Like most people I spend a good deal of my time trying to avoid getting on and removing myself from marketing databases and failing miserably.

For instance, I once foolishly bought a ticket to Villa Park online. I now get regular Christmas cards from The Villa despite being a Hull fan! Which frankly is an unwelcome reminder of the 0-3 defeat we suffered that day.

I take great pleasure in being rude to telesales people too. I like to explain just how low down on the food chain they are and give them career advice about contributing positively to society rather than doing the evil work of a brand that are paying them a pittance in order to interrupt my dinner.

The UK’s Direct Marketing Association (DMA) will tell you that when done “properly” DM is a cost effective way of generating business and that it is their mission to “protect the consumer” from unethical, unscrupulous or ignorant practitioners, which is all very noble.

However, email, with it’s near zero delivery cost, has presented the perfect DM channel and it is just those sorts of people who have moved in – or ’spammers’ as they are now known.

Interestingly, the law says that before you can send a person a commercial email, they need to have given you explicit permission (opt-in). In my case that would be when I accidentally ticked the wrong box during an online purchase.

However, offline the opt-out rule still applied. That’s where consumers have the right to tell brands to stop bothering them. Which, assuming legislation mirrors the people’s wishes, suggests we are all less tolerant of online DM than offline DM campaigns.

But as any professional direct marketer will tell you, permission-based databases, accurate targeting and above all personalisation will always be the critical factors to DM success, on or offline, not the machine gun approach of the spammer.

These days consumers under 25 communicate more via social networks than email and social media is set to be the dominant online channel. Thanks to its viral distribution potential the rewards of marketing via social media can be immense.

However, the chances of collateral brand damage from a clumsy direct marketing approach is also increased with empowered consumers able to extract social media revenge.

So DM will have to become subtler, if it is to make hay in a world becoming very resistant to crude commercial messages.

The good news for DM is that targeting can be more accurate given the wealth of personal information social networkers make available, yet ‘databases’ cannot be bought. Brands have to create their own, by building fans and followers for example, which will take time and resource.

Despite the DMA’s efforts, for me the term “Direct Marketing” has been tarnished, as so many amateurs have deployed it in an unprofessional way.

Perhaps it needs rebranding but it will definitely need to become a lot less annoying if it is to prosper as a marketing discipline in this digital age.

Once again, I woke up this morning to the fat opera singer, belting out that annoying jingle. The wife’s insistence on watching Sky News, at an inhumanly early hour, means I’m bombarded with ads before I’ve even had a cup of tea!

So instead of getting mad, I’m going to exact social-media-revenge on the insurance price comparison site by telling you that I was thanking my unlucky stars the last time I went to GoCompare.com.

The insurance firm that appeared at the top of their results page reneged on the quote that got them there, then hassled me by phone with hard sell. Ah – now that feels much better. So, on to the main point of this blog. I wonder how many of us after the World Cup, will be driving a Hyundai, drinking Lucozade or Castrol GTX for that matter, or flying Emirates this summer?

More generally, I don’t have a cat or eat dog food and I don’t wear nappies. I seldom purchase female hygiene products and, being follically challenged, have absolutely no use for shampoo, however life enhancing it appears to be.

Don’t these brands know they are wasting their money selling to me?

More importantly don’t they know I’m not alone?

Don’ t they know we are living in the Post Advertising age?

Or the Post-Interruptive advertising age at least, where people consume media at a time and place of their choosing and filter out TV adverts both mentally and physically via DVRs and on-demand services.

Perhaps that’s why the brands that still have budgets to waste on TV are clamouring for world cup slots, as live TV events are the last bastion of this old fashioned, poorly targeted advertising model. But, given the modern consumer is a more critical, cynical and in my case irritable audience, the potential to damage a brand by annoying them has never been more real.

I, like most, would rather have seen Stevie-G’s goal against the USA than the Hyundai ad ITV-HD decided to broadcast on Saturday and will now never ever buy one. And carpet bombing news channels with a jiggle more annoying than a stadium full of vuvuzelas is never going to turn me into an advocate.

I can help but think that if Sky add three celebrity judges, a premium rate phone vote and put on a ‘results’ show, an hour later to remove the worst ‘candidate’ from the next debate- they could have a seriously good game show on their hands!

Admittedly the studio audiences are not allowed to heckle or clap, but the x-factor-meets-blind-date format is starting to disturbing me.

Judging by the subsequent plethora of posts on PR agency blogs after each debate, the election will be won and lost on the best performer in these debates.

But judging the acts, sorry I mean ‘priministerial candidate’ on how well they listened to their PR trainers is not a good way of choosing a government.

