Well in the case of a Facebook fan page this can literally be true!

Read my latest Birmingham Post column to find out why.

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.

The Brindleyplace-based consultancy has been commissioned to conduct research and devise a social media strategy for the University Hospitals Birmingham. The aim is to engage with users of the newly opened Queen Elizabeth super hospital in Selly Oak, and to keep Birmingham citizens informed as services, such as A&E, are migrated to the new building.

Alcester-based Helping Hands Home Care, which provides live-in carers for the elderly and disabled around the UK, has also turned to Friend to help it promote its services. Those responsible for making the decisions on care for their relatives are increasingly looking to social networks for help and advice on looking after their loved ones.

Chris Tomlinson, director and co-founder of Friend, said: “Over the last year Friend has gained a great deal of experience in finding relevant online communities and helping organisations engage with their key influencers to turn them into advocates on social networks.

“The continued growth of our client list is proof that social media is now an established marketing channel and, increasingly, a first choice marketing tool.”

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.

It’s a well-known fact that during austere times, the sillier or more self-deluding your job title is, the more likely you are to be made redundant.

Post-recession, the new boy on the marketing job title block is: ’social media manager’

But is this is a silly job title or not ?

Read Chris Tomlinson’s article about flamboyant job titles in last Thursday’s Birmingham Post

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.

The past year has literally flown by, full of the thrills and spills you’d expect from starting a small consultancy specialising in a relatively ‘niche’ area like social media and in the middle of a recession!

But life, and business, are about taking risks – and the risk paid off!

The fact is that social media marketing should not be sidelined as “niche”.

It has the potential for ROI like any other marketing discipline – and this has been our most consistent finding over the last 12 months.

For our clients, it’s been about understanding what social media can do by exploring its specific potential for their businesses.

Importantly, understanding where social media fits into a marketing strategy, its role alongside other marketing disciplines and how best to execute and measure it is crucial to its success.

And putting it simply, this is what Friend does.

Our experience over the past 20 years in both traditional and digital marketing means that we have been able to help many clients truly understand social media and its potential for their organisation, in both B2C and B2B arenas.

In the past twelve months, we have helped a range of clients and agencies navigate the social media landscape.

Our clients include:

• NHS
• Nynas Oil / European Road Initiative
• Property Match
• Argent / Brindleyplace
• Masshouse Developments
• Rider Levett Bucknall
• Huntingdonshire County Council
• Gas Street Works
• University College Birmingham

We have also helped lots of marketing and PR agencies with digital marketing and social media research, strategy and training.

So we’re chuffed and, in true social media style, thought we’d share!

Find out more about our social media and online PR services.

Everything online will become a “location-based service” with users not just wanting the best matching results to their searches, but “nearby results” too.

Read Chris Tomlinson’s latest musing on the subject in this weeks Birmingham Post

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.