The presenter would have prepared for weeks; researched diligently and practiced five times the night before, just to make sure everything went according to plan. No stone would have been left unturned. No ‘t’ would have been un-crossed. No ‘i’ left un-dotted.

Presentation day would have arrived. Seats would have been arranged. A screen erected at the front. The presenter would have turned up, ready to begin; a glass of water beside the lecturn; a hot cup of instant coffee on standby.

Marker pens would have been in hand, ready to highlight the important points; a few carefully-practised hand shadow animals would have lurking in the wings, ready to storm the virtual stage should the crowd require some half-time entertainment. A strange bunch of clear plastic sheets would have been piled neatly on the table, but they would have drawn negligible attention, because they were dwarfed by the strangest looking lamp the admin assistant had ever seen. The year was 1957.

“What’s that?” She would have asked (excuse my misogyny, I’ve been watching too much Mad Men).

“It’s an overhead projector,” the presenter would have announced proudly. “It’s the latest in presentation technology.”

The admin assistant would have nodded.

“Is there anything I can get you then before you begin, Mr Presenter?” She would have asked

“Yes,” Mr Presenter would have said. “I need a power point?”

“Power point?” She would have asked, a puzzled look on her face. “Well, there is one, but it’s way over there in the back of the room. If you want people to see your presentation I’ll need to get you an extension cord.”

Powerpoint, of course, the Microsoft version, spelled the end of the overhead projector back in the early nineties.

Slideshare.com, has spelled the end of the extension cord.

Here are ten brilliant presentations you need to watch if you want to be a better marketer.

Shift Happens

A look at how globalisation and digital technology has changed our world.

Universal Mccann International Social Media Research Wave 3

This is the Social Media Research done by Universal Mccann including 17,000 people in 29 countries. Detailed stuff

What the F**K is Social Media?

Social media for dummies; with swearing.

Visual and Creative Thinking:What We Learned From Peter Pan and Willy Wonka

Visual concepts for marketers - how to express yourself visually, handy if you’re presenting…

Big Brands & Facebook: Demographics, Case Studies & Best Practices

Forrester’s advice on Facebook. Very worthy if you’re getting asked about it.

Luxury Brand Marketing

Relevant because it’s about creating a desire for things no-one needs; something every marketer has to do sooner or later!

Great Quotes To Use & Repeat When You Can’t Find A Better Way Of Saying It

The title kind of says it all - the layout isn’t much, but they’re great quotes!

Seth Godin on Tribes

Haven’t got time to read the book? Here’s the picture version, yay!

NASA - GenY Perspectives

Why does NASA care about Gen Y? Because Gen Y will be giving them 124 billion dollars to poke around places no-one can see. You can bet they’ve done their research into engaging the kiddies.

Marketing Management By Philip Kotler

Go back and remember the stuff you forgot from marketing school: 719 slides from the 11th edition of the textbook.

We had a meeting with the bank earlier this week. We knew they were interested in the whole social media thing or they wouldn’t have asked us back. We also knew they were going to struggle to see value in monitoring social media channels when they could easily setup Google alerts for their brand and catch anyone having  a sneaky whinge. We knew Google alerts were only half the story though; if you want to engage people, you need to meet them. It’s hard to meet people when you only know them as just ‘levinator25′ or ‘ID203′ in a database. So this is what we did…

“Tegan,” from Australia is actually a digital project manager at Cummins Nitro, the Brisbane agency behind Queensland Tourism’s best job in the world campaign and the tattoo is quite clearly fake. Discerning YouTube viewers picked up on the facts pretty quickly (for goodness sake, fresh tattoos bleed, you don’t walk out of the shop with a pristine design), yet the video has had more than 60,000 views so far and considerable traditional media attention from around the world.

Who looks dumber, AAP and the major news outlets who ran with the story, or Qld Tourism who used it as an example video without a disclaimer?

Either way,  nice acting Rhiannon. Are the freckles real?

UPDATE: It seems Tim Burrowes over at MumBrella actually beat me to the punch on this story - for further reading and a response from Tourism Queensland, make sure you check out his blog post.

1. To learn more than I did in 2008
2. To write more, much more than I did in 2008
3. To have good ideas and take responsibility for them
4. To balance work, love, music and life on four equal, gigantic pillars and spin them until they blur into one harmonious symphony
5. This

A friend of mine has developed his marketing mantra. It’s quite good and it goes like this:

1. Markets are conversations
2. Conversations happen around social objects
3. Social objects are products or services that are remarkable
4. Remarkable is not just something special, but something worth being remarked about
5. A great product, and even better customer service are the most remarkable things you can offer.

I like it (although I’d change the first point to read “your market is conversing”), and it fits in with pretty much everything I hold to be self-evident: The TV-industrial complex has crumbled and in an age where advertising saturation makes it almost impossible to push your message out, the best way of marketing your product is to get people to talk about it. Social media, as a form of word of mouth marketing, works, but what if you’re not remarkable? What if no-one wants to talk about you?

