portfolio for a second because for the longest time that was exactly how you would do things because traffic was super easy. You could pay Google 5 cents a click, you could throw up 30,000 key words in a day and was, it was all honey and manna from heaven, it was wonderful. Now you have to be a lot more sophisticated about it because traffic is hard and traffic is expensive. So it’s very important that you understand the strategy. I suppose to break down the various businesses, if you look at a lot of the people who are in a business and looking to promote their online business, do they have to promote online? Absolutely because, bluntly, bottom line they are promoting online whether they are actually doing it actively or not because your users, your clients, your customers are creating your online presence if you won’t.

06:04 ED: It’s amazing when I speak to companies about this stuff and I actually just show them, “Look, did you know you’re being reviewed?” Restaurants are used to getting reviewed. Hotels are used to getting reviewed. Nobody else is. Not dentists, not accountants, not lawyers, not graphic design firms. They’re not used to getting rated, but they are. Everybody’s getting rated. There are reviews everywhere. People comment about good and, more importantly, bad service all the time. And so, if the company is not creating a presence in having a strategy for their presence and their online reputation management which I think is one of the hugest big growth and crucial issues, it’s a big deal.

06:46 ED: The other side of it, of course, is on the traffic side. And, yeah, where are you in Google? Google is the new yellow pages. Google is the new who’s who. Where are you? Where do you exist? When somebody types in if you’re a dentist, when somebody types in “dentist London” where do you come up? Where are you? And, typically, a lot of these businesses… Because why would they know about SEO? Why should they know about SEO if they’re in the business of being dentists, not SEO experts? But, sadly, there’s a bunch of little, easy, simple things that you could get any sort of surly teenager to do, [chuckle] and you’ll be instantly that much better. Here in Australia, we have this horrific, and it’s particularly bad in Australia and in the UK as well, I might add, where savvy SEO-based directories are actually taking up most of the traffic for particular business search phrases. And then, of course, the grand irony is they effectively charge you for entry in their directories, or worse, send your traffic, traffic that should have been coming to you, to your competitors all for the lack of just the most basic of basic stuff, and this is not thousands of dollars of stuff, David, this is stuff that you can do. It takes you two hours max, totally free, as I say, any surly teenager who can pimp their MySpace page could do it.

08:18 DB: So you touched on reputation management there, is there a bigger danger for negative reviews out there about your business or someone perhaps getting a hold of their Facebook and Twitter account and doing things that they think are proactively promoting their business, but actually coming across as spamming? Well, what would you say is the biggest danger there?

08:41 ED: I think, without question, negative… Allowing negative reviews and comments and so on unchallenged. If they’re actually out there and actually have a Twitter account, they actually have a Facebook page and they’re trying, then that is… That is, let’s face it, much better than 95% of businesses are doing at the moment for all the heat and light about online which I would imagine less than 5% of businesses actually have some sort of proactive strategy.

09:15 DB: Right. You have to give it a go and then learn on the move then.

09:17 ED: Yeah, exactly. So it’s much better to be giving it a go and maybe making the occasional error than sticking your fingers in your ears and going, which is the typical response, “I’m not listening, I’m not listening, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Because they’ve got so much… And I can’t blame them for that. They’ve got so much on. Let’s face it, they’re just trying to deal with the global financial crisis and economies and all these sort of thing and they’re just trying to deal with the customers they have and you’re saying to me this is whole other layer I need to now understand? The way I… The analogy I give, David, is when I was renovating our house, I’m the least practical person you will ever meet in your life. So all I heard when the builders were talking to me was “Blah, blah, blah, blah, $2,000 extra. Blah, blah, blah, blah, three-week delay.” That’s all I heard, right? And this is effectively what’s happening with business owners. And ultimately it will… Typically it comes from pain, doesn’t it? And they’ll be such harsh and vicious reviews or more. Because think about it, it’s… I think of a whole bunch of sayings. The first one is, “People always slow down for a car accident, but never for the beautiful sunset.” “The market goes up by the stairs and down by the elevator shaft.” It is anytime they’re… If somebody had a bad experience with your business, they’re going to want to vent and they’re going to vent online.

10:49 ED: And, currently, we’ve got this huge social shift going on because typically, and obviously I’m massively stereotyping here, people believe what they read. We’ve grown up, most of us have grown up being in an environment where there were only four channels on TV and there were newspapers. And, typically, if somebody said something on the newspaper or on radio or on the television and it was fact, regardless if it was fact or not. And of course now, we’ve got a million publishers, even a billion publishers of information and, quite often, the stuff that’s published is trash and these reviews undeserved. But unanswered or uncombatted or at least try to listen to what the market is saying about your product or service and sticking your fingers in the ear and going, “I’m not listening, I’m not listening,” is not a strategy that’s going to get you much past March 2011 because it’s happening.

This transcript is the third part of my Ed Dale interview and this part focuses on advertising on Facebook.

19:21 DB: We touched on social media there. I’m aware that you’ve focused quite a bit on Facebook ads in the past as well. Do you have any tips for businesses with regards to the design of ads and perhaps landing pages as well?

