Keynote is not the presentation utopia that some will have you believe. It’s good if you have the patience to teach yourself a whole new system. But why bother? If you are used to Powerpoint then stick with it. Prezi is great, but the chances are your audience will be wowed by the delivery mechanism and forget the message.

The point I made is that it doesnt matter what tool you use, if the message is crap the presentation is crap. Far better to spend time on the message content than the message delivery system. Especially when it comes to a stand up presentation – people remember you and your body language far more than the slides on the screen behind you.

Many years ago when I had a corporate job (European Marketing Director for Clarify – thanks for asking), I had the pleasure of taking our then CEO, Tony Zingale, on a whistlestop tour of our European offices to run meet and greet sessions (they were called Town Hall Meetings – you have to love the Yanks) with staff, and then separate sessions for partners and then customers. That was 15 presentations in 5 days.

He had some PPT slides, but he knew his content, he lived and breathed it, slept it and even walked the talk. He was a mesmerising presenter because of that. As for his slides, there were only 6 or 7 of them, no slide had more than about 3 words on them, and not a single bullet point. It was Tuesday afternoon when I realised that the slides were actually his cue cards, just there in case he went off-piste and needed to get back on track.

If you can present like that, then you will sell “you” and not your content, because let’s face it, I doubt that your content is unique, but you are. And that’s what customers buy into.

In my view you should be looking to use social media to engage with partners. Whether it’s something as simple as replacing your RSS feeds on your partner portal with a Twitter account, or perhaps something a little more complex, like using LI or FB to engage with partners, and enabling the inside sales team to own the conversation, as opposed to a marketing exec who is a couple of steps removed from the sales floor.

We should also really consider the key component in this discussion – your channel partners. Do have something to say / share that deserves to be heard? Personally I don’t think vendors should be jumping on the social media bandwagon simply because they can. They should be doing it because they know what they want to achieve and that their audiences are receptive.

Lastly, how can you make it as easy as possible for your partners to follow and engage with you? How about creating a social media newsroom or even an App?

What is the point of spending your marketing budget on exhibitions?

Last week I attended Marketing Week Live, a 2 day extravaganza of bright young things in designer glasses discussing the latest must haves in marketing. But it seems to me that the world of marketing should look in the mirror and ask itself a simple question:

“Why did we think it was a good idea to exhibit at Marketing Week Live?”

The first stand I visited I was greeted with “Don’t ask me, I just give out brochures”. The second stand I visited wasn’t much better – “I’m sorry, we have no brochures”. Now, maybe these two companies should meet in the middle? Sadly, neither of these two companies asked for my contact details. Things did get better and I had meaningful conversations with 5 or 6 other companies about live projects where we could use their services.

But, 5 days after the show finished I have only been contacted by one of the companies. Is this really an efficient use of your hard earned profits? To blow it on an exhibition stand, and then make it difficult for prospective customers to interact with you, and when they do succeed, to ignore the sales opportunity that has been presented to you?

I really hope this is not typical of the UK marketing industry, or any other UK industry for that matter. But alas, this mirrors my experiences at the Technology For Marketing show earlier this year, and previous years at both events.

How do you make sure your exhibition budget is more wisely spent?

So, it has no revenue, and has soaked up over $3.5 million in VC funds so far. How does that make it worth $40million? But at least it’s a recognition at last that the Twitter UI is a pile of poo!

We like Tweetdeck, up to a point, it’s a good way of keeping track of a particular topic, or even your immediate friends stream of consciousness. And let’s face it, the old UI on Twitter was dreadful, and the new version is not much better. So perhaps this acquisition will result in some more development work to turn Twitter into a must view destination. Let’s hope they spend some of the cash to change / remove the alert ‘chirps’.

But until that happens, we will continue to use any number of the myriad of third party apps to read, follow and interact with our Twitter followers which, bless you, over our different accounts now numbers something in excess of 4,100

There are a growing number of B2C and B2B brands that are using these codes as a shortcut for the advert audiences to engage with the brand. There is a really good article on MarketingWeek.co.uk that discusses it all in more detail.

But, back to the point of this blog post, how can you read these codes, like our Contact page QR codes? Those QR codes contain our address details for our UK and French offices. All you need to read those codes, and to have the content, in effect our business cards, added to your phone, is a free to download QR code scanner.

You can easily install one of many from the iPhone App store, Android and Blackberry Apps are also available.

I use Qrafter on my iPhone and it happily scans in codes embedded on websites and in print format.

In the beta version you could run adverts according to geography (a limited choice of countries for advertisers in Europe) job function, industry, company size, seniority, age and sex.

Now, in the new full fat version, you can target adverts by job title, company name, and the groups that they are members of.

According to LinkedIn, customers that have launched campaigns with the newly available targeting options report click-through rates three to four times higher than those for other campaigns.

But what does this all mean to the average advertiser?

Just imagine, you want to run a new demand generation campaign. You have had your brainstorming sessions and you have agreed your target profiles.

In the past you could run a PPC or CPM advertising campaign to some criteria around that profile. But now…

You can practically run a campaign targeted to a specific person, with ad copy relevant to their business.

A bit creepy perhaps, but the more you can target your efforts, the more effective your campaign will be.

I would recommend that you run a CPM based campaign to start with and then look at the metrics to see whether it is worth switching to a PPC model.

Of course not, Web 2.0 is in rude health.

But, an interesting blog on TheNextWeb.com made some interesting observations about some of the bigger web 2.0 websites. Digg, Delicious, Flickr, MySpace and Bebo all experienced dramatic declines in their monthly traffic during the course of 2010.

What these rather simplistic charts show is that individual sites might be experiencing a decline in traffic, but they are not representative of Web 2.0. They are merely some of the building blocks.

What has happened over the last few years is that other sites, have developed APIs to enable users to plug in the building blocks that they want. Just think how much you can do within the Facebook pages now compared to 12 or 18 months ago, for example.

I think the most interesting point of this posting is the Yahoo experience of buying Delicious at the top of the market and now selling at a huge discount. If they looked at the losses they made on that deal and had invested the same amount in a wide variety of start-ups, it could be a different story. Perhaps it’s better to invest the same amount of cash in a wider portfolio of start-ups.

If you are googling your potentially sales prospects, rest assured, they will be googling you. If not know, they will do, as soon as they have received your call or DM piece.

So, make sure that all your team have good, clean and relevant profiles on LinkedIn. If they are on Facebook, get them to sort out their privacy settings, or better still, remove the damaging photo’s from that last sales incentive trip!

Digital Surgeons have carried out some fascinating research into who is using Twitter and Facebook and how they are using these social platforms.

For any business wondering which is better, up until now they had to rely on the ‘Harry Hill’ method of deciding. But these stats show that Facebook is by the far the more important platform when trying to reach out to consumers. 40% of Facebook users follow a brand and 51% of those will purchase that specific brand. By my reckoning that equates to 110 million people on Facebook using this specific social network to engage with brands and then making a buying decision.

Facebook vs Twitter

If that is the case, then perhaps your New Year’s resolution should be to exploit Facebook more.

For more detail on this research, check out Digital Surgeons