On the 15th of October I received the following e-mail from Siobhan Stirling at BBC South East Today – the BBCs local news programme covering the Eastbourne and Seaford area (and Brighton too, although most people can’t actually receive it here):
Kieran I am a producer for BBC South East. I came across your website when I was planning a walk in Cuckmere Haven with my family last weekend. We love the photographic gallery you are keeping of the changing coastline and would love to feature it on BBC South East.
Typically, at this time my mobile phone was completely buggered and it took about a week before I was actually able to successfully have a conversation with Siobhan on the phone. During this call Siobhan explained that they’d like to do a short feature on my project and film me up at at Cuckmere Haven actually doing some photography. Of course I was very enthusiastic about this because it’s great free publicity for my website.
Siobhan also explained why it is that the news we can actually receive in Brighton is so focused on Portsmouth and Southampton. Brighton actually marks the border between the BBC South and the BBC South East areas. I knew that BBC South’s studio was in Southampton, but it turns out they’ve only got one reporter in Brighton, in comparison to BBC South East’s two reporters – that’s right, the news show that we can’t even watch have more reporters in Brighton than the one we can watch.
This is one of my (many) pet peeves – it’s not just that BBC South Today are too Southampton-centric, I believe the producers actually take a rather disdainful attitude towards Brighton. Whenever Brighton’s featured – which happens quite rarely, it’s pretty much always some kind of story about drug addicts or homeless people. I get the impression the Southampton producers think that Brighton’s full of hippys, gays and druggies. Okay, it is.. but that’s a good thing! Nobody in Brighton gives a fuck about the latest big boat to have been launched in the Solent – I will actually heckle the TV when there’s a news story about some fucking boat. Brighton actually does have a lot of general-interest events happening in it, but they never get any coverage from BBC South.
Anyway, enough ranting about BBC South – thankfully it was actually BBC South East Today that wanted to feature me and I don’t have any rants about them because I’ve never actually seen it. In fact, I have nothing but positive words to say about BBC South East because everyone I dealt with there was very friendly and likable.
After having spoken to Siobhan and agreed to the filming, we were hit with over a month of solid rain, it would’ve been virtually impossible to film. Eventually it did let up and I got a call to arrange filming on December 15th. Shortly after I knackered my car driving to Bristol and back with no oil in it! I was a little bit worried at the time that my car was going to give out on me and I was going to get stuck half way there and end up late. Anyway, the car was fine (as it has been ever since) and I got there on time.
Upon arriving at the Hill Barn car park which is where I’d arranged to meet Robin Gibson the reporter and the Ben Leete the cameraman (who I would later find out goes by ‘Ben the geek‘ – obviously anybody who introduces themselves as a geek is gonna go down well with me).
Robin Gibson and Ben the geek
I was expecting a bit more of an entourage to be honest, more people, a van, anything, but it was just the two of them – I think Ben turned up in a Vauxhall Astra hire car, I didn’t see what Robin was driving but it was definitely a car – I guess this is how news reporting works, it needs to be lightweight in order to keep up with the news. Naturally the first thing I was looking at was their mode of transport, wheels are important yes! Apparently they would normally have had an editing suite in a van, but that van had broken down and was still in Brighton, hence the hire car.
On the way from the car park down to the coastguard cottages I tried to brief Robin with as much information about my project as possible so that he would be able to ask the right kinds of questions (and not catch me out of things I hadn’t prepared for). One of the things I was curious to try to see was whether he seemed happy with his job – let me explain that: Basically I knew my project would be the “human interest” story, or, to put it another way, the “and finally..” item (although it didn’t actually come at the end of the programme). I’ve noticed in TV news that sometimes you can detect an ever-so-slight hint of resentment in the reporter giving the “and finally..” piece, sometimes you can tell that they feel stupid reporting on these trivial stories and they’d rather be doing hard-nosed political reporting or something.