19:35 ED: Well, look if I take one step back and just say that the first thing that anybody needs to have a look at when they come to Facebook is as a business is making sure they have a proper Facebook page. Mistake number one that people are making, and sadly I made this mistake and hurt, because we’ve been on Facebook since the very first day that they opened up to people who are not college students in the United States. And we encouraged people to have 5,000 friends which is a limit on your personal profile and that was the worst most horrific piece of advice we could have ever given. And unfortunately I see businesses promoting, they’re putting you out, like if I’m Ed Dale and I own a mechanics business, they’re getting people to friend me on Facebook. Bad news. Really bad, bad, bad way of operating. You need to use the system that Facebook have specifically designed for you and that’s Facebook for pages. It’s very easy to set up. In fact, what I’m noticing, David, and I don’t know what you’ve seen, I’d be interested in your feedback actually, but here in Australia and more in the United States, I’m seeing businesses promote their Facebook fan page more than their website.

20:52 DB: Yes. You even see that on TV as well here.

20:56 ED: Yup. Now, that’s stunning. Think about that. In the space of 18 months, everybody was using their website as their primary vehicle. And now, because of course, they charge so much to update their website and it’s so ridiculously expensive, they’re using something which they easily understand and can interact and have viral tools built in which is their Facebook fan page and they promote that and their Twitter account rather than their website.

21:22 DB: And you obviously think that’s preferable long-term for them to do that rather than their website.

21:26 ED: Yeah. And it’s a shame because actually their website is a crucial part of the puzzle because Facebook is an important part of the puzzle, Google is an important part of the puzzle. So, you really need to have both of these things covered. But, to get back to your original question, the most important thing for people to understand when they’re advertising on Facebook, and this is particularly if they come from an internet marketing background and they’ve had some experience with Google, Pay Per Click in particular, is that Facebook Pay Per Click is not Google Pay Per Click.

22:00 DB: Right.

22:02 ED: And because Google is all about phrases, what are people typing in? With Facebook, it’s all about demographics, and this is very exciting. This is really, really exciting. For certain types of businesses where you can define your demographics well, Facebook is awesome. Like, the classic example I use is that if you’re in the wedding planning business, then Facebook Pay Per Click advertising is like a gift from the gods. Because you can literally advertise to everybody who’s just switched their profile to engaged. Engaged people is a demographic. Engaged people in Birmingham is a demographic. Engaged people who work for BT in Birmingham is a demographic. Engaged people who are living in Birmingham, work for BT and are between 24 and 29 years of age is a demographic.

22:58 DB: It obviously sounds like a gift from heaven for certain types of businesses, but are Facebook ads appropriate for every type of business?

23:06 ED: No, I don’t think so. And sadly, to just sort of stop the next question before it comes, is you never know until you test. And the trouble is what I see is people botching their tests. They try to do an ad which covers everything and that is such a mistake on Facebook. You really… If you can create an ad… Say, you’re a national real estate agent, a national realtor. Now, the mistake would be that you would do one ad for every person who’s interested in buying a house in the UK. That would be a massive mistake. When you can stew and create specific ads for people who are living in… Who are interested in real estate and living in Surrey, or living in Herefordshire or Derbyshire or wherever. You can automatically customize and create ads. And the trick with Facebook demographic advertising is try to make your demographics as small as humanly and manageably possible because that gives you the… That really does give you the edge because you can really create very, very, very targeted ads. You’ve got a little bit more copy that you can put in an ad on Facebook as compared to Google and, of course, you can use an image which is in our testing very, very crucial. So you’ve got all of these opportunities with Facebook demographic advertising, but the key thing is to understand it, start small, make sure your demographics is small and test because it works. Gangbusters in some markets and in other markets, it could be a dud.

This transcript is the fourth part of my Ed Dale interview and this part focuses on Facebook marketing strategies.

24:57 DB: And what kind of call-to-action is appropriate? Should you be driving people back to your Facebook page and just getting them to “like” you? Should you be driving people to your own website?

25:08 ED: Good question, and it depends a little bit on the… Typically, in the web world, I suppose we go… If all else fails, get an email, and that’s certainly like very, very popular on Facebook at the moment, Facebook marketing strategies for pages where you can look to get an email opt-in. And some of those are working very, very, very well, David, so I’d be hesitant to counsel against that. However, what I will say is this. I wonder how long Facebook will be comfortable with that because I think, more than anything, Facebook wants to keep people inside Facebook. And so I think a longer term, healthier strategy is to try and deal with people and, my goodness, they give you these amazing tools to communicate with everybody who likes your page. In some ways, in a much more reliable manner than sending out emails. So I think, I’ll… Look, right now if you ask me what’s working right now today, David, is indeed the strategies which send them to the Facebook page and you have some sort of great offer, the ethical bribe as we call it, so that they give you their name and email address so you could build your email address and then go on to perhaps market your services down the track.

26:29 ED: If I was putting on my… Looking into my crystal ball, I would say that at some point in time, Facebook is going to lower the boom on that and investing in strategies which get people to hit that “like” button on your fan page is the very minimum, is going to be crucial because you can communicate to people. Most people don’t realize this, is that you can communicate via update, even via email if you do it properly with the people who’ve “liked” your page. And what people don’t even realize is you can actually use demographic messaging for people who have “liked” your page so you can send just to females, just to males, just certain age groups and I expect they will expand that functionality over time as well. So it’s a very, very exciting time and if you haven’t… The most important message is, if people will take one message away from this, is that if you’ve been able to avoid Facebook until now, in 2011, there’s just no way you’re going to avoid it.

