Company founder and Creative Director, Ross Thornley talks about building a successful – and balanced – creative business, and his predictions for the future.

This month, RT Media celebrates a decade of creative campaigns, branding and web marketing for a client base spanning international, national and regional clients of all shapes and sizes.

Company founder and Creative Director, Ross Thornley, attributes the company’s success to a clear vision, a clear definition of success, a focussed drive to achieve it, and good timing – launching a creative agency at the start of the new media revolution.

Ross explains: “When I started the company I was 21, I worked from a bedroom armed with an Apple Mac, support from my family and a desire to prove myself.  Ten years on, RT Media has grown organically to a 10 strong team with all the skills required to fully service 21^st century campaigns.  All this has happened against perhaps the biggest ever change for marketeers; the advent of broadband into our homes.”

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It’s everywhere, inescapable. In every news outlet, in every country of the world (sometimes as a front page story), Facebook privacy settings are changing once again. That fact in itself is practically a landmark in the importance of social networking sites, but that’s a different blog post.

So you may be thinking, as I’m sure quite a lot of Facebook’s almost 500 million registered users are, what exactly is going on?

Not so long ago Facebook changed their privacy settings to allow users granular access to their privacy settings, to control exactly who can see what, when, where and in what context. Personally I thought this was a marvelous idea, and the first thing I did was set everything to private. Job done, straightforward and spelled out for you there in black and white.

Unfortunately this spelled trouble for people who found the level of control to be overwhelming and confusing, and after a few privacy gaffes (including a few choice comments from Mark Zuckerberg himself) and millions of users threatening to delete or abandon their accounts, Facebook have caved to the pressure and are rolling out a simpler, one click approach to privacy controls. But what exactly does this mean?

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Ross loves twittering. You can see that he is in “Twitter” mood when his eyes light up and he has a smile on his face like a child on Christmas day. And everybody knows, he is going to enchant the world and his faithful followers with some wisdom about his passion-  branding -  or just something interesting that happened in his life. Personally, I already feel over challenged keeping my private Facebook account up to date and I don’t even want to talk about my LinkedIn profile. However.  (you could see it coming, this “however”…) As responsible for e-marketing I have become a bit of an evangelist for social as well as business networks as a fantastic marketing tool. “Viral Marketing” is the magic word, which means nothing more than “word-of-mouth”. Basically, let others do your marketing for you. Spread the word, pass it on to your followers who pass it on to theirs who pass it on to theirs… and before you know, your audience has gone from 20 to 8000. No costs involved. How much better can it get?

What does this have to do with email marketing? An e-newsletter can be the ideal place to drive people to your networks and to get the ball rolling. You add a little icon to your newsletter (can be Twitter, can be Facebook or LinkedIn or all of them – whichever suits your business best) and place it strategically so that people can easily find and click on it. If only 5 people click on your profile and decide to follow you (I keep to the Twitter example) and each of them have 20 followers themselves – imagine how easily you’ve enhanced your potential target audience. Or why not create a group, start a discussion and kick it off in your newsletter? The options are endless…

Whenever we start a new email marketing strategy for a new client we strongly recommend to set up a company (not your private!) profile on at least the most commonly known networks and to promote them in the actual newsletter. It doesn’t hurt but does increase your chances of being heard and builds a deeper more engaging relationship with your audience. And if you are like me a bit scared of regular updates, here’s a nice tip: http://ping.fm/ Sign up for free, send your update to them – and it gets automatically published on all networks you have registered with them.

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