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.

Online PR guru, Fernando Rizo, was speaking on how to sell ‘digital’ to clients. (he was destined to become some sort of guru with a name like that!).

His main point was that, thanks to the internet, mass communication was no longer the preserver of the media – everyone is now in the broadcasting business and that has fundamentally changed how PR works.

(That’s probably a poor summary so judge for yourself – video of his full presentation can be found here:  http://bit.ly/3ADvb4 )

He also underlined what many of us have already worked out – that PR has become conversational. Rather than issuing press releases it is about listening to, and then joining, online conversations.

To use Fernando’s words: PR consultants used to spend most of their day writing, now they need to spend most of the day reading.
Many of our local Birmingham PR firms are trying to get to grips with this ‘digital’ thing. Most have worked out how to put their client’s press releases on blog sites and tweet them to their journalist followers.

But that isn’t joining the conversation – especially when they invariably turn off the ability to leave comments.

A press release and a blog post are entirely different animals.

Fundamentally online content only becomes a blog when comments are not only allowed, but activity solicited.

For me, to qualify as a blog a post needs to contain hyperlinks (words underlined in blue) to background content too.

But most importantly, unlike a dry press release, which is usually the voice of an organisation, a blog needs to be a personal opinion. When people get to know a good blogger they trust their opinion far more than they ever will a corporate press release.

In fact, the biggest mistake business bloggers (and their PRs) make is to treat their blog as an online press centre and damage that personal trust.

Press centres and press releases are for feeding stories to the media, a blog is for communicating with your audience directly.

Since last August, Mr Murdoch has been threatening to charge for access to The Sun and Times Online by erecting a so-called ‘paywall’ around the online versions of his publications.

Read: Simon Heath’s blog Murdoch on the defensive (6/08/2009) for background.

So why has he not done so yet?

The question is – given so many free alternatives, the BBC and Google News for instance, will people stump up the cash? Even Mr Murdoch is not sure of the answer.

The likely scenario is that if a paywall goes up, no one will visit the sites and advertisers, the major source of News Corps’s revenue, will go elsewhere.

The crux of the matter is this: old-fashioned newspaper moguls are used to having their cake and eating it.

Back in Jurassic era, they could monetise news and monetise audiences at the same time. They charged their subscribers for content then sold them, or at least their attention, to advertisers.

The industry blames tight consumers for not wanting to pay for “quality” journalism, but perhaps they have just wised up to this double wammy.

I personally think paying £30 a month for Sky Sports to watch England play cricket is a bit steep. But then to be subjected to an advert between every over is taking the mickey.

Murdoch understandably hates the BBC because they don’t have to make this choice between subscribers and advertisers. They don’t need advertisers because UK law makes anyone who owns a television their subscribers.

His gripe against Google is even more understandable, they being the rather large cuckoo that has taking over his media nest. But to prevent people from finding his content via search engines would decimate traffic to his websites and devalue their advertising real-estate.

No, the only way Murdoch can safely put up a paywall and bar Google, is if all his competitors do so at the same time and that is unlikely to happen.

Related links : Anna Blackaby – Problem with great paywall of News International

Update: 19-Nov-2009

Seems Rupert hasn’t taken my advice – further plans for the Murdoch paywall have been revealed according to Brand Republic article.

However, how many people do you know would be prepared to pay £1 a day to access the Times Website ?

Who are you going to call?

Well, if you can’t get hold of Ghostbusters, there is always Wragge & Co!

The leading Birmingham law firm has setup a Cyber Tracing team to bring those heinous bloggers, who are hiding behind the anonymity of electronic communication, to justice.

Using their special powers, sorry, I mean UK legislation, to force ISPs to handover the real names behind the anonymous blogging accounts.

Well, if that sounds too expensive, you can always take the PR approach to online reputation management.

Most sensible people will always take a ranting blogger with a pinch of salt and if they are posting anonymously their credibility will be especially low.

Of course some bloggers are incredibly influential and cannot be ignored.

We can assess the influence of a blogger in many ways. The number of readers he/she has. Our the number of comments and contributors to their blog and perhaps most importantly the number of people linking to it.

If the latter is high, their blog might start to appear at the top of Google when people are searching for you – then it’s time to act.

Now let’s assume defamation has occurred. If they are telling the truth, better apologise and promise to do better in the future. However, unlike traditional media, inaccuracies can be corrected.