The 60th edition of our podcast brings you week #22 from the original 26-Week Internet Marketing Plan. This video talks about soacial media marketing strategy.

The recording is taken from our original 2007 seminar. At the time it sold for £399 as part of our 26-Week Internet Marketing Plan home study package. Now, for the first time we’re giving it away for free via our internet marketing podcast.

Why are we giving all this great video content away for free?

Although these videos still offer a lot of great tips, internet marketing methods change over time. We’re going to be launching a brand new version of the plan soon, and we’re sure that by sharing these original video recordings for free, you’ll be persuaded to jump on-board when the new paid-for version launches! Stay tuned to our newsletter to find out more.

The audio version of our new media PR interview with Craig McGill is only available to Inner Circle members. If you’re already a member, click here to listen to the interview now.

Craig McGill

CM At Beattie Communications I’m a Senior Account Manager…

DB Okay

CM And obviously with a specialised interest in technology and how to give it, it’s a much derided term at the moment PR 2.0, taking on the new websites and so on, and that’s very much my specialist area of interest. Seeing how things on the web and other parts of technology can take what used to be the humble press release and expand on it and deliver it in new ways.

DB Tell you what, could you begin by telling us a little bit about your own personal background and how you evolved into the current position you are today?

CM Yes sure. Obviously I started off like many a person in the PR sector, started off as a journalist working for the likes of the Daily Mirror and the Sunday Mirror, and also worked on the technology section at the Guardian and the Scotsman throughout the years. After reaching the news desk and being the deputy news editor at the Daily Mirror in Scotland, I changed careers into public relations, seeing, because by that point in my career, IT technology had obviously come a long way from the first Apple machine that I had back in the 90s and with the internet and so on, taking over to an extent. I mean most people now if you want information you go to a company’s website and in particular, if there are press releases out there that’s where a lot of people now get information, even from a press point of view. So while there’s often been derision about people going from journalism into PR, nowadays thanks in part to modern technology the job is practically identical. It’s all about getting information out there and I found that PR now allows for an incredible amount of detail to be out there because press releases now are no longer just for the exclusive domain of a couple of journalists. Press releases have to be written as if they’re being read by the mass market in the same way that a newspaper story has to be written for the mass market. What I’ve found is in Public relations at the moment clients are willing to grasp these ideas and potential a lot more quicker than some newspapers were. That’s not to put down the efforts of newspapers; newspapers in the UK especially and foremost Guardian Unlimited have grasped the potential very well but it’s been a slow revolution for many of the others. Whereas I’ve found that if you go to companies you can say, let’s try this, let’s try that and they’re a lot more receptive to those ideas. I mean, one example I find quite funny is that you still have some newspapers now advertising blogs as if they’re the next big thing and anyone at all in the know will tell you blogs are now practically passé. Two years ago was the height and now the cynicism has set in that they are just another marketing tool. That’s not to say there’s not a lot of good information still in blogs but at the same time, they’re not seen as the cutting edge as they once were.

DB Right okay. So what would you say personally is the cutting edge at the moment?

CM I think at the moment you’re still seeing a lot of people going to Facebook, Bebo and these sort of sites and that’s. Again you can see companies are getting into it and the tide again will turn shortly in that. What’s the next big thing afterwards? I have to be quite honest and say, I don’t know and they’ll be a million people on the web who can happily speculate what the next big thing is but I think the beauty is that very often people don’t know. For example, ten or so years ago if someone had told you MP3 would be the music file format of choice, people would have scoffed. Yes it was low compression but it’s not, as any good music lover will tell you, it’s not the best digital sound that you’re getting, it’s a very flat digital sound, yet it’s taken off in a way that no one else expected. Similarly, text messaging, even though it’s not part of the web as such, no one predicted the success of that. A lot of people thought blogs would stay a niche product. People thought things like My Space would be exclusively for teens. These things you can’t always predict what the next fancy or next big thing will be on the web. For example, I’m quite surprised, I think in the corporate sense RSS is still to come and arrive in a big way because while a lot of websites and blogs have got it, it hasn’t been embraced at a corporate level, unlike blogs which have been the corporate thing to adopt at the moment. So I think the next six months to a year you’ll see a lot more companies adopting RSS as a way of getting their message out there.

DB That’s an interesting point yes and also it makes it easier the fact that RSS has been integrated as part of Internet Explorer 7 of course as well. Which has…

MC Exactly.

DB Grown it massively as well. So, you certainly sound as if you’ve made the right move there. What made you choose the Beattie Group to move into?

MC Beattie have a fantastic reputation within the UK and also when chatting to the senior team at Beattie, the likes of Gordon Beattie, Martin Crines, Lorna O’Donnell, Chris Gilmore. They grasp the potential that is there. Many PR companies pay lip service to the idea of what the web can do without actually seeing the complete ramifications of setting something up. Beattie very much have the proper approach. What impressed me anyway was that okay, if you want technology to do something then tell us how it works. Don’t just say you’ve got this fantastic piece of Tec that’s now looking for a solution. Have the solution in place that the technology helps it because all too often you see, especially if you go to websites like The Register where there are a lot of people who say, oh this is a great piece of Tec, this is a great piece of software, this does this, this does that but they haven’t thought about its real world use. With Beattie what they said was yep, we’ll do things but we won’t set up a MySpace for every client just because we can. At Beattie they won’t use the technology or the new ideas just for the sake of it to look flashy, it’s got to fit in with what the customer wants and what benefits the customer will receive from that and that was an ethos I quite like myself. It’s something I particularly bond to because I believe while there is a lot of wonderful technology out there it has to be there for a reason and not just for the sake of it.

