Turkey was not the only Bird I had at Christmas this year.
I was also honoured to have Drayton Bird over as a guest. We’re cooking up a few very exciting things in the New Year together, which I will soon be sharing with you. In the meantime, I got a few snippets on tape from the Grand Master himself for you to enjoy. Here’s a funny story about Christmas and a certain David Ogilvy….
Lovely to report that I’m listening to my old friend Lemn Sissay on BBC Radio Manchester being interviewed by Alan Beswick about the fact that’s he’s been awarded an MBE! Regular readers of this blog will know that Lemn is not only an inspiration to me, but also thousands of other people, especially children – he has spent thousands and thousands of unreported hours doing workshops and talks for kids all over the world. In fact, when we used to knock about in Manchester it always amazed me how many bouncers we’d bump into who suddenly drop their guard and say stuff like “Fuck me, it’s Lemn Sissay!”, then give him a big, star-struck hug and spend 20 minutes telling him how much he inspired them in a talk he did at their school years before (much to the chagrin of the other revelers in the queue desperate to get into whatever house of ill repute we were attempting to enter).
Apart from being Best Man at our wedding (the poem he wrote and read at the ceremony “Heart Garden”, is one of my most treasured memories and possessions), he is also Godfather (in a non-religious type way, if that’s possible:-) to my son. Here they are just after he was born:
You can get further background on Lemn here, and you can get his work from Amazon here:
His second published book was “Rebel without Applause”. As he said on Alan Beswick’s show this morning, after Alan chastised him for moving from Manchester to London, he’s now a “Rebel with a baguette”. I can’t publish what he said MBE stands for. “Might Be Ethiopian” was my suggestion – not as funny as his.
One project Lemn has created that is really exciting is the GPS (Global Poetry System), a typically brilliant idea that is a user generated world map of poetry. Watch the video about it here:
We’ve often chatted about the use of poetry in the commercial world over the past 20 years. A couple of things we did together that I’m very proud of include the famous poem on the wall of Hardy’s Well pub on the busiest bus route in Europe on Wilmslow Road heralding the entrance to Rusholme from the South in Manchester. I pulled that together along with Toby Hadoke and the then landlord of the pub, Andy, back when there was a little comedy club in the back room.
That was back in 95/96 – and it’s still there!
The other thing was that when I won a sales promotion contract with Stagecoach to promote their weekly Megarider ticket (with the company I set up in 2001 that’s still going strong, AIM Solutions) I convinced them to them to do the whole thing around Lemn and use his poems in the promotional material.
We got Lemn on the side of hundreds of buses lying down “Sex and the City” style, his face on millions of tickets and posters inside the buses with his poetry all over them. I’ll never forget the meeting with Stagecoaches’ management when I proposed it. One of them said “I don’t want to do it if he’s associated with drugs”. Oh, racism. What a bizarre and stupid thing you are.
Lemn Sissay. Friend. Brother. Member of the British Fucking Empire!
Personalised search has been around on Google for a while, but only for people who were logged in to their google accounts whilst searching. It basically tailors the search results to your browsing history. Recently this feature has been widened to include people who are not logged into a google account when searching.
It has interesting ramifications for SEO – your listing will appear in different places dependent on how many times the user has clicked on your site for the search term.
One client of mine emailed me recently asking if I could do anything about the fact that his site was no longer Number One for his tier one keyword. I checked on my laptop and he was indeed still number one. The company he said had overtaken him were nowhere to be seen on my screen. I asked if he’d been clicking on his competitor’s site a lot recently (he had), so I told him to click on the Search Settings at the top right of the Google page and then to disable the customised search.
Sometimes Google doesn’t show this information, and sometimes it puts up a little “View customisations” link just above the information about how long the search took and how many pages were returned for the query. If you click on that, you get a message like this:
“When possible, Google will customize your search results based on location and/or recent search activity. Additionally, when you’re signed in to your Google Account, you may see even more relevant, useful results based on your web history.”
Disabling it is one thing, another is to go to a Google Dance tool like this.
The Google Dance tool allows you to check your rankings on different google servers from around the world, and will give you your actual, non-personalised rankings. The “Google Dance”, if you’ve never heard of it before, is simply the term used by SEOs to explain how rankings seem to jump up and down as Google’s servers get updated.
You should also make sure you’ve got Rank Checker installed in Firefox and schedule your rank checking automatically.
Now…I really should be out in the snow instead of blogging about rankings the day before Christmas Eve!
I came across this video recently whilst looking into the so-called Global Warming/Carbon Crisis following all the hullabaloo after the Copenhagen debacle.
It shocked me.
Are we actually living in a fascist state? Did the Nazis win the 39-45 war? Has everything predicted and illustrated by Orwell and Kafka come to light but hidden in plain sight?