We all seem to be obsessed with discussing this charisma contest rather than the future of the country – perhaps that is because it is too hard.

Old media has long since turned elections into personal popularity polls, where the personality of the candidates and how good looking their wife is, seems to become more important factors than the policies of their parties.

Meanwhile the real political debate is happening in social media. Follow the tag #leadersdebate on Twitter before, during and after the final debate and you’ll see real enguagment and quite a few expletives too!

During last nights show alone, 117 thousand live comments were tweeted featuring the above hash tag  (source @Tweetminster).

And a real debate – i.e with more than the half dozen carefully fielded questions and only three people allowed to speak – is happening on Facebook too, but not on the parties official pages.

The Conservatives seem to be winning the Facebook war, with 53K fans to their official page, the LibDems close behind with 50K and Labour languishing with a megur 27K ( as of 22/4/2010).

It is worth visiting these pages just to see which of your friends’ mugs appear as fans divulging their political persuasion. Note: I have become a fan of all three parties while researching this blog – in case you see mine.

However, in true X-factor style the ‘We got Rage Against the Machine to #1, we can get the LibDems into office!” unofficial discussion group out trumps them all with 134K members so far, where a lively pro Nick Clegg debate is raging.

However, given that the original RATM campaign gained 500K+ followers you could say that more people cared about getting Simon Cowell off the Xmas #1 spot than getting Nick Clegg into number 10! Which is an interesting measure of the nations interest in the election outcome

(More election fun can be found at Facebook’s own ‘Democracy UK’ page where there is even an App to help you decide whom to vote for!)

With UK electoral turnouts on the decline, some argue that the TV debate will improved the population’s engagement with the political process and records turns will result on election day.

But if they are voting on superficial style, not policy, this will be a hollow victory for UK democracy.

But the government was never going to win on this one.

If you’re in the digital creative business you’re naturally going to have anti-establishment tendencies; this is a digital revolution after all.

And if you profess to be one of the revolution’s “thought leaders”, it seems that the more radical your views on what the digital economy needed from the bill, the higher the regard from your peers.

But when Lord Carter came to Birmingham last June and spoke to a room full of such people about his Digital Britain report (the forerunner to the Bill), I thought he gave a good account of himself.

The report and the discussion covered the vast spectrum of issues lumped under the ‘digital’ banner. Everything from solving the growing bandwidth divide between poor and wealthy and the illegal download problem, to the role of our publicly funded broadcaster.

In my opinion, this hopelessly wide scope created an impossible task for Lord Carter. So I was not surprised that the resulting Bill contained extensive measures to help stop illegal downloading and little else!

The most draconian measure, or so it seems to the digital community, is the removal of a perpetrator’s broadband connection – but only after a few stiff letters have been sent.

Which seems rather ironic, as Carter’s report identified high-speed net access as a human right in the 21^St century!

ISPs are also critical of the Bill because, basically, they don’t want the bother of trying to implement it. They know that online anonymity is never going to be hard to find for people intent on breaking the law and at best they will catch a few gullible kids.

Creators of digital content need to find other ways to remunerate their endeavours. For instance the film industry has discovered that 3D can counter piracy by creating an experience that cannot be replicated at home (yet!).

Musicians can make money on merchandising and live concerts, and games providers through online subscriptions to hosted multi-user features.

They have to find innovative ways to be rewarded for their creativity in this new environment, rather than relying on copyright laws from a pre-digital era.

It is very easy to criticise the Bill, without offering any alternative, but my suggestion would be to have no Bill at all!  Online piracy is not a problem that can be solved by legislation.

Last week I had an encounter with ageism. This is not unusual in social media circles but for the first time, at work at least, it was aimed at me.

While introducing myself as the presenter of a social media training course, one of the attendees mused that he was expecting someone “considerably younger” than me to be doing the training!

Now its true, I’m no spring chicken and time hasn’t been particularly kind to my face, but age does not preclude a person from understanding social media.

Or even participating in social networking, as I’m about to prove.

Lets assume old is aged 45 and over (obviously I’m considerably younger than that). Well, according to the latest social networking demographic report 40% of Facebook users are over 45!  Here are the figures for the other popular sites:

YouTube:  45% of users are over 35
Facebook: 40% of users are over 45
Twitter:     63% of users are over 35
LinkedIn:  48% of users are over 45
MySpace:  28% of users are over 45

Of course we are assuming no one’s been lying. After all one of the main advantage of online socialising is that no needs to know exactly how old you actually are, unless you tell them.

As you can see, it is just about true that MySpace is still for the kids and LinkedIn is for the infirm, but YouTube and Facebook has now been infiltrated by the silver surfers.