Well, I’m pleased to report that it was immediately obvious that Robin didn’t take that attitude (or if he does, his professionalism hides it bloody well). He seems to actually revel in the absurdity of some of the stories he covers. This made him instantly likable and very easy to chat to. I had watched the previous day’s episode of South East Today on the BBC website in which Robin’s report was on a bunch of nutters from Hampshire who like to dress up as some kind of demented horse and then hit it with a stick. Sorta like a life-sized piñata but instead of candy inside you’ve got the village idiot and when you hit it nothing comes out except perhaps some blood – looked to me like a thinly veiled excuse to beat a retarded man with a stick. I wish I could remember what it was called now so I could provide a link. It was actually Robin who mentioned this story in passing and without even the slightest hint of sarcasm of disdain! Jesus christ, I thought, this guy really does love interviewing crazy weirdos. Hats off to him and hats off to the Beeb for finding the right man for the job.
To be fair, they probably could’ve edited my interview to make me look like a crazy weirdo. After all, I kinda am one. I did say one pretty risqué thing on camera – Robin directly asked me if I was an environmentalist, to which I replied “No, quite the opposite, I don’t like to be told I shouldn’t drive my car” – I wouldn’t have minded too much if they had included that because it’s both controversial and true, although I’m aware it makes me look like a bit of a selfish cock – only to environmentalists though so I’m not worried about that. I think I might also have said that Cuckmere Haven was created by the victorians for the enjoyment of city folk – I’m kinda glad they didn’t include that because it also makes me look like a bit of a cock – an assertion like that requires a small history lesson to back it up which obviously I didn’t have time to give on camera.
Being in front of the camera is weird for me, I’m used to being behind the camera – I’m quite good behind a camera, I know what to say to make people relax and get the best photos, I’m also quite good at taking people by surprise and getting great action shots. In front of a camera however, I’m like a fish out of water.
Ben the geek
Actually the hardest part, and the part that I hadn’t really anticipated was that when you’re being filmed like this you’re constantly in conflict with your brain’s own “don’t repeat yourself” mechanism. What I mean by that is that I was trying to give Robin as much information about my project off-camera so that he could actually compile the report, that when I came to talk about it on-camera, I was fighting my brain’s own built-in mechanism not to repeat everything I’d just said. Of course then you have to do repeated re-takes and the same conversations from different angles with and without mics, it’s very easy to screw up the delivery on things and forget to mention things that you wanted to mention. I think one of the key skills needed to be a TV personality is the ability to erase your brain’s buffer of what you’ve just said and start at the beginning again, replaying the same conversation over and over until you get it right.
I did have few soundbites prepared in my head that I wanted to give on camera, but unfortunately due to the repeating-yourself problem I screwed up the delivery on my favourite one and it got edited out. Oh well, it’s not Cuckmere Haven-specific so I’m gonna save it for my next TV interview – I’d rather give it and get the delivery perfect than have it broadcast with me stuttering because it’s basically an explanation of my entire reason for doing photography in a couple of sentences. I’m not gonna say what it is, you’ll just have to wait until the next time someone asks me to do an interview. I did manage to get a couple of good soundbites out and I was happy with the final edit that got broadcast. And here it is:
The thing is, to me, this is a step on the ladder towards my final goal. Ultimately my goal is to get my images seen, not by thousands of people, but by millions of people, not for the sake of making money, but simply for the sake of getting my images seen. What’s the point in me risking my life driving up to Cuckmere Haven in the snow if nobody sees my images? My sights are set high – I’m aiming for thousands, even tens of thousands of visitors to my website per day, on this scale the BBC are actually a relatively small success. I want my images to be seen all over the world. I want to be the next Ansel Adams.
The Coastguard Cottages
Part of the task is to just get progressively better and better at the art of photography itself – I’m constantly working to improve the photos that I take and improve my website so that it displays them in the most effective manner, but an equal part of the problem is marketing – actually getting the website seen. I actually have a relatively strong internet marketing background, the majority of the companies I’ve worked for in the last 5 years have had a marketing slant. In some ways that’s part of the purpose of this website; I want to understand internet marketing and prove to myself that I can make it work on a large scale.
