There was a time in recent memory when I thought that media would create almost perfect information, a condition that exists in theoretical economics that makes markets work. However, the more tweets and RSS feeds I read, the more I realise that there is more opportunity to create misinformation than ever before.

As editor of the business news site for yacht racing – yachtracing.biz, I am caught up in a scary trend. The hunger for content by some publishers is so voracious that they have stopped performing any editorial function at all, in favour of lazy, cut and paste practices.

The result is an opportunity for savvy, communications people to reinvent history and flog everything from the America’s Cup to garden centres.

So if you want to create facts using lazy bloggers and other so-called journalists, here is a step by step guide.

1. Create a press release.

Make sure it is full of hyperbole and facts that are hard to verify. Something like: “the largest technology fair in the world.” (This can later be amended to “largest conference of its kind in the world” if you get called out.)

2. Push the press release onto as many platforms as you can…

But make sure you focus on small content providers and social media. Twitter is best because it is only 140 characters and people will re-tweet the link you send without reading the article. This way, someone ‘influential’ will accidentally give the information some credibility. If you concentrate on a niche, then you will know you have done well when 90% of the RSS subject lines are your headline – unchanged from the way you released it.

3. Get credibility

Once the story is seeded on hundreds of little blogs and Twitter feeds and Facebook likes, call up a semi-respectable, traditional news outlet. A great one to try is a ‘local’ or ‘regional’ offshoot of a larger brand, like BBC South West Wales. This allows you to show others that a ‘proper’ news outlet has reported a ‘fact’ which now can’t be questioned.

4. Re-Invest

Now that your hyperbolic PR claim is a fact, repeat step 2. Get as many people as you can to Digg, Tweet, Like, stumbleupon and share the trusted source of your information. You could also now add a Wikipedia entry with a great source, so that no-one can challenge you.

How to deal with those rare, irritating beasts – journalists

In most cases, the steps above should be enough to ensure that your version of events is the one that captures the interest of the Twitterati for at least 9 or 10 seconds before someone else comes up with a better trending hashtag. But sometimes, someone might call ‘Bullshit’ and ask you to clarify or verify your position. Don’t Panic.

There are a few strategies to deal with self-appointed truth seekers.

The most obvious thing to do is to ignore them. Most will have a Klout score of less than 30 and acknowledging they are there just makes more people look in your direction. Other strategies include various forms flattery and ego fluffing, or if they are really good, you can bring them onto your side – perhaps even pay them to make up and distribute facts on your behalf.

Follow these rules and you can make the most of the total absence of fact checking and if you are lucky you will even get a few inbound links.

Or Why Even Google should be worried about advertising revenue.

We all know the tales of woe coming from newspapers and printed magazines about the loss of advertising revenue to the internet, but even established players like Google should be worried about losing revenue to social advertising.

Like many digital marketing people, I have used Google’s Adwords product to get my message to a large group of people searching for keywords or browsing a particular network. Adwords’ targeting ability is a step-change better than a national newspaper or a mass market TV station, but compared to Social advertising channels like Facebook and Linkedin, even Adwords looks old fashioned.

And social advertising is not just for the B2C brands who are looking to appeal to those on Facebook. Linkedin has an enormous number of business users who can be targeted using geography, company size, job title or even the groups that they belong to.

If used properly, thinking about micro-segmentation, social advertising could be used to target a specific individual.

The LinkedIn Advertising Channel for B2B marketers.

Some have argued that LinkedIn’s valuation through its recent IPO signals a new internet bubble, but a LinkedIn user has a lot more value than an anonymous Hotmail user or Twitter account. The reason why marketing people like me prefer to use LinkedIn over Google Adwords at the moment is the quality of the available qualifying information available about LinkedIn users.

LinkedIn Advertising is easy to use and available to any existing user. Setting up an ad is run through an easy wizard and prospects can be directed to a website or to a page on Linkedin like a company or personal profile.

Micro-Segmentation and Targeting

The biggest advantage that LinkedIn Advertising has over channels like Google Adsense is the ability to target to a group of highly relevant individuals.

Ads can be targeted using the following attributes:

• Geography – Self explanatory. Choose one or multiple markets.
• Company – Target people who work for certain organisations.
• Job Title – Show your ad to people at a certain level e.g. CEO or SEO Manager
• Gender – Select male or female users or both
• Age – do you want junior or senior people?
• Group – LinkedIn Groups are strange things. Some are busy, some are quiet. Some have hundreds of thousands of members and some have barely any. But for the purposes of Social Advertising, Linkedin groups are a self selecting mechanism to target users. Groups can be particularly interesting when targeting specific industries or subject matter.

Value of Social Advertising

Depending on the industry, market and competition for advertising in your space, advertising on LinkedIn can be incredibly cost effective. If you get your micro-targeting and segmentation right, then you eliminate wastage which further increases the value of your campaign. The secret to getting the most out of channels like Linkedin is understanding segmentation and how you adapt your sales funnel to give a slightly different customer journey for each of your segments.

Facebook Advertising has similar control over targeting, but I’ll cover that another time.

In 2008, I started Yachtsponsorship.com. The site came about because I had been working in sports marketing for a number of years, worked with some incredibly professional people and learnt a few things about how sport can be used to inspire, but more importantly, the commercial value of sport.

Having seen the best practise employed by organisations like NASCAR, Manchester United and MotoGP, I turned to a sport that I had grown up with as a kid.

