To say that the internet has brought about a social revolution is to state the obvious.

Close to 80 per cent of the population is now online and whether they spend their time shopping, gaming, social networking or simply surfing, it has become a social and business phenomenon – some might say obsession. According to a recent survey, 1 in 4 people spend more time online than they do sleeping.

The implications for advertising and PR are obvious. Some retailers complain that the online marketplace is taking over the high street one, and when you look at last Christmas’s sales – traditionally the high point of the year for the retail trade – you can see why.

UK internet users made 84 million visits to retail websites on Christmas Eve and 107 million visits on Christmas Day – up 86 per cent and 71 per cent, respectively, compared to the same days the previous year, according to Experian Information Service.

Boxing Day topped the lot with consumers making 113 million visits to retailers’ websites – up 17 per cent on the previous year; presumably not all were made simply to check how much their presents had cost!

The lesson for businesses in all sectors is that digital marketing and PR should now be indispensable weapons in their promotional armoury.

But where to begin? The chief cornerstone of online marketing always used to be a website, the virtual shop window or reception desk of a business. It is the prospective customers’ first port of call and has taken the place of the sales brochure or corporate literature traditionally used to set out a company’s wares or establish its credibility.

This is not to suggest, incidentally, that online promotion is a wholesale replacement for traditional (or proven) promotional activity. On the contrary, companies now exercise 360 degree campaigns which use a whole range of promotional tools from direct mail to SEO. A complementary mix is the key to developing, and maintaining, a strong brand presence, as opposed to simply focusing on product.

The internet may be the world’s biggest marketplace, but the infinity of cyberspace is a big place to get lost in, so a website alone is just a beginning. There is the question of driving traffic to your website, and there are a variety of ways to achieve this, both on and off line. One way is even through traditional media – such as in the newspaper you’re reading – a strategy that even on-line media moguls like Google and EBay are not above using.

And then of course there is social media, with all its ramifications – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. The ‘social media, is it the new PR or advertising?’ argument is still raging but I think this misses the point to a great extent.

I would suggest that it mainly falls into the advertising category because of its measurability, but why try and force it into any of our preconceived definitions of the promotional mix? The real questions you should be asking are about goals and what will the definition of a successful campaign outcome be – are we looking to create a buzz, or to make sales? For instance, the success of PR used to be measured mainly in column inches achieved. To that can now be added likes, tweets, posted comments and much, much more.

There’s also promotion via search engines. A good example of this was a recent campaign run for Snickers who wanted to target office workers, but who knew that viral and social content could well be blocked by IT departments. They worked with Google to produce an ad every time a user misspelt a word in a search (which needless to say is quite common). The search result read: ‘Yu cant spel properlie wen hungrie – Grab yourself a Snikkers’. They targeted 500,000 people in three days, they got them in two! A humorous engagement, brilliantly executed!

If one cornerstone of online marketing is a website, the other is a blog – embedded or linked to the former – which can form the heart of a company’s social media activities. A blog can be your business, but with a lighter, more personal touch.

If there is one lesson that marketers and PR’s have been forced to learn from the digital revolution it is this: the key importance of informality, of befriending and chatting with customers, involving them and inviting their opinions, and showing a human face rather than a corporate front.

Of course the best sales people have always known and practiced this, but now the technology is making it increasingly evident and giving the competitive edge to customer-centric businesses.

There are technical strategies that will hone that edge – modern CSS built websites with management systems, the preprogramming of some of your social media and so on – but the key to a successful digital marketing campaign is in deciding from the outset what it is that you want to achieve, what tools you will need to enable you to do it, a timeframe and, dare I say it, ‘a budget’! However you decide to tackle it one thing’s for certain – non-engagement is no longer an option.

http://www.simpsonscreative.co.uk/

Twitter: @rick_simpsons @SimpsonsCreate

In the ad world we work on the rule of thumb that you have three seconds to arrest attention with a print advertisement.

Brands and branding have been with us for a long time (ever since the first rancher burned his initials in the hide of a steer) and you’d have thought we’d have understood them thoroughly by now.