I remember, when email was the preserve of the youth (OK , I am over 45). Now it’s a mandatory communications channel for everyone between the ages of 10 and dead.

As technology matures it will, like its users, gain a middle age spread.

My sarcastic student was only joking and wasn’t that much younger than me. He, after all, had signed up for a social media training course rather than being of an age where its benefits were inherent.

Having spent much of my early working life trying to convince crusty business people that online should be taken seriously as a marketing channel I found his comments ironic.

My much fresher face and its implied inexperience was a barrier to credibility then but now the older version was a liability too!

But ageists and marketers need to take note; the inhabitance of social networks may not be as youthful as you might think.

Now, I’ve finally got my LinkedIn status hooked up to my Twitter feed, my blog posting to my Facebook page and can just about monitor everything from my phone.

The last thing I’m inclined to do right now is join another time consuming social network!

Before I got my current collection under control, I barely had time to check my email and when I did it was full of mail from my social networks, alerting me to new activity forcing me to return.

Even with its 146 million captive Gmail users, Google has its work cut out if it is to get enough people using Buzz to make it worth my while.

Google tried before with a social network called Orkut, but failed to make it a global success – so why are they having another go?

Well Google is under attack from the social networks on two fronts.

Firstly, Google sells adverting space and as consumers spend increasing amounts of time on social networking sites advertising budgets are migrating there too.

Secondly, people are increasingly using their social networks to communicate instead of email. Mostly because they want to talk about content and social networks are designed to associate content with conversation.

Facebook is rumored to be upgrading its messaging system to be more email like. The project is code named Titan. Some are calling Titan the “Gmail killer”, which is why Google might be worried.

This also explains why Google has integrated Buzz with other popular networks, like Twitter, Flickr and its own blog site eblogger, but not the more popular Facebook!

Increasingly people are keeping a traditional email address for their professional lives, for colleges and customers, but conducting their personal communication via social networks.

Whether future generations of net citizens want their main email integrated with their social networks or, as Google hopes, the other way round is yet to be seen.

Considering it is the largest media owner in the world, Google is very bad at communicating with its users – which, lets face it, is most of us.

Back in December Google slipped Personalised Search into our lives, but few peopled noticed.

Google is always fiddling, or ‘refining’ as it calls it, with its algorithm, the one that determined which sites we see at the top of our search results pages.

Usually you need to be a search engine optimisation (SEO) expert or a real geek to spot the changes, or follow Google’s official blog.

But now even normal people are noticing that their search engine results are becoming very different to those of other people – even when they search with the same words!

Basically, Personalised Search means that once you have visited a website, via its results pages, Google is now more likely to offer you the site again, in future search results.

Now, if you’re an advocate of personal privacy, an international terrorist, or part of an organised crime syndicate you already know that Google records you’re every move and you’ve worked out a way of turning its tracking off.

However, those of us who don’t fit into the above categories have not really been that bothered. But now that Google is using this information to choose websites for us, perhaps we should be bothered.

Fundamentally, I use a search engine to find websites I don’t already know about. I have other mechanisms for recalling websites from previous interest; bookmarks and news feeds (RSS) for instance.

And whether my own previous misjudgment in site selection is a good way of determining what sites I see in the future is highly debatable too!

You can of course turn off personalised search, but it is now on by default and few users will be aware of this or work out how to turn it off. Previously you had to be logged into iGoogle to get this ‘useful feature’ but now everyone is unwittingly lumbered with it.

This makes it very difficult to prove money spent on SEO is justified. If everyone is getting different results, how can you know your SEO is working?

Alternatively, the unsuspecting client, who visits their own website on a regular basis, might think their SEO consultant is doing an amazing job, as their site seems to turn up on every relevant search they do.

So if you’re site has suddenly become number one in Google, for your targeted keywords, but this hasn’t turned into an avalanche of website visitors – and of course you’ve read this, you will now know why.

Being presented with death and suffering, before you’ve even left the house, is a bad way to start a day, but guilt wouldn’t let me turn it off.

I then started wondering why valuable plane space was taken up, flying a Kate Adie wannabe with camera crew, to the scene of a disaster just hours after it had happened?

Did the piece-to-camera clips really need live earthquake scenes behind it?

We’ve all seen the aftermath of an earthquake before – piles of rubble and human bewilderment.

The Haitians have complained that too many US soldiers have been flown in with guns, but I’d be complaining about the army of men with cameras.

I know broadcast media help galvanise aid, but unless one of the dozens of ‘news’ videos features your family, what useful information do they actually provide?