DB Okay. So would you say that relationships still is king within PR or is technology taking over from that?

MC I think that the relationship still has to be there at all levels, obviously there has to be the relationship between customer and client. For example, it’s one thing for me to spout say the wonders of an RSS feed but if I can’t have a good relationship with a client to explain to them the benefits of it because ultimately, while many people see you doing something like an RSS feed or a podcast might be, a no-brainer. Again, if it’s not something people are used to, they have to take that little leap of faith for the first time and if you don’t have a relationship of trust with someone then it’s going to be very difficult to convince them that it’s worthwhile. Similarly, for the client to reach their customer there has to be that trust of quality. You’re not going to go and give up seven or eight minutes listening to a podcast or go and play an interactive game, or start subscribing to their RSS feeds, unless you know there’s something of value there and you have to have that relationship to understand that in the first place.

DB Right.

SM So, the technology is there to supplement the relationship not to replace it.

DB OK. You mentioned podcasts there a little bit. How would you go about advising your clients on how to actually harness the power of podcasts for PR?

SM I think the two things that any client willing to do postcasts has to be aware of is, first of all they have to make sure that they can speak relatively well and clearly. That sounds like a basic 101 to use an Americanism but I’ve been very surprised, you even see people on the television now, and so called experts and pundits, and you’re shocked at how… Not how hard it is for them to project their voice but just how much it’s a struggle at times for them to pull together a coherent sentence. Obviously um, and I’ve just said an ‘um’ there myself so, that’s for the bleeper reel! But I think one of these things, as I’ve said to people is, look you can speak slower, that’s not a problem, it gives you a little bit more clarity but at the same time don’t drone. It’s one of these things that a podcast is best with–there’s nothing wrong with people having a couple of notes in front of them. It’s not like doing a speech to a crowd or a speech to video, where people can tell you’re reading off a crib sheet. A crib sheet can just help to keep the brain flowing but the one thing I think with a podcast that people always do have to remember is, like a speech, it’s better to be short than long. Lots of people think that a long podcast, you know, the length gives them the quality; I don’t think so. I think six, seven minutes on one topic is all most people are willing to listen on and if it’s interesting enough they’ll come back for more on that topic. If it’s not been to their particular taste then it’s something that they can go, well it was only six minutes it’s no big waste of time. I know a couple of banks out there are doing forty-five minute podcasts and very few people I’ve spoken to make it all the way through. They’re kind of just going as far as ten, fifteen minutes and then giving up the ghost on it, which is a shame for the content in the other part of the show. Whereas if they broke that forty minutes into four, ten minute chunks or eight, five minute chunks, it works a lot better. Brief is better and again, what people have to remember after that is, like a website it’s out there for all eternity. It’s one thing for companies to advise, especially PR. PR companies who aren’t as briefed in the corporate environment as Beattie and other big firms can sometimes; say just go out there and say something shocking to get the publicity.

DB Hmm.

CM But the danger there now is you can say something shocking, you can do the podcast on it but five, ten years down the line it may just come back to haunt you because these things are out there now and they’re out there for good. It’s not so much a case of the horse has bolted; the horse is long gone on a plane and docked with the ISS.

DB (Laughter).

CM And is never coming back to your house. So it’s there, you’ve got to be very careful of these things. Someone said to me once, and so I’m assuming it’s an old saying; don’t say anything on the web that you wouldn’t want your mother to hear you say.

DB (Laughter)

CM And I think for about ninety percent of cases that may well be the case. The other ten percent is don’t say anything you wouldn’t want a prospective job employer to hear you say.

DB Hmm-hmm.

CM And that ranks obviously from people at my level to corporate CEOs because you never know whom will go looking to find out information about you, especially nowadays when it’s more common for companies who are either hiring another company or a person, they will go to Google to see what information they can find on them. Obviously, search engines get more sophisticated. If there are podcasts as well, people will go and listen to the podcasts.

DB Hmm-hmm.

CM To see. I know for example some newspapers have seen emails and heard podcasts of people moaning about the media and it’s been enough to stop them getting job interviews, which is a bit of a shame but it’s one of these things that will become more and more of a problem as we move forward.

DB Right.

CM And I kind of drifted away there but I think one thing that may affect companies from a press point of view on, is that you’ll see companies perhaps criticising a competitor. This will have a knock on effect in that say, PR company ABC represents a bank and another bank may take the huff with ABC purely because they’ve been involved with a podcast and seen the competition be criticised. This may lead to a more neutral stance and more neutral opinions being put out there, which may not make for such great copy but it’ll shoot down the sensationalism in the long term.

DB Hmm-hmm.

CM Which may take some of the fun out of the game.

DB Blogging and podcasts, obviously they are still options available for businesses to actually have more of a personal voice in the corporate world. Would you? You’ve mentioned there, there’s a little bit of an issue potentially for someone to actually voice their own personal opinion within a blog, so would you tend to actually advise companies to allow their—all their managers to have their own blog within the company, or is that a dangerous route to go down?