It’s been a good few decades since you could get away with gratuitous sex or sexism in advertising. Remember the glory days when Fiat could run an ad headlined “If this car were a lady it would get its bottom pinched”? Famously, it attracted feminist graffiti that read “If this lady was a car, she’d run you down!”

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde -preserved shark is its title: ‘The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living’.

I’ve never tried to get a genie back in a bottle. In fact anyone who knows me well could tell you that I’ve never tried to get anything back into a bottle at all – it’s strictly one-way traffic as far as I’m concerned.

A bargain isn’t a bargain if it’s not in your size. It’s a truism, but it’s a demonstrable fact that greed often puts common sense on hold. And before any men out there start to get too smug about who is the most vulnerable to the ‘it’s half price so I must have it!’ syndrome. Watch and see how many of them come away from a sale with a bagful of hardware ‘essentials’ destined to gather dust in their shed or the attic.

Imagine you’re interviewing a candidate for a job. You usher them to a chair and after the usual formalities you lean forward expectantly and say “So then, tell us about yourself.”

Branding is big business, so it’s no surprise to discover that the creation of a brand identity often comes with a hefty price tag.

I was sitting down at the weekend with a charming little ‘Vino Collapso’ (just to help with the creative process you understand) and my laptop to review a presentation on logo design that I’m due to give to an audience of SME’s in a couple of weeks and something struck me.

Yes, well, we all want to believe, but as you watched the re-runs of Only Fools and Horses over the holidays, I hope you remembered that Del Boy’s short-term tactics may be good for a laugh, but they rarely amount too much else.

It’s a horrible thing the Littlewoods Christmas ad.  A group of children singing the praises of mums who buy expensive presents in a quasi-nativity play setting is enough to put my teeth on edge at the best of times.

I’m not sure whether the immortal lines “Titter ye not”, “Just like that!” or “Tea, Ern?” (Catchphrases, as if you didn’t know, of Frankie Howerd, Tommy Cooper and Eric Morecambe) deserve to be literally set in stone, yet that is precisely what artist Gordon Young has done for them in the ‘Comedy Carpet’ installation he has created on Blackpool’s seafront as part of the town’s regeneration plan.

Getting older is a fact of life. Growing up is optional. Occasionally you come across an unreconstructed punk or hippie, but for most of us our tastes and outlook mature with age, and are reflected in our dress and grooming. Think of Vivienne Westwood, who practically invented the punk look, but who is now a doyenne of haute couture. In business terms, we rebrand ourselves.

What do you think might happen if you took all of the self-proclaimed social marketing or branding experts in our region and sealed them in a dark room (one can only dream!) until they all calmed down?

The science fiction world of interactive advertising imagined in Stephen Spielberg’s film ‘Minority Report’ has taken a step nearer reality at Tesco’s virtual supermarket in Seoul, South Korea, which featured widely in the national and trade press this week.

In the film, Tom Cruise’s character walks through a shopping mall where an electronic poster calls out to him: “John Anderton! You could use a Guinness round about now!”

In Tesco’s virtual supermarket posters with pictures of well-stocked shelves runs the length of a subway platform and allows commuters to shop by scanning the product QR codes with their smart phones. The shopping is then delivered to their homes.

Following the advent of internet shopping and the recent proliferation of self-checkouts at the big supermarkets, it surely can’t be long before outdoor media follows suit.

Indeed, QR codes are already appearing prominently on estate agents flag-boards, giving passing home hunters a direct link to their specific details.

Could combining the twin obsessions of ‘shopping till you drop’ and mobile phone fixation be the instrument we’re looking for to reboot the economy and lift us out of recession? It would be cheering to think so.

For those who fear that on-line shopping threatens the future of the high street, there’s also encouraging news from ‘Forever 21’, the US fast fashion chain, which has plans to open 100 new stores in the UK.

“The global high street is growing” says Linda Chang, the group’s head of marketing. “People enjoy shopping, it is not an ‘either or’. Lots of our customers visit both our website and our store.”