During the several years I’ve known him, he’s developed his own Petting Zoo studios into a thriving hive of activity for local and touring acts interested in committing their work to recording.

As another wave of artists prepare to release Cd’s with production and engineering credits to Ben, I asked him some questions about his music and recording aesthetic.

Q: You’ve been a producing madman this past year—what producers do you look up to? Could you name 3 albums that you look to models of excellence and perhaps exemplify the aesthetic you’re going for?

BB: I really like the work Daniel Lanois and Malcolm Burn have done, especially with Emmylou Harris’ work. Also, George Martin, of course. Three albums that exemplify my aesthetic goal? Blood on the Tracks, Goats Head Soup, and The Fleet Foxes self-titled debut. It has a really great space on the whole album but sounds clear as a bell. I recommend listening on vinyl. They recorded it all over the place, largely in bedrooms, but it sounds awesome. I went to see them at the Palace of Fine arts and it sounded the same as the recording. How many bands can do that!?

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Click here for her introduction.

Haegwan Kim (HK); Today I’m going to talk with Lori Taylor, who is renowned as a marketing professional and the CEO at REV Media Marketing. Thank you so much for your time.

Lori Taylor (LT); Thank you.

HK; Why did you start working in the field of marketing?

LT; Well, I started right out of college working for a company called Wallace, at the time. It got bought a couple of times, so it was really with the same company but I worked in RR Donnelley Printing, which is a $12 billion printing company, and I was in a specialised division that was the direct marketing response, we called it Response Marketing Services Division, and was focused primarily on creating strategic marketing programmes for customers that were integrated with their TV and radio and other mediums.

But, primarily, we focused on direct mail, and so direct mail was really my area of expertise that I honed very well with because I landed a big account called Disabled American Veterans. And we raised over $2 billion for them over the last 17 years; so $5 at a time through the mail. I just kind of became enamoured with the field from direct mail, that’s where I fell in love with marketing.

HK; Was the direct mail service a new thing? Or was there already someone who was using direct mail for marketing before you did?

LT; No, it’s not a new thing direct mail, it’s a one to one communication and I would probably have to say that most people don’t do direct mail correctly. They find it to be very expensive, but it’s expensive because they don’t know how to test. And I was lucky to work with Max Hart who was director at DAV. He was inducted into the hall of fame for the national DMAs, so there were about 30 people in there at the time anyway.

He taught me everything I know, and two years ago my fiancé at the time was launching another internet company and brought me on board to help with marketing. And I fell in love with the internet, truthfully it’s a lot faster; it’s all the same methodology as direct mail because of the attention span being so low for people, and they have to make a decision in about three or four seconds where they’re at and why they’re there and what if they want to stay there. What I love about the internet is that if you do your A, B testing correctly, and set up your testing methodology, you very quickly can determine what’s working and what’s not working.

Whereas, direct mail, because of the postage it’s more expensive to test, and it also takes longer because you have to produce it, mail it, get your results in and then quickly try and get back out into the mail. But when you’re with the customers like Procter and Gamble and Kroger and DAV, the big mailers out there that mail hundreds of millions of pieces, you just can’t turn it on a dime; so it just takes longer to implement successful roll outs, that’s all.

HK; Is marketing in the 21st Century different from 20th Century’s one?

LT; Yes, here’s the thing. Consumers really haven’t changed; so what’s changed is that they have more information coming at them than ever before. It used to be 700 items at a grocery store, now there’s over 30,000 in some cases. So they’re in a state of overload trying to learn about everything, which I’m going to write a book on, I call it the One Click Society, the now generation.

But basically everyone got into the state of instant gratification, so if you cannot very quickly tell them what you’re promising and convince them that you can actually deliver on the promise then you are in trouble. Because with so many messages are coming at them it’s very easy to get lost in the crowd. So I would tell everyone that you cannot be broad with your marketing messages especially if you have a smaller budget. You have a client like Procter and Gamble and while they know that they can niche their products down into specific segments and markets, it’s actually cheaper for them just to blast it out everywhere because they get so many viewers.

But for these average marketers, you wouldn’t want to just have, say, a weight loss product that just said, hey, it will work for men and it will work for women and it will work for everyone. You actually have to talk to your specific person, and if you can deliver your message to them creatively, say for your high school reunion’s coming up, and you get very targeted with your messages, that’s about the only way that you’re very successful on the internet with a smaller budget; you really have to be targeted with your marketing, for sure.

HK; Can you tell me how marketers can find the adequate target?

LT; Yes, so there’s a few tools out there that I really like, and I would start with key word research. So I usually start with Google, they have a free ad words tool, its Key Word tool. I also like what’s called Keyword Spy, which is a paid for tool, but it’s an inexpensive. And then there’s another tool called Market Samurai, and what these tools do is you can put in your broad target, weight loss for this example, and then it will give you relevant key words associated with that.