CM I think it’s a tricky one because on the one hand, it’s nice if people can see what a company’s doing and one thing I’ve said to people before joining Beattie who have wanted to set up blogs in medium sized companies is, that’s fine if you’ve got something to offer. If you’ve got twenty-five middle managers who all just want to put a blog out so they can say they’ve got a blog, then it’s useless. Two reasons for that are, any good message in there gets diluted because there’s twenty-five people doing it and also a lot of those people will just do it for a couple of weeks and then lose interest when they discover they’re not internet superstars.

DB Hmm.

CM A sort of tertiary spin off of that is the fact that some may not like the fact that the comment section can have on all sorts said about you. Most people set blogs up either to present facts or to be loved and quite often if you set one up to be loved, the downside is that people may come back with responses you certainly don’t want.

DB Hmm-hmm.

CM But it’s something. A company can still do it. I was still advised, if a company wants to show a little bit of behind the scenes, or if they have someone with strong and interesting opinions, I would still advocate that they should do it but, and this is where you’ll see the obvious flaw in the argument here; everyone’s blog should be read from a PR point of view or from an internal perspective before it’s sent out on release, just in case there is something contentious, controversial or legally risky. The problem that has with the blog culture is that it goes against the spirit of just logging into Blogger or Type Pad and sending it away; you know, jotting down your thoughts, quick blog and it’s done. That doesn’t happen as easily with, if it has to be approved by someone else in a corporate process.

DB Hmm. You mentioned Blogger there actually. Does that mean that you actually have more experience with corporate environments using an outsource blogging tool, rather than actually having their own blogging software on their own website?

CM What I’ve found so far is that most companies like to outsource at the beginning and if there’s a benefit to it, they can turn round and see the benefit, then they may buy in. But at first when they’re dipping their toes, most companies I’ve got experience of like to do it in a more cost effective way and obviously, for every company, the less something costs the better.

DB Hmm.

CM And that’s why at first they’ll try and use free software options and then see how it goes for them.

DB Hmm-hmm. Of course that blends in with social networking to a certain extent because you can have your own blog on My Space.

CM Indeed.

DB Have you had companies that you’re aware of go down that route to actually choose that as a blogging tool?

CM A couple have asked us about it and one of our companies, RetroFest has set up a MySpace and because. That’s a music festival and obviously, that’s a great retro music festival to be. One thing I think, anyone setting up something like a My Space site has to look at is making sure they do it properly. Make sure it’s not just about providing links and text anymore, you have to have the video there. You have to have the music there and to do that for a lot of things you need to make sure you’ve got the copyrights. From a corporate point of view it’s obviously for 24 year old’s just setting up a My Space for a bit of fun, linking to music they like, it’s fine, you know, more power to them. But sometimes from a corporate point of view you’ve just got to make sure you have approval for all of this stuff because you may be doing a festival on one thing and someone links to music that’s not appropriate, or an act doesn’t wish to be on MySpace.

DB Hmm-hmm.

CM I’ve heard of some bands actually like to position themselves as not being on MySpace because the MySpace audience isn’t their market and that’s perfectly fair enough, not being on MySpace and letting the world know that is every bit a PR tool, just as being on MySpace and letting the world know about it is.

DB Hmm-hmm.

CM So again it comes down to this individual fit. For smaller businesses or businesses where there’s a push on one person. For example, if Virgin was starting up now, you can bet Richard Branson would have a blog.

DB
Right.
CM
He would be everywhere, so in that sense it can be a good thing but again, the company has to make sure that it treats these things properly and gives them the respect that they deserve, in that they keep going back to them and they keep updating them. They can’t treat them just like a static thing, oh we’ll set up a MySpace page and that’s it, it doesn’t work that way. The rules are fundamentally changed in that sense.

DB
Hmm.
CM
And you’ve also obviously got to watch comments, feedback, where you’re being linked to. All of these things can be quite a big time drain resource.

DB
Hmm-hmm. And you also mentioned webcasts on your website as well. Now you know, I’ve seen webcasts for demonstrations of what a product’s about or how to do a particular function on a PC and that can be extremely effective. What are your own personal experiences with webcasts?

CM We have done a couple of trials with companies just to show them the benefits and up until recently, up until a year or so, the big problem has always been the dual dilemmas of bandwidth hosting and so on. Now in the You Tube generation that is not so much of an issue. I think that’s a fantastic thing, moving forward because it allows for good fun webcasts to be out there and obviously, at first, you remember yourself the original webcams, the resolution on them was horrendous. Now you have fantastic picture quality without it actually having to… You don’t have to log in live to see something happening and also you don’t have to download it because in a week, it’s gone.

DB Hmm.

CM Between the use of things like torrents and YouTube, a good webcast or a webcast recording can now last forever. Again, it comes back to, as you were saying, about relationships, just as it comes back to regardless of the media using, doing the delivery; you have to have good content. Ultimately, the content still drives everything else.

DB Hmm.

CM I know some people, and there’s obviously those who say the medium is the message. The medium can be part of the message but it’s not the be all, the content is still the message.

DB Hmm. Even if it’s an audio message, if it’s a pictorial message, you’ve still got to actually demonstrate quality in that you’re actually offering the readers, the listeners, something of value, certainly.