What if you make brown shoelaces, or you have a brand of aspirin that does the same thing as all the other brands of aspirin? What if you don’t really have a story or you don’t have a chance to really impress your customers with amazing service… What do you do? Do you just give up and start something else?

Nope. You invent a story.

If you make brown shoelaces you get Bear Grylls to explain that if he was stuck on a mountain and needed to create a makeshift parachute, he would only recommend using your brand. You would start a YouTube channel with a series of videos detailing other amazing uses for your brown shoelaces and explain how they are the best. You would find bloggers who talk about running shoes and dress shoes and adventure shoes and you would send them free product samples. It would be so successful that people would start buying your laces to put in their brand new shoes because they would think that shoe manufacturers didn’t know enough about lace technology.

If you make a new brand of aspirin you would create a 1300 number that people could call and whinge to; you’d remove their headaches. This number would be advertised, radio presenters would copy the idea. You would setup a social community where people can talk about their headaches and you would get experts to jump online and give advice.

If you think your product isn’t remarkable, you’re not trying hard enough.

Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft provide solutions to people with video game problems. The trouble was, in 2006, the proportion of people who realised they had a gaming problem in need of a solution was very small in comparison to the population of the earth. Worse still, most people with video game problems needed to get hold of their mom’s (sic) purse first.

Rather then come up with the next fastest/loudest/baddest/blue rayest/most violent/most banned/most wanted new gaming console in the history of the world to date, Nintendo, instead, were smart. Very smart. They created Wii. Kids like it. Mom’s love it, heck, even the Queen of England has one. In fact, Wii sales now account for more than both main competitors combined.

If you’re going to develop a new product, think outside the (X) box. It’ll pay off. Especially if you back it up with customer service people rave about.

My first proper job was as a reporter for a start-up indie newspaper in the north western suburbs of Sydney. The editor was an awesome guy called Peter Gladwell; he hired me because he had a fire in his eyes and I think he saw a bit of that in me too. He wanted to bring credible, interesting, ballsy journalism back to suburban newspapers and I wanted to write credibe, interesting, ballsy suburban journalism. The paper was called the Northwest Edge and it was brilliant. I think it lasted five issues.

When Fairfax and News Corp got wind of what this little start-up was doing they slashed their advertising rates and undercut the market. A little indie newspaper stood no chance against two giant media corporations and that was that. I looked Peter up on LinkedIn and he now appears to be Chief of Staff at Fairfax, which is kind of ironic. I’m sure he’s getting his own back, one stolen paperclip at a time.

The Northwest Edge is a David and Goliath story. There are lots of them in the media, and sadly, Goliath usually wins. What happens though, when Goliath fights Goliath? Google is the biggest giant standing in the current media landscape and they’ve put numerous companies out of business by not just undercutting the market, but literally giving away products and services other companies were charging a mint for. Imagine if you’d invested millions of dollars into any of the following services in the last decade with the hope of making money from them:

• Maps
• Email
• A Blog Service
• A Website Where People Can Share Videos
• Website Traffic Analytics
• Satellite Imagery

You’ve now either been bought by Google, or you’ve been put out of business (or you will be soon).

Google has avoided producing ‘content’ of it’s own so far, with the exception of mapping data, but before long their share price will level off and investors will start demanding further diversification. The Google search brand is so well established that it won’t be tarnished or have its power diluted by adding more complimentary services. There is absolutely no reason why Google cannot feasibly, tomorrow, muscle in on the real estate, jobs and classifieds markets. There is no reason why they can’t produce their own accommodation search engine. What exactly will RealEstate.com, Seek, CarSales.com.au and Stayz do if when a major player like Google comes along and makes their product free. When was the last time anyone used WhereIs? (A site that just launched a popup ad in my browser, little fuckers). Does anyone really think that MySpace and Facebook are going to remain dominant for more than a few more years?

(Almost) everything online will soon be free. If I was shareholder in of any of those fore-mentioned companies, I’d be cashing out now.

Here’s a list of 25 top marketing and social media blogs. It comes from a guy called Mack who makes lists of blogs every now and then based on how many people subscribe to them. It’s by no means definitive, but there are some gems in here. Have a browse if you’re bored or looking for inspiration.

1. Duct Tape Marketing
2. Church of the Customer
3. CopyBlogger
4. Search Engine Guide
5. Chris Brogan
6. Influential Marketing
7. Logic + Emotion
8. Converstations
9. Drew’s Marketing Minute
10. The Viral Garden
11. Experience Curve
12. Conversation Agent
13. Techipedia
14. The Social Media Marketing Blog
15. Emergence Marketing
16. The Social Customer Manifesto
17. Techno Marketer
18. Social Media Explorer
19. Movie Marketing Madness
20. Daily Fix
21. Customers Rock!
22. Shotgun Marketing
23. Biz Solutions Plus
24. Resonance Partnership Blog
25. MediaPhyter

Imagine if you had a photo of the factory worker who put your iPOD/Phone/TV/Shoe/Pen/T-Shirt/Chair/Computer together.