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And now we’ve just launched our new standalone site for our Prezi training courses over at PreziTraining.co.uk.  Here’s why:

Type ‘presentation’ into Google and you’ll see Prezi pop up around number three.

Gone are the days of boring linear presentations; presentations that fail to strike a chord with your customers, clients, colleagues or even yourself. PowerPoint has served its purpose as an easy-to-use package that became industry standard for years, but the boundaries of presentation rhetoric have now been pushed.

And for good reason.

How we learn, communicate, comprehend and digest information has changed dramatically over the last few years. We have less time on our hands these days, not more, and attention spans are short. As a presenter, it’s essential to engage your audience and tell your ‘story’ effectively. CEOs, senior management, even sales and ‘ideas’ people need a slick, visually engaging tool to guide your audience seamlessly through your idea, message or narrative.

Yes, there are many presentation packages out there but none quiet as dynamic and customisable as Prezi. Prezi lets you say so much more about your work and share your ideas with ease. But how?

Whereas PowerPoint dictates your pathways in a strictly linear fashion, Prezi allows you to work on one giant canvas and direct your presentation as you would a film, with as many camera movements as you see fit. It can also be used for working collaboratively, mind-mapping or for designing diagrams.

But don’t take our word for it. Go and see numerous examples for yourself at prezi.com. And when you’re ready to use Prezi yourself,  just drop us a line here or via prezitraining.co.uk and book a training course. Your audience will thank you for it!

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Ok, I have a Facebook Page – now what? Nobody knows about it.

The short answer:

Post lots of really interesting and engaging content and people will share it with their friends.

The problem was that you couldn’t take your Page into the wider world of Facebook to talk to people.

This has changed. It’s still all about the content but Facebook now lets you use your Page (almost) as if it’s a personal profile. You can, for instance, post on another Page’s wall as your Page rather than having to use a personal profile.

So, for example, if your Page is about your Glasgow restaurant, there are dozens of other non-competing Glasgow- and food-related Pages on which you should be visible. Why? because fans of those Pages may well be interested in you. You can cross the right radars and find ready-made audiences.

There are stacks of other changes to Facebook Pages, some cosmetic and some significant. We’re planning to run an intensive two-hour course on making the most of the new Pages, including custom landing pages*. The cost is likely to be £50 (bargain!) here in our Govan cells. No dates yet but please get in touch to register your interest.

*A custom landing page is the first thing a new visitor sees when they visit your Facebook Page. It’s completely customisable and it’s a terrific opportunity to grab people’s attention and interest. If they choose to like your page, they’ll be taken straight to the wall on their next visit. Here’s an example – on which you can see our very own Chris in a decidedly dodgy shirt :)

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Which begs the question: having written 12 or more (I lost count) of these Haynes manuals, why haven’t I written a guide to social media marketing?

The answer is: for the same reason that Blether stopped offering group training in social media. Our hands-on group sessions, run in partnership with the Go Group for the past two years, were popular and rewarding. BUT if you have ten or twelve companies in a room, you have a need for ten or twelve completely different strategies. One size does not fit all. While we could cover the technical aspects of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, RSS tracking, blogging etc, and talk a lot about broad approaches to social content, we couldn’t focus on any one company’s particular needs.

So we stopped doing it. Now we only work with you on a one-to-one basis. That’s why there’s no step-by-step social media manual (at least from me).

It’s not about the tools. It starts, and ends, with the strategy – and that has to be unique.

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Great fun to shoot and edit (hey, I can do umlauts now!) and über-kudos (see?) to Ashleigh, Chris’s lovely girlfriend, for throwing herself into the role. And to Heleen Kist for finding a dress on eBay that matched the book cover.

Question is: do trailers sell books? On it’s own, a trailer probably won’t generate sales from nowhere. This ain’t no pixie dust. But as part of the wider promotional package, I think it helps. I see it in terms of competitive advantage. If a punter is in the market for a book, then all other things being equal he/she might well be lured by the one that offers a trailer – and, say, the first chapter as a free Kindle download – rather than one that doesn’t. I certainly am.

Our last trailer was for Helen FitzGerald’s Ex, published in Dutch by Ambo Anthos. I asked publicist Laura Starreveld if the trailer was doing the business:

I think the trailer definitely helped, although it’s hard to say how much it exactly did. The trailer was used in an iPad-edition of the magazine Viva, together with a prepublication. A good trailer makes the complete package more attractive. But as I said, we can’t measure it, which makes it impossible to actually prove it helped.

…which I think is spot on. We need to start tracking and evaluating the impact of trailers, giveaways, author blogs, social outreach and so forth in terms of return on investment. It’s all part of a much bigger picture in the movement towards writers taking far greater responsibility for promoting their own work.

Here’s the Ex video. I’m the guy in the white coat, not the pants.

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Digital entrepreneurs are invited to join a new £200,000 scheme aimed at helping to bring innovative UK applications and services to market. IC tomorrow, a Technology Strategy Board programme, will invest in up to 20 consumer trials across creative market sectors including Music, TV/Film, and Publishing.

We’re planning to submit one or more entries in the Publishing sector. So if you’re an author (or an agent or a publisher) and you…

• have a killer idea that could transform the world of publishing
• would be interested in collaborating

…please get in touch. We’re particularly interested in ‘disruptive’ models, especially anything that connects readers and writers more efficiently.

But be quick – the deadline is March 11th and we need to make a video as part of the application process!