CM Indeed, and it doesn’t always have to be. For a lot of companies at first, I think there was this worry about, what are we giving them and I think now people are realising that what they’re giving them is, for a blog or a webcast, it’s their information, it’s their expertise. I may know something that I consider run of the mill but when I’m speaking to someone about it at dinner they’ll go, oh really, that’s fascinating. If I’m speaking to say a lawyer or footballer, plumber, you know things they consider everyday and run of the mill, they tell me something I consider completely fascinating because it was something totally unknown to me. This is where PR companies more and more I think will be pushing in the next couple of years. They’ll be finding out what the knowledge is, you know, what’s the interesting thing, what’s the… It’s tied back into this idea of being a journalist, being a PR and how the division has blurred. It’s finding that nugget that makes you go, yeah, that’s what people want to see or hear.

DB Hmm.

CM That’s the punch line. This is what they want and that’s a great thing to get out there and it can be something completely ridiculous or it can be something, just an analysis of an existing law or something, or an opinion on a website but as long as the opinion is delivered interesting, and the content is interesting then you’re always onto a winner.

DB Hmm-hmm.

CM And again, instead of people just going oh, we’ve got Flash or we’ve got this, we’ve got that, I think the thing to look at is, yeah but what are you doing with it? It comes back to this idea of… It’s having the technology is nice but it’s what you’re doing with the technology that is the actual. That should be the pushing point, that should be what’s driving things forward.

DB Absolutely. I remember a couple of years ago the big thing used to be have a big Flash intro on your website.

CM Exactly.

DB And who wants to see that, certainly if you’re coming back and visiting the website four or five times you just get completely sick, fed up of it, it was incredible…

CM Exactly, and a lot of times I think they hadn’t even thought to make it optional.

DB Hmm.

CM I think one of the greatest inventions that came along was Flash, at some point was people remembered to put the HTML in for the skip button.

DB (Laughter)

CM And that was, to me that was pioneering because so many websites didn’t do it for so long.

DB Hmm.

CM Because there was this great assumption of Flash runs really fast on our machine, it runs well on our local network, brilliant but not everyone in the wider world was on a fantastically good ADSL or broadband network.

DB Hmm-hmm.

CM And so as you were saying, it clogged everybody up and that just frustrates. Quite often I’m still, I’m slightly old fashioned in the sense that I quite like to get into a site quickly and text, works wonders for that, especially if I’m out doing it over a wireless and if I’m out in the middle of nowhere using my phone as my modem. But it’s nice to have the options to then go and look at the video or download the PDS, or go and see the large JPEG designs. But text is still going to be a strong driver.

DB Hmm.

CM And I think also as companies look to expand in the next ten years and so much of the world, taking a global perspective on this, is we forget at times that not everywhere is as advanced as us. Especially if you look now to India where there’s a whole school of thought where the PC may never actually take root, it may actually be the mobile phone. The mobile phone will be the PC and on the one hand that’s a mind blowing opportunity for PR companies and marketing companies to look at. Well, how do we take our message out there, you know, you have to throw everything out. You forget the ideas of the fifteen inch monitor, you’re suddenly down to a one and a half inch monochrome screen, perhaps a colour screen if you’re lucky but the question is, how do you now take everything you’ve learned and condense it into that one screen to get people’s attention.

DB Hmm-hmm.

CM I think that the opportunity’s there and the global perspectives are immense and it will be really interesting to see what happens. I think there—to also tie into what you were saying earlier–what could the next big thing be? Obviously we’ve discussed what it could be for the web and on screens and I said, part of the excitement is I’m not really sure. But I think there will be more and more looks at what can be done with mobiles and it won’t just be here’s a flashy graphic, here’s a screen of text. I think an area now where the technology is so cute and so advanced, and cute may sound patronising but I don’t think it is because there’s been a push that way in recent years. I think especially with the likes of something like the iPhone that’s coming out and the new large screen touch screens. It will be interesting to see how companies adapt round these to get their message out there and again, how they interact with each other.

DB Hmm. It’s certainly incredible. The onset of mobile phones to a certain degree are encouraging the use of text again, really on websites. I remember having a conversation the other day with a chap called Shawn Collins and he was saying that he is aware of someone who uses the Web 2.0 Social Book Marking / Social Networking website called Twitter.com, I’m not sure if you’ve heard of that website?

CM Yeah, absolutely, yeah.

DB And all they do is they type in two lines of text about a book per day and a link to the book on Amazon and they’re making a full-time income just out of affiliate commission out of doing that. So, it’s incredible the opportunities out there for companies in the future and it’s just about harnessing them and trying to actually think with a vision of what actually is possible.

CM Hmm-hmm. I think one thing as well that companies have to remember is that they have to have a good opinion on something. People read a bland website once, perhaps twice but if there’s something interesting there people will come back to it. If someone’s got an interesting website and they also say for example, I read Football Incorporated by Craig McGill and the Amazon links there, they will click onto it and it’s fantastic, and I just say the benefits are there so that companies can actually make money out of this.

DB Hmm. It’s all about strategic thinking more than marketing really. Marketing’s evolving and really becoming part of the main general management function as opposed to just as some kind of small ad hoc function that’s not really part of the centre of the management of the business.

CM Yeah, I think in one sense, just as in the late 80s IT was seen as its own thing, it was the beast in the basement that no one spoke about but then throughout the 90s and now into obviously the early 2000s, we have seen the rise of the IT Department and to the extent that the Chief Information Officer is now a respected place on the board.