And the key is to have searches that are over 1,000 as a benchmark, but not so broad that you’re in a situation where you’re paying, say, $7 per click. Like in the health insurance business that is a very expensive market, and you’re going against people with huge budgets; so what you really have to do is identify the key words that a small business person, say you are focused on weight loss, I’ll go back to that example, and you might go into feeling like someone that wants a quick, a fast solution, and someone that maybe wants to target their abs, as an example.

So you do your landing pages or your micro site, you actually try to optimise these pages that are around those particular key words to try and attract the traffic. So without those tools another thing that I like to use is, I use tools to search Twitter which can be very cool. You can go in and use say Radian6, which is a paid for tool, or you can just go and you search.twitter.com and you actually can go in there and see how many conversations are taking place on Twitter around the particular topic, and what questions people are asking; like what words are they using in order to ask about particular systems or solutions.

HK; What is the most important element to make the most of social media for you?

LT; For me, an important element is keeping everything connected so that you maximise your time. So I’d say, first of all, being very organised with your approach, so consistency is very important. And I would say that if someone said to me, look, I want to get started in such a media, what must I do? Now, I would tell you, on a scale from one to ten, if you want to start out the gate shooting for that ten, you would want to have a blog. You can use themes like woo themes, or thesis or frugal. I would then tell them that they have to purchase SEO Scribe, which is Brain Clark’s tool—he is owner of Coppyblogger – you don’t have to know anything about SEO, you just write your article and it just helps you, it just changes your words and helps you key word optimise it.

But let’s take someone that’s maybe not such a great writer, or you’re not competent in your writing skills; I would use Youtube for video blogs, putting some video blogs out there as far as what your point is. I would use slide share and what my single most important thing that I do is I use a tool called Hoot Suite that actually connects my Twitter, my Facebook, my link, in my blog so that I can go from one dash board to put out content and then I definitely focus very carefully on engaging.

So what I tell people iit doesn’t matter what your space is, there are influential people that you can find using a Twellow OR Listorous. I would target those ten people and I would watch them, I would comment on what they’re doing, I would Tweet them and I would stay laser focused. I wouldn’t stalk them, but I would stay very focused on engaging with these people so that I become smarter by learning by what they’re doing and trying to adapt my style that works for me.

HK; I wonder your opinion on the individual communication in the 21st Century. Because as social media develops, the effect of Twitter, Facebook, and other communication tools on our life is unmissable. Young people often use Facebook every hour and tweet 100 times a day. What is your opinion on these issues?

LT; Yes, that’s a really great question, in fact I was just talking about this yesterday with Loreen Arbus and Clare Mann, and we have a thought process around this that we call CQ, which is the communications quotient so people talk about IQ, which is your aptitude for learning, and then EQ came out, the emotional quotient. Now we’re in a situation where everything is so virtual in business, look at us, we’re doing Skype, we’ve not met before, we’re doing Skype to do an interview. When before you would have met someone in person and it would have been much more difficult to do it. CQ is the bridge between the two – IQ and EQ – It’s how you connect and communicate your ideas effectively.

So everyone’s working so virtually that what I believe is that if we’re not careful the emotions get taken out of it and the passion and creativity lose some of their strength. Because what’s happening is people are getting so much information from each other, and sharing so many thoughts so quickly, that if you’re a visionary or a person that’s an idea person, if you will, you are coming up with so many ideas so quickly that I don’t believe they’re staying in the right side of the brain long enough to really incubate.

So you have situations like Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook that makes big changes to people and then realises that didn’t work out and he changes it really quickly because he’s trying so hard to stay ahead of the competition. He’s taking big risks which I appreciate and respect, but at the same time he’s also making big mistakes that cost money to fix, to damage control.

So I’m hoping that once the newness wears off to some degree and people get used to being connected this way that they will start to then communicate not just more efficiently, because I think that’s what the web’s about right now is efficiency. How many times have you got an email from someone and you read it and it will say you’re in a bad mood, and you read that email and you’re enraged, you cannot believe that they said that to you in that way. It turns out that they didn’t say it that way at all, but because their writing lacks emotion and they were in a hurry and you were in a bad mood; so it all gets translated incorrectly.

So I’m worried that right now the internet is making us lazy communicators, if you will, but at the same time with the explosion of video, I believe that that’s actually going to turn the tide a little bit, because, I think, video, people can see you, feel you and can get an anchor for who you are. And, I think, that that’s going to lift the veil a little bit to where you have to be transparent and honest because it’s very obvious when someone can see what you’re saying if you’re competent, if you will, and if you’re integrated with your communications. I don’t know if that answered your question, it was a long answer?

HK; What would you say as the next big change of the filed of technology?

LT; I think it’s mobile for sure, and I think it’s e-Commerce using your phone. So, I think, if you look at what’s happening in Japan right now, the way that they can just walk past a billboard and a coupon gets downloaded to their phone, and then they can actually purchase so easily from their phones you get an idea of what’s coming. What’s holding us back in The States, honestly, is the way the mobile phone companies are set up, they’re not connected, they’re not integrated.