With over 280,000 members, “Earthquake Haiti” is now the largest group on Facebook.  Let the sceptics of social networking take note: not only are people using social media to find missing loved ones, but using it as a source of on-the-ground information.

More harrowing is that by searching for #helphaiti on Twitter, you’ll find tweets of longitude and latitude with request for food and water – grim.

What finally made me turn the TV off, was when Simon Cowell appeared!

I love it when rich people want to ‘give something back’ as long as it’s not actual the money they made, and they get plenty of publicity thrown in.

I feel sorry enough for the people of Haiti, without some piece of pop pap, to induce my sympathy.  I’ll give to the cause, without getting something in return.

However social media is not immune to the words ‘band’ and ‘wagon’.

Birmingham tweeter, @stevegerrard (not the footballer), promised to donate £2 for every comment he got on his blog.  Not the most altruistic of Twitter marketing as many of the comments, now removed, pointed out!

Last week saw the blogosphere speculate that Twitter’s meteoric growth might finally be ending.

According to web monitoring company, Compete, traffic to the micro-blogging website has flat-lined, suggesting its world dominance may not be so assured.

Quantcast’s numbers told the same story. Since its peak at 29.2 million users in July09, Twitter traffic has dropped down to 23.6 million U.S. unique visitors, a loss of nearly 24%!

But before the social media sceptics start celebrating by regurgitating theories on the faddish nature of social networks and the vacuous nature of their inhabitants, it is important to know a couple of things.

Firstly, unlike other social networks, Twitter is not popular with teenagers. It is this age group that is notorious for migrating from one network to another.

Teens don’t tweet.

Possibly because it requires brevity, but more likely because it requires an understanding of what might actually be interesting to other people!

Younger users may have simply got bored with Twitter and its many shortcomings as a chat room or perhaps realised it is full of grumpy old people like me.

But those of us who don’t use it as a chat room have found increasing ways to share content, galvanise public opinion and exact social media revenge on bad customer service.

(Oh – and it’s great for slagging off the X Factor too).

Secondly, we need to remember that there are “lies, damn lies and website statistics”. A fall in traffic to Twitter’s own websites could simply mean that more tweeters have migrated to using phone and desktop applications; a sign that the Twittersphere is evolving, not retracting.

Frankly, it is the basic functionality of Twitter’s own site that leads many a debutant tweeter to give up before accumulating enough followers to make it rewarding.

We may well see the site transformed in 2010 as it is widely rumoured that this is the year that Twitter intends to monetise its success – perhaps sick of the jokes about it knowing how to spend money but not make it.

In fact, Twitter is reported to be hiring new developers to help transform the site into a commercial entity.

But stories about its negative growth won’t help this course.

However, if there are truly less people using Twitter than before, it must be because it is transforming from a place where narcissists and their voyeurs can meet, to a more credible news and opinion sharing platform.

Perhaps the Tweeters are separating from the Chavs?

But thanks to social media, I find that I’m not alone.

I hate every nauseating minute of the show. From the insipid voice over to the hackneyed ‘old spice’ music, through the endless regurgitation of clichés, that make footballers sound intelligent, right up to the gurn inducing, blart infested melodrama that is the vote.

Yes it has been a “journey” for me too Dermot.

The only way to get through it, is to follow the xfactor hash tag on Twitter for reassuringly clever sarcasm about the minute by minute happenings on the show.

(For the uninitiated – people label their tweets with a # label in order that it can be found by people like me!)

Yes there are lots of ‘Go Joe’ tweets from the mindless, but interspersed with them and the blatant advertising tweets, are funny and intelligent observations, far more entertaining than those of the bland judges.

But then I discovered the #ratm4xmas tag and found my kindred X Factor hating spirits, who are saying “no” to the cult of Simon Cowell.

The tag led me to, what is currently the most popular discussion group on Facebook,  ‘RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE FOR CHRISTMAS NO.1’ .

The idea is that by synchronized online purchases of a track called ‘Killing in the Name’ by the rather appropriately named band, ‘Rage Against the Machine’ – we can knock X Factor off the Xmas number one slot.

I’ll let others explain why X Factor is a cancer on the music industry and as I work ‘in marketing’, I’m in no position to point out the immorality of playing on the aspirations of the nations susceptible no-hopers to be rich and famous or indeed laughing at the mentally ill in the auditions.

The important thing is that, instead of shouting at the TV, I can now use social media to vent my frustration! In fact, I’m feeling much better already – proving the cathartic nature of blogging and its power to spread the word of resistance against the Karaoke King.

I don’t suppose the 20 million lemmings that like the X Factor can be beaten, and I know few of them are likely to buy ‘Killing in the Name’ for the Nan’s xmas present, but it will be fun to try.