DB Hmm.

CM And there’s now nothing… I believe there was a survey in the Economist about six weeks ago and it pointed out there was nothing to stop Chief Information Officers now rising to the top positions in a corporation whereas, if you’d suggested that fifteen years ago, you would have been laughed out of town because these things only ever happen to the top sales, or the top economists or the top analysists.

DB Hmm-hmm.

CM But now that the CIO position is strongly embedded and I think over the next fifteen years, as we see this distilling of how to get a message out there and as you say, the incorporation of the marketing and also to expand that a little–the marketing and the press sides of it. There will be nothing to stop companies promoting the Chief, Marketing Chief, PR types into the very, very top senior positions. Obviously, they’ll have to have a grasp of the whole company but at the same time whereas in the mid-80s if you’d said a PR strategist or a marketing strategist would rise to the top ranks, you’d have been laughed out of town. Now I think we’re seeing areas where it could quite easily happen.

DB Hmm-hmm.

CM And I think it’s a good thing–sorry, because you’ll see that companies won’t, will always be aware to an extent of what’s happening. They’ll be aware of the larger zeitgeist for properties that need that sort of thing.

DB I was just going to ask are there any other areas of Web 2.0 that Beattie are looking at at the moment as possible areas that they can advise their clients on?

CM At the moment as I say, and especially just on the back of this conversation pushing it more to me, we’re already in chats with a number of them about blogs and saying here’s what you do–but also be aware of here’s your time commitment and we’re also. Once we’ve finished that we’re going to push more of this aspect of the RSS feed but one thing a couple of companies I’ve noticed, not necessarily Beattie clients but I notice a lot of companies still don’t do this is they don’t have their press releases on their own website. And I think that in this day and age that’s a fundamental error for many because it means that you’re losing out on all those cross-references from the Google hits. From the search engine spiders going and pulling all that back, so that every time for example, if someone went to look at RetroFest, they also see Beattie Communications and the link is there and obviously from our point of view, that means that if someone says, I was really impressed with what Beattie Communications was what the PR company for RetroFest did. I’m not sure who it is, the type on Retro Fest, Beattie comes up on the front page, they know, ah brilliant it’s Beattie Communications; I’ll get in touch with Craig McGill. That’s what I think a lot of companies have to start looking at because storage is pennies these days, it’s not a problem to store a text file and that’s what we’re looking at. Again, each client, we don’t have a blanket this fits every customer policy, that would be to do them all a disservice. What we’re doing with each of them is saying, here’s what works, a podcast will work for you but it won’t work for you. A blog will work nicely for you, an RSS feed is good for you and for companies… What we are advising though is most companies need to have something on the web, they need to have some form of presence because nowadays a lot of places, if they can’t see you on the web they’re not sure if you really exist. It’s just one of those things. It’s like a phone number, it’s like a fax, it’s like having a physical office; everyone has a presence now. You don’t have to be on the likes of Second Life, or Crime Sponsor Buildings and World of Warcraft, or any of the large mass of multi online games but you do need to be seen somewhere on the web. Preferably under your own website and that’s what we’re. We’re just making sure. With our customers we like to make sure that the content is there and that what each of them has is something focussed and specific to them.

DB So do you suggest writing slightly differently for the web as opposed to hard copy?

CM I think it depends on the client’s needs, for example, Don Construction have been an incredibly open company when it comes to grasping the possibilities of the web and the internet. They like their press releases on the web to be a little more informal and that’s just one of the things because they’ve done studies that show a lot of the time, people looking at their websites are either staff or clients. So instead of the very informal Don are doing this, Don are doing that, they treat it a little and say “we are doing this”, which may not seem like a big change but it’s enough of a change that they have found people like to read it that way. It makes the atmosphere more friendly, more cosy.

DB Hmm.

CM And that’s something we can advise on. Again it’s not for very everything, ultimately, there’s always the balance of what you advise, what the client wants and sometimes if you’re not in agreement you have to. Each person persuades the other and you put your points across but it comes back down to having that good relationship in the first place.

DB Hmm. I like your point that you made about no blanket approach because it’s so frustrating for people to actually see so many different options available for them in internet marketing and the reality is even although everything will work a little bit, some will work better than others, it’s important to choose the best, the most relevant aspects of internet marketing that’s right for an individual company to choose that. But it was interesting also what you said about companies not having press releases on their own website and how it would really benefit them. Are there are any other big mistakes that you’ve seen companies make with regards to Web 2.0 PR and well, could you possibly give us an overview of other mistakes.

CM Yeah, sure. I would hate to single out any company for. There have been absolute howlers committed by many companies I think. I just said I won’t name any but the one that I think everyone online remembers just now is the great Sony PSP gaffs last year. It’s to the tail end of last year, start of this year, where they tried to promote their handheld game console the PSP and they had all these videos and lists of Guerrilla… I can see what they felt was a Guerrilla Web 2.0 website set up and it was then revealed that it was all professionals. It wasn’t just, you know, Mark from Manhattan posting up his, here’s me sitting in my bedroom playing my PSP, it was actual actors with proper directors and professionals filming and so on and it destroyed them because they were slammed for it because, it was against the whole ethos of the idea of Web 2.0 being every individual’s own user generated content. And I think to an extent Sony may just have done that because someone somewhere has said, look let’s do something Web 2.0, it will be hip, it will be cool and they never actually got the idea behind it. So that was a disaster for them. I think the biggest disaster any company can do is to embrace the concept without understanding the concept. As I say, setting up a MySpace page and then leaving it is pointless.