And, believe it or not, because we have such a great ability to have computers at our homes there hasn’t been a focus, but I’m telling you right now mobile is going to explode and the more people can get familiarised with apps likes Synchcast, Audioboo, things like that, because right now, a four square is an example of what people want – geolocation and the mobile phone are going to explode.

HK; As my research is on the law of success, I was wondering what is your definition of success?

LT; My definition of success is when you set a strategy with a defined outcome of what you want to accomplish, and you can actually measure your outcome. What people do, in my opinion, is they’re very vague with their strategies, and in the way they execute, and there’s a lack of technical skill and a lack of typically people who do analytics and CRM stuff, that’s a skill; just because it’s easy to access doesn’t mean you have the skill set for it. So I define success by definitely setting the strategy that we agree on, testing it and having the metrics.

And if I achieve what I said I was going to achieve then that’s a successful campaign to me; and sometimes your success may just be limited in the fact that we want you to get this video out and we want 1,000 people to view it. So what people have a hard time doing is everyone wants ten million people to view it, and now what I tell people is, and this is my mantra actually is, going viral is never a strategy, ever; it’s a happening, it happens rarely.

And I’ve worked with big clients, we want to go viral; well, I’m sure you do, we all want to go viral. If you’re saying your strategy, out there saying I’m not going to be successful if one million people don’t view this video, that’s not a strategy. Unless you have a huge ad budget, unless you have the money behind that to promote the views, so, for me, success is just simply setting up the strategy, setting up the metrics and hitting my goals, definitely.

And if I don’t hit my goals honestly I actually consider that successful as well as long as I know why, as long as I understand why. And it can be as simple as you didn’t have the right landing page, it could be as simple as you hit the wrong target, you thought that this would appeal to women in their 30s; turns out it appealed to men in their 40s. So you either find the right strategy for the target that you’re going after, or you get smarter and say, well, I guess we should be going after men in their 40s.

And so, to me, success is always just learning something; even if I did something wrong, sometimes my biggest wins have come from my biggest mistakes. It’s a flexibility and the ability to be flexible that will make you very successful on the internet, for sure.

HK; Can you give me your advice to be successfu?

LT; Yes, I just gave a talk on this the other day. I believe the key to success in life, in business, is simple. I believe there’s three columns that you set up and you set some of the things that you want. So most people, if I asked you what you wanted you might be able to tell me. In my experience people might be able to say two or three things. But what’s really funny is if I asked you what you don’t want, Nine out of ten people will go, oh, well, I don’t want a job where I do this, and I don’t want to be in a relationship that looks like this, and I don’t want to do this. And they go on and on about their jobs, . But the key to a successful life is putting a third column, it simply says, what is it that you’re willing to give to get what you want?

So are you willing to give more time to your job to make more money for example, where’s that time going to come from? Are you taking it from your kids, are you taking it from your workouts, are you taking it from your weekends; where is that time going to come from? If you don’t want to give more time then how are you going to get that thing that you want because, honestly, I promise you, what ends up happening is people have the two columns, what they want and what they don’t want, and what ends up happening in order to get what they want, believe it or not, they go to their don’t want column. And they’re like, well, I said I didn’t want to work on weekends but, I guess, I’m willing to; and so they’ll combine in there.

Then they start doing this and all of a sudden they end up going, this sucks, I have everything I ever wanted but I’m doing all the things I didn’t want to do. The problem is that no one really thinks about what it takes to be successful, and so that’s the column, I’m speaking about so many people admire and some even want to be Tony Robins, well, I’m friends with Tony Robins. He’s on the stage for 16 hours times four days, five days at a stretch sometimes. He travelled the world, the man never stops working, really; so what you really want is Tony Robins fame, but you probably don’t have the engine or the motor to do what it takes to be Tony Robins.

So what do you really want that you’re willing to build into your life, and still have the life that you want? And Tony loves his life, but he’s special, he’s Tony Robins, I know he would agree with me when I say that 2rd column is the key to success, isn’t it? And what you want, what you don’t want, and what you’re willing to give up to get what you want.

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Mmmmmmm. Yummy. Squirrels.

From people being fined for killing them, to a company making the world’s strongest beer in taxidermied one, Squirrels are a hot topic these days. Today, squirrels are in the news because of their meat.

Budgens, a North London supermarket is now selling squirrel meat. Apparently, it tastes like rabbit.

Andrew Thorton, owner of the Budgen’s that’s selling the meat claims that “squirrel meat is more sustainable than beef” and “Squirrels will be culled anyway. You have two choices. Either you dispose of them or you eat them.”

It’s really popular, despite animal welfare groups disapproval.

There you have it. Another reason to go easy on the meat.

(Spotted in the Guardian)

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Sainsbury’s announced this month their pledge to plant 2 million trees over the next 5 years with the Woodland Trust. To mark the momentous occasion, they built the tiniest shop ever, in a tree.

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