If you care one dot about the concept of free speech, this should frighten the living shit out of you:
I’ve just come across this guy Phelim McAleer – seems like a decent citizen to me. Whether we agree with his views or not should not detract from the fact that he has a right to ask questions, and a right to his views which seem, to me in this case at least, simply to get Al Gore to clarify the fundamental errors identified by the British High Court in his film, “An Inconvenient Truth”. Especially as this film is being shown in schools to our children!
Nothing should be presented as fact like this (although that’s never stopped the religious indoctrination I witness at the nativity plays I am obliged to attend every year).
I watched that film about three years ago and it scared the bejesus out of me.
I’m starting to think that was it’s intention. Another tactic designed to keep us all like rabbits in headlights, along with wars on terror, swine flu, recession – the never ending list of nonsense designed to get us all distracted from massive changes in legislation that effect our rights as human beings on this Earth.
An amazing amount of snow on Sunday (which has me on a wild goose chase skidding from shop to shop looking for an elusive sledge – most of which had been sold out to more organised parents presumably) led me to take this picture from the car today. It was an experiment to see how the iPhone camera dealt with looking the sun right in the eye (something I teach my kids to do when they shake hands with anyone).
It’s also a salient reminder of just how beautiful this world really is.
Regular readers of this blog may be deluded into thinking that all forms of inspiration for me come from business shenanigans.
No so.
One man who has always inspired me, and always believed in me, is Lemn Sissay.
Lemn was best man at our wedding. He was my soul mate throughout our twenties back when lager, kebabs and last night fights were a regular occurrence. We both grew up (sort of). Now he lives in the smoke continuing his career/calling as a truly inspirational and brilliant writer and performer.
Lemn was recently made an Honorary Doctor of Letters at Huddersfield University. Here’s Lemn alongside Theo Paphitis.
This is an extraordinary achievement, especially when you know what Lemn has been through to get to this elevated status in society.
He was fostered as a child and grew up as the only black person in Atherton, Lancashire, in the 1970s. He was dumped uncermoniously at the age of 11 by his foster parents, then put into a succession of children’s homes. When he found out his true identity as an Ethiopian called Lemn, he painted the Ethiopian flag on the ceiling of his room. This earned him 12 months in a detention centre.
He escaped to Manchester as a 17 year old and started performing the poetry that was ripping through his soul.
Soon after. he traced his true roots. His father was a pilot from Ethiopia and had died in 1973 in a plane crash. The BBC made a documentary about this called “Internal Flight”:
Even if you have no interest in poetry, you cannot be failed to be moved by Lemn’s work. Here he is doing some of his stuff:
I am so pleased that he is being recognised for his brilliance in this way. You deserve it all my friend.Thanks for everything.
If you are in business, my message is simply this: take your finger out of your backside, buy this book, read it, implement what you learn as fast as you can.
Drayton is the dog’s bollocks. He’s erudite, funny, brilliant.
David Ogilvy said Drayton knows more about DM than anyone else on Earth.
Ogilvy knew his onions (literally, as he used to peel them for a living in a Parisian Restaurant in the 1930s before he became the “King of Madison Avenue”).
This book is about as definitive as you can get on the subject of direct marketing. You know, the kind of marketing where results and profits are actually measured. The kind of marketing that does not get taught at Universities. The principles of which form the basis of all successful internet marketing.
I first met Drayton when we both spoke at The System Intensive in London in 2008. We met again in 2009 and regularly exchange jokes and advice by email. You can see how good the old goat is here (in fact, that’s my developing bald spot you can see in the foreground):
So, go and get “Commonsense”, then whilst you’re at it, get this as well:
Then follow one of the best blogs on the whole t’internet here:
I’m just getting started on my adwords seminar in Cheshire. Should be a good day. Updates later….
This is a picture of everyone coming into the room before an exhausting 8 hours of me talking.
It was a great day. I’ve spent so many times in the last 6 years looking into peoples’ adwords accounts and seeing so many fundamental errors, that to get 50 of them into a room at the same time and “fix” them was wonderful.
To all that came – thankyou for being such a receptive and friendly audience. Now go forward and make your business more profitable please.
If you missed it, I have three pieces of advice:
1. Go and get Perry Marshall’s Definitive Guide to Adwords. Best ton you’ll ever spend.
2. Take control of your own adwords account. If you do outsource it, make sure you’re getting proper reports and that you are tracking every profitable keyword. When you know which one’s make the moolah, that’s when you do the SEO.
3. Make sure you’re on my adwords workshop list. I’ll be emailing you when the CD is available for the event, and news about future events. Use the form below.
Here’s the trailer for the DVD of “The Art of Blogging for Business”. If you want to know how to get hold of a copy of this 4-part DVD set, fill out your details in the form below. If you want to know how good the seminar was, check out these testimonials.