DB Hmm.

CM Trying to do a Guerrilla marketing, Guerrilla video making but having it done by professional teams doesn’t work either because you’ll get caught out, as Sony did in that case. The best advise would be, if you look at something you like you have to think about why you like it and what it can do for you. It’s not enough just to sit and do a presentation either to a client, or have a client say to you I want My Space, I want Second Life, I want this, I want that, I want Bebo, I want Face Book, I want to be in iTunes, I want to be in YouTube, I want all these things. You have to say well, you can have these things but why do you want them and what’s the benefit because just as. If you do it right people will praise you and the positive effect of that is obvious. If you do it wrong or go to the wrong place, it’s like your uncle dancing to Michael Jackson or Justine Timberlake at the family wedding. The best word for it is naff. It’s just, no one likes it, you just look silly and you just. The company gets derided at all levels and no one’s a winner and again, because once it’s out there, it’s out there. You know

DB Hmm-hmm.

MC Sony would love all of that stuff to be away. They may have pulled the website down and so on but it’s all there somewhere, it’s all cached on a couple of machines. The embarrassing videos are sitting there on YouTube. So that’s the one big piece of advice, is just think it through and always think of what’s the worst-case scenario. Think it through, think what the worse case scenario is and understand what you’re doing and why you’re doing it because one thing that’s equally important here, it’s not just working out about where you want to be for a client or a company. It’s equally important where you don’t want to be, you know, just as there are companies that would love to be in the Daily Sport, there are companies that would be horrified to be in the Daily Sport and they have to think of it that way. It’s all about your positioning.

DB Excellent advice there. I love what you said about think of the why, think of the benefit, brainstorm beforehand, you know and have a real strategic approach to internet marketing certainly. So do you reckon there are some PR firms in danger over the next few years because they aren’t up to speed with current internet marketing trends?

CM I would like to think so because obviously you don’t want any company to have the monopoly in this. Someone being creative at another PR company is good for me because it pushes me on and me being creative here is good elsewhere because it pushes them on and ultimately, clients benefit so the customer benefits. Everyone wins in a creative industry if we’re all pushing ourselves. I think what will happen over perhaps the next five years or so is you’ll see some companies realising that they may not have the best grasp on, as I’ve jokingly started telling you on all the inter web techniques. You know you may not have the best grasp of Web 2.0 and so on and what they may decide is just to focus on what they do well.

DB Hmm.

CM They may just say we’re good at getting it into print and on occasional websites but that’s it, we don’t do anything else. If you want advice on things like Bebo, RSS, you know, Multi Media Stunts or ways to incorporate the company with the website and vice versa and diversify that out into real world items, then fine we can advise you on companies to go to for that but we do print and we do it well and that’s what we’ll tell you to do. Because quite often if a company does that they will retain the business because they’ll be appreciated for their honesty. So I think what you may see is that there may be a blip in a couple of years as companies sort of go, oh, we’re not doing everything but then the smart ones will realise well, perhaps we don’t have to do everything, let’s just concentrate on our friends. Porsche don’t make airplanes, well I’m hoping, they don’t know that I’ve said that. Porsche certainly, last I checked Porsche certainly don’t make pickup trucks.

DB (Laughter).

CM So Porsche don’t feel that need to be everything to everyone on the road and similarly, I think you’ll see PR and Marketing companies realising no… Some of them will have the big staff to do everything and some of them won’t and some of the smaller ones may go under but hopefully, most of them will realise, well hang on, let’s just stick to our strengths. Let’s be good at what we’re good at.

DB That’s interesting, really interesting. In relation to that actually, the last I checked, Bebo was actually more popular than MySpace in the UK and also had quite a few more business type people using the website so there’s no point in social networking being a bit-part player on two sites. If the UK’s your market place, if your company then perhaps Bebo’s the place to be in, maybe even forget about My Space but just become very, very good in one genre of internet marketing and that…

CM Yeah.

DB Could lead to much greater success.

CM Exactly. It’s the old argument of if you take an hour, just as an example, you could spend five minutes doing twelve different things, everything getting five minutes within that hour, or you can spend ten minutes doing six different things, which is a bit better, or you can spend fifteen minutes doing four things. It depends, you can scatter gun or you can be a bit more focussed. Because the obvious comparison, there is a short gun of laser, one goes wide, one’s very narrow and you’ll get the benefits from that. Now if you just spend five minutes throwing stuff up onto every site possible you may not get the best benefits of. No if you’re just spending a bit more time and being a bit more selective.

DB So in summary think of your why, think of your own benefits, brainstorm, be strategic and then go for it but then go for it methodically with a certain end in mind?

CM And preferably do it through Beattie Communications.

DB (Laughter).

CM But I obviously would say that (laughter).

DB Absolutely, absolutely. I’ll tell you what, do you want to finish off by giving some contact details so people could get in touch with you if they’d like to.

CM Certainly. If anyone wants to discuss their online strategy and how they can tie it into an offline strategy, I’m more than happy to talk to them and probably the best way to reach me is on email at craig.mcgill@beattiegroup.com.

DB Excellent stuff, I really appreciate you joining me today. Thank you very much.