I’ve been doing lots of traditional internet marketing – this is primarily focused around building inbound links, writing content and basically getting people talking about my website. The most important thing really is getting people to link to you – this is necessary both in terms of building Google Pagerank and actually getting people to click on those links and visit your site. It’s really just a case of contacting the right people and asking them for links. I’m pretty good at traditional internet marketing like this, and I worked hard to get my website onto the first page of results for the term “Cuckmere Haven”, and it’s this that bought me the interest from the BBC.
The thing is, I know that traditional internet marketing will only take me so far – to achieve the level of success that I’m aiming for, what I need is viral marketing. This is a relatively new practice but I’ve already glimpsed at the awesome exposure it can bring and I’m now determined to get it right and catapult my website into the big league. Viral marketing is new because it relies upon the social element to many new websites like Youtube and Facebook that allow a person, upon seeing something that amuses or interests them to pass that thing along to their friends – when this process is repeated over and over again, it can reach a point of criticality – an ignition temperature if you like, a point at which the reaction continues under its own steam and thousands of new people are exposed to it every day. This is when you see the exponential growth curve that gives you the potential to reach basically everyone on the internet.
In the graph below you can see a very clear example of the power of viral marketing. This graph shows the number of my visitors to my website per week since I really started trying to market it back in April:
Visitors per week since April
Notice that there are two major peaks, the first peak in the last week of June actually represents a minor internet hit that I had on the social bookmarking sites with my timelapse videos. The second set of peaks at the end of the year represent the traffic I got from having my website mentioned on TV. Notice how the viral effect of a hit on the social bookmarking sites actually resulted in a higher spike in traffic than a TV appearance! The funny thing is, those timelapse videos were really only my experimentations with the medium, in preparation for a proper timelapse video that I intend to take at Cuckmere Haven in the summer – I never intended them to be seen by so many people!
Of course, there’s a little more to it than that – the hits I got from the timelapse event were mostly one-off visitors, I did gain some return visitors from this event but the vast majority of those 1000 visitors simply came to my site, watched my timelapse videos and then went away again, never to return. Furthermore, the fact that the timelapse videos caused a bigger spike on the graph is in part due to the resolution of the graph itself – the visitors to my timelapse page all came within a few days of each other, but during that time the number of hits started out low, gradually increased to a maximum point and then gradually fell off, returning almost back to its original level after 3 days. This is why you see one big spike on the graph – pretty much the entire sum of the traffic came within one week period, so they all fall within the same segment on the graph. This is in contrast to the traffic which I received as a result of the TV appearance – this followed a rather different curve. As the news broadcast went out my site experienced a sudden and rapid spike in traffic – this was people who had seen the report and then immediately decided to look at my site. The spike was so rapid that at its peak it was causing a noticable load on the server. This spike then gradually trailed off over the course of the evening as people went to bed. However, the increased traffic continued for many days after the event (and continues to this day) as people presumably recalled seeing the report and Googled for me whilst killing time at work. The BBC were also kind enough to provide a link to me from their website which resulted in many more clicks through to my site.
The other important thing to note is the relative value of these visitors – the timelapse visitors had no idea what my site was about, they were simply here to watch my timelapse videos, in contast; the visitors from the TV appearance had already been given a 2 minute introduction to my Cuckmere Haven project and had gone out of their way to look me up. This makes them significantly more valuable to me because they’re likely to spend longer browsing and come back at a later date to check for updates.
That said, even though viral traffic is less valuable than more targetted traffic, it has the potential for much greater exposure. Also, crucially, it’s within the reach of even a very small player like myself – you do not need a massive marketing team or budget to make viral work. Like all marketing however, it’s insanely unpredictable. I had absolutely no idea the timelapse videos were going to be a success, and the things I think have a good chance of being a viral success haven’t done nearly so well. In short, the only real approach to successful viral marketing is to throw lots of shit and hope that some of it sticks.