Click image above for full details (PDF)

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Our advice? Three words. Change the chef.

Why? Because while we saw plenty of opportunity to get people through the door, nobody would evangelise the food. Nobody would tweet a picture of their steak. Few would come back. Some might post negative feedback.

So what of the Groupon goldrush? Tempting though it may be to offer a spectacular offer to get punters through the doors, you have to ask yourself whether they’ll come back. Are you confident that they’ll enjoy the experience sufficiently to start a relationship with you? Or are you merely servicing one-night stands?

The restaurant mentioned above was in the latter camp. Plenty of people would take advantage of a Groupon deal. Few would return for a second date. Fewer still would abandon old familiar haunts to start a lasting affair.

It’s a fabulous time to be a consumer. You’d be mad to pay full price for anything. There have never been more opportunities to shop around and play the field.

But for businesses seeking to exploit the Groupon/LivingSocial/Facebook Places Deals phenomenon, offering a one-hit wonder at below cost price isn’t going to change your life unless you convert thrill-seekers to long-term lovers.

You’ll only get once chance at that. So figure out:

• Are they going to love you?
• How are you going to keep them?

Anything less is a chocolate teapot – no use to anyone.

pic credit: Steve Way

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We need some help over the next few weeks. The role is a bit of sales, a bit of business development, and definitely a bit of everything. Is it an internship? Sort of (but paid). Will it become a full-time job? Maybe. That’s kinda up to you.

This role would probably suit a recent marketing graduate but we’re open to suggestions. It won’t suit anyone with an ingrained marketing agency mentality. We’re a bit different.

Obviously you’ll need to be up to date with social media!

If you’re interested, please drop me a line at kyle@blethermedia.com with some background info and your availability.

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1. What’s it all about then?

Social media is about people talking to people in networks. That’s it. Nothing more complicated than that. Sure, people do funky stuff like share videos and collaborate on projects and play Scrabble and write their own blogs… but really it’s all about people coming together online and having a good old blether.

2. So how do we do social media?

Well, you don’t ‘do’ social media. You use social media tools and services like Facebook and Twitter to talk to people. Why? Because that’s where you’ll find people – on Facebook and Twitter and blogs and a gazillion other social networks and sites. You just have to talk to them.

3. We have to talk to people?!

Sure you do, if you want to use social media. Hey, it’s a big change. We understand that. Businesses and brands and organisations are used to ‘broadcasting’. You advertise to people. You try to get their attention. You try to sell them stuff. You control your message and you ignore criticism. But if you do that in the social media world, people will cut you dead. Seriously. You have to find people who want to hear from, who care what you do… and then talk to them openly.

4. How do we talk to people?

Just as you would in a meeting or around a kitchen table or in a pub. You listen, you gauge the situation, and you join in with the conversation. But you also have to be real. People you connect with, people who give you their time and attention, have to feel that they’re connecting with a person, not a faceless corporate image. Nobody wants to talk to a logo. So you have to be prepared to be (more) open and honest and transparent about what you do and who you are.

5. What happens then?

Well, if people are interested in you, they’ll talk about you to their friends – and ‘friends’ in this context means people in their extended networks. If you give somebody a reason to become your friend or fan on Facebook, their friends will see this. Some of them may be inclined to become your friend or fan as well. And so it spreads. This network effect is incredibly powerful.

6. What if people say we suck?

If you’re rubbish at what you do – if you sell snake oil or offer lousy value for money – then sure, people will talk about you negatively. But they’re going to do that anyway – in fact, they probably already are – and there’s nothing you can do about it if you stay outside the conversation. On the other hand, if you’re good at what you do, people will like you. If you’re responsive, they’ll appreciate that. If you’re open to input and feedback, you’re onto a winner. If you care about your customers, they’ll care about you. And they’ll tell all their friends. So if you don’t want people saying that you suck… don’t suck.

7. What social media sites should we use?

As Lance Armstrong said, it’s not about the bike. And really, it’s not. It’s about figuring out what you want to achieve and working backwards from there. If you want to win the Tour de France, you need a good bike that’s right for the circumstances – but the lightest, fastest bike in the world won’t win a stage for you. It’s what you do with your bike that matters. Your social media strategy is much the same deal – first choose the right tools for the job; then use them well.

8. What’s the ROI?

Most social media consultants will tell you it’s a large island off the west coast of Britain. But we understand that a social media marketing campaign has to pay its way. You need a return on your investment. We can’t guarantee an outcome in the way that, say, a direct mailshot might produce a steady response rate of 0.3%. But we can do something much more useful. We can monitor, track and analyse everything you do every step of the way – and respond accordingly.

9. So who’s doing this stuff well? Who do we copy?

We’ll pretend we didn’t hear that. Tempting though it is to jump on the latest bandwagon and follow the latest success story, we believe there’s a fantastic opportunity for just about every business and organisation to do something brilliant with social media. Does one of your competitors already ‘own’ the social space (e.g. a gazillion friends on Facebook)? Then you can do something different and better. And if they don’t… well, there’s a terrific opportunity right there for you. And right now.

10. Social media is free, isn’t it?

Yes. And absolutely not. The tools are usually free – that’s true. But using those tools as part of a marketing campaign requires skill, time and effort. Your social media strategy isn’t something to dump on the staff member of least resistance. We’ll help you plan your resources to make sure you can run your social media strategy effectively.

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