Leave a comment on the blog, pointing out the mistakes or offering a rebuttal wont require a visit to court.  Many bloggers will edit or update their post in the light of new information.

If you regard a blog as the start of a discussion or the beginning of a conversation, rather than a published work, suing under defamation laws seems less appropriate.

However, if a blogger refuses to publish your side of the conversation, perhaps it is time to call the team at Wragges!

Be warned, though, true online anonymity isn’t that hard to achieve, unless Wragges know something the serious crime squad and the anti-terrorism people at MI5 don’t.

And let’s not forget that, despite its many misuses, online anonymity is usually regarded as a good thing – ask anyone who lives in Iran for instance.

No one hates jargon more than me.  But I have to tell you about my new best friend -Social Influence Marketing, or SIM for short.

It is always good to be present at the birth of a new marketing acronym, so I thought I’d invite you along to wet its head.

If you believe the hype, SIM is a whole new way of marketing online, engaging consumers in their worlds’ and in their languages. You and I might call it ‘online PR’ but that might be doing it an injustice.

When you tell people you’re into ‘on-line PR’, they think they know what you mean.

The basic PR premise is that editorial is more powerful than advertising, getting people to recommend you is better than recommending yourself.

This premise still works online, if you’re simply focusing on the blogosphere.  You are now targeting an army of citizen journalist (bloggers) instead of real ones and your audience is always listening, not just periodically reading selected publications.

However, given the advent of social media (the dreaded ‘S&M’ words had to come out sooner rather than later) bloggers are no longer the most important influencers online.

Individual bloggers, especially if they are professional journalists are undoubtedly key influencers, especially if they have offline credentials, but there’s an even more powerful collective – the social and business networkers.

You can’t target them with press releases whatever digital mechanism you use. You can’t invite them all on a press trip and send them free goodies to review. You can’t charm them into saying nice things about your brand for the price of lunch at Simpsons.

You have to join their communities, listen to their conversations and become a trusted presence in their world, speaking their language and sticking to their agenda.

You might want to get some help with this, lest you end up looking like the social media equivalent of your dad dancing.

SIM is the clever way of building brand engagement online and it is a lot more subtle than the term ‘online PR’ suggests. It therefore deserves a better name and mercifully I’ve now found one. Online PR is dead: long live Social Influence Marketing.

Well it is true that for every blog worth reading, there are a myriad of drivelling diatribes that are simply a waste of good electrons.

The growth of blogging as quasi-intellectual pastime has almost been its downfall.

But while housewives blogging from farmhouses in Cumbria are still being discovered and offered book deals, its popularity will not wane.

I did it the other way round. I had a newspaper column and then became a blogger, which is not uncommon for a proper NUJ card carrying journalist too. Either to expose their original words before editorial control, or extend their life beyond next day’s chip carrying duties.

So if they and other respected bloggers write about your company and products, consumers will be influenced and as any PR will tell you, editorial coverage is a thousand times more potent than advertorial.

But marketers can make hay even from the most drivelling, mind numbingly boring blog too, even if their readership amount to no more than one, thanks to Google’s appetite for text.

No matter how self delusional, uninspiring and pointless a blog is, if it contains words that look like they are vaguely associated in English sentences, Google’s indexing robots will attentively analysis them.  And you can’t bore a robot.

Robots can’t distinguish between a JK Rowling and an undergraduate having ‘meaning of life problems’ at Ohio State either, and should either contain a link to your websites they will count with equal weight

And the more links Google finds to your site, the higher it will rank it in search results.

If in offline ‘there is no such thing as bad publicity’ then in online ‘there is no such thing as a bad link’.  Ironically, even bloggers maligning your company will boost your Google rankings!

But this assumes your site is more worthy of visiting than that of the blogger.

Brands with poorly built, search engine unfriendly sites can be eclipsed by the bloggers’ sites themselves. A classic recent example is River Island, whose site came below an agency blog describing how it would have built a better site for River Island than the people chosen for the task.

The site was built entirely in Flash and hence totally invisible to search engines and did not comply with accessibility laws too boot. All this was rather publicly exposed when the blog moved to the top of Google for the search term “River Island”.

If you type your own brand name into Google, you really should expect your own site to come out top.

Let this be a warning to those that still doubt the power of the blogopshere.