Sailing is more mass-market in Australia. In Melbourne, I grew up next to the sea and I remember watching sailing on free-to-air television, from the annual Sydney Hobart Yacht Race, to 18ft skiffs during the lunch-break of the cricket to the historic morning that my dad got me out of bed to watch Australia II win the America’s Cup in 1983.

The blog I started in 2008 then was intended to bring great sports marketing practise and professionalism to the sport of sailing.

I love the sport and believe that I have done a lot to promote it over the last couple of years, which is why I am dissapointed when I see amateurish behaviour at the highest level.

It’s even more disappointing when that amateurish behaviour centres around Australia and the America’s Cup.

Spokesmen for the new America’s Cup, like Russell Coutts and Jimmy Spithill keep reading out the line that the event is the pinnacle of the sport. The new deal is supposed to usher in a new era of professionalism that allows sailing to be pitched as a platform worthy to deliver a return on an investment over $50 million.

How then, can the America’s Cup organisers officially announce the entry of a team that can’t name a team principal, sailors, a challenging yacht club or have a live website?

In the year 2011, for a professional international sports team to not have a functioning website at the time of such an announcement just looks like amateur hour.

Speaking to some of Australia’s top sailors over the last few days – people who would be 1 & 2 on my speed-dial had I the investment to launch an entry I find that they haven’t heard anything about the campaign. Haven’t even had a phone call.

I hope that my fears about this campaign are unfounded. I hope that Australia can mount a challenge for the America’s Cup that brings to bear all the talent that the country has to offer – from world beating sailors to globally recognised boat design and technology to some of the most savvy sports marketing people on the planet.

If Australia is going to enter the America’s Cup after 10 years it has to be a proper go. Being the underdog is okay, and mounting the resources to take on Oracle racing, even with an Australian dollar that is parity with the greenback, is going to be tough. But there is underdog and there is amateur and we’ve moved on – haven’t we?

I’m certain that Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) was not a subject that was on the curriculum when I studied marketing.^[1]

However, in the year 2011, it’s hard to call yourself a digital marketing consultant and not understand the drivers behind new customer acquisition via search engines like Google and Bing.

SEO is not as sexy as witty, or zeitgeist catching creative. It’s not as trendy as social media or as cutting edge as location based services with augmented reality, but my informed guess is that Google and Bing send more customers to your site than any of these marketing methods.

Despite the fact that most businesses say that being on the top of Google is one of their most important customer acquisition methods, marketing people (like me) have never really been given the SEO tools to help clients take control of this essential digital marketing task. There are thousands of marketing and PR agencies that have SEO in their menu of services, but in reality, most of these companies don’t know how to do it.

So how important are search engines for driving traffic to your website? The following is a breakdown of where new visitors come from for one of my sites.^[2]

• Google – 49.9%
• Direct – 16.4%
• Facebook – 7.5%
• Bing – 4.4%
• Yahoo – 4.0%
• Twitter – 2.8%

So whose responsibility is it to look after the 50% of new business that is delivered this way? Is it Marketing, PR or IT? The answer is that all these functions have a part to play in making sure that your business has the best chance of being at the top of the search engine results.

Luckily, for marketing and PR people, we already have the basic skill-set required to do SEO. At the heart of good search engine optimisation is the creation of relevant content for an identified audience. If you know how to do targeting and messaging, then you know how to come up with keyword phrases that your customers use to search for your products and services.

If you know how to pitch an article to a newspaper or magazine,  then you know how to pitch for a link from an authoritative website. Building relationships with influencers is a key part of SEO, so all your work building a following on Twitter and acquiring Facebook fans can add-value too.

Okay – now for the disclaimer bit – for the last few months, I have been working with a company called Linkdex who have been funded by Amadaues Capital to build a set of SEO tools that help businesses take control of SEO. The online application allows marketing people to build workflows and procedures to make the most of this new business acquisition method.

Everything they never taught you at marketing school about SEO is woven into an integrated set of tools that can take you from zero-to-hero if you apply the methodology. The secret that SEO people don’t want marketing people to know, is that anyone who knows how to use WordPress or similar CMS can rank at the top of search engines.

Even if you don’t sign up to the SEO tools developed by Linkdex, you should check out the great free Learn SEO posts that reveal how to do key tasks like link-building.

1. ^[1] I first saw Mosaic running during my 2nd year at university. Alta Vista may have come shortly after that. ↩
2. ^[2] www.yachtsponsorship.com ↩

It seemed more appropriate to put these thoughts here rather than Yachtsponsorship.com – It’s a more personal, less considered thought process than Y$ readers expect.

I have been thinking about the way in which the Defender of the America’s Cup – BMW ORACLE, led by Russell Coutts, has been looking at ways to reposition the trophy. The stated aim of the process is to make the Cup more appealing to a younger, television audience.

Every interview that Russell Coutts does, he talks about “marketing experts” and “television experts”, but they are never named. We don’t know who these people are or what their credentials are for embarking on a massive rebranding exercise are. The following scene came to mind:

There’s no reason why the identities of the ‘experts’ should be a secret. I just hope that they are the best there is. Not the best in sailing, but the best. If BMW ORACLE can afford the priciest litigators in the country, then they should be able to employ a similar calibre of television creatives and marketing people.

Personally I don’t think that just putting something exciting on television is enough. There are hours of exciting sports coverage that no-one watches. The people who need to be paid are the people who are going to sell the America’s Cup as a movement – make it a meme – create buzz and glamour. Being at the America’s Cup needs to be a ticket as hot as walking the grid of the Monaco Grand Prix. Some different camera angles aren’t going to do that.

So to borrow a theme from one of the most successful television products of recent times - Who are you?