Simon Van Wyk, Australian Media Expert on “Lessons Learned” from DishyMix Guests: Blogs, Search, Social Media, ROI and Marketing as Conversation
DishyMix
Susan Bratton
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Episode 72 - Simon Van Wyk, Australian Media Expert on “Lessons Learned” from DishyMix Guests: Blogs, Search, Social Media, ROI and Marketing as Conversation

Meet Simon Van Wyk ("van vake"), host of Hothouse Interactive Podcasts out of Sydney, AU. Simon is one of Australia's leading Internet marketing savants. He's Managing Director of Regional Media Networks, a constellation of local content sites serving cities and towns across the continent under the OurPatch moniker. He's also involved in Zazoo and Hothouse Interactive, an agency in Sydney for Toyota and other multinational brands. 

In this episode of DishyMix, Simon turns the tables on Suz and interviews her about key takeaways she's gleaned from her past guests - some of the smartest, most-successful and innovative Americans in the digital media, marketing and Web 2.0 sphere.  Hear what Seth Godin, John Battelle, Charlene Li, Danny Sullivan, Rex Briggs, David Weinberger, Ellen Siminoff and other luminaries have to say about Corporate Blogging, Search Marketing, Social Marketing, ROI and "Marketing as Conversation." Get the top-line perspectives and actionable nuggets from digital media's thought-leaders through Bratton's ability to net out the most salient insights from 20 of her most valuable interviews.

Transcript

Transcript

Woman: This program is brought to you by PersonalLifeMedia.com.

Susan Bratton: Welcome to “DishyMix.” I'm your host, Susan Bratton. On today’s show, we're going to turn the tables and go down under. I'm going to introduce you to Simon Van Wyk. Simon is the Managing Director of a company in Sydney called the "Regional Media Networks” and I've actually been on his podcast. Simon does a podcast called “The Hothouse Interactive Podcast” and he's done it for over on two years. I had the pleasure about a year ago of being on his show and he's here in Los Altos visiting me in the studio.

What we're going to do is actually have Simon do his show live on my show. So Simon is going to interview me and it's going to be a best of “DishyMix” special. He's going to take back to Australia with him. I thought you might enjoy this show as well, so it's a show in a show nested.

[musical interlude]

Simon Van Wyk: It's a real challenge from an [xx] movement the Search environment. It's so much noisier now than it used to be, almost in every category.

Susan Bratton: That’s what Ellen Siminoff said. She said, “As you noted that there are a lot of global campaigns now. You used to do a campaign for MSN and one for Google and you were kind of done. Now, not only are they global campaigns but they're also campaigns where different business units in the organization have different business objectives, different keywords.” So all of it has gotten more complex.

The number one thing that I've noticed people saying, all the blogging experts and the social media experts is that a corporate blog is probably the very best and first thing that most companies can and should do to put their toe in the water of the conversational marketing or social media space.

Where you put your name in LinkedIn, also put your e-mail address in the name space, so that if someone doesn’t have your e-mail but they want to connect with you, they can get your e-mail address and just send you the request. So, when “marketing is conversation” becomes a keyword for me or key phrase for me, I start thinking about not only how am I going to get involved in the conversation, but how am I going to track the conversation that’s happening around my brand that I'm not involved in.

[musical interlude]

Susan Bratton: Welcome, Simon.

Simon Van Wyk: Thank you, Susan.

Susan Bratton: It's so great to have you here.

Simon Van Wyk: It's great to be here.

Susan Bratton: You came on vacation and we put you to work.

Simon Van Wyk: Yes. I've done the Montana trip and now, I'm down in San Francisco.

Susan Bratton: That’s great. Alright, well, we're going to get the show started and you're going to take over. The tables are turned, I'm going to be the guest of the show today. I'm looking forward to it and thanks for having me.

Simon Van Wyk: Thank you.

Susan Bratton: Here we go!

Simon Van Wyk: Hi, I'm Simon Van Wyk, and today, I'm interviewing Susan Bratton in her studio in San Francisco. Susan is, without doubt, interactive industry’s most connected woman. She's been part of the industry from the very beginning, the mid ‘90s. She's definitely shaped the way the industry’s developed and has been a pragmatic operator who definitely walks the walk. She's been very candid about her life and she found herself in her 40s, and lucky me, she loves burning men and rediscovered her marriage a few years ago.

She's authentic, interesting, talented, and people really like her for good reason. As a result, she's one of the best connected people in the Internet. She runs Personal Life Media, a network for the cultural creatives and conducts a weekly interview with some of the industry’s most interesting and creative thinkers. Really, that’s what I want to do focus on today.

Susan, the things you’ve learned from all the interviews you’ve done over the past couple of years, most of the people who’ll listen to this Hothouse podcast are marketing people and are really looking for help and advice. I think, some of the people that you’ve talked to certainly have candid advice for these people. So where, I thought, we’d start this with Search. We're always telling our clients now that Google is really the homepage and you have to think about your website from that point.

You’ve talked to people like Ellen Siminoff of Efficient Frontiers and really talked about how Search is global now and much more complexed; John Battelle, obviously, who wrote the Google book; Stephan Spencer, who talked about SEO and SEM and how search engine optimization people make the best social marketers; and then, Danny Sullivan. What are your take outs from all of those conversations about Search and your advice for marketers?

Susan Bratton: Well, I think, there are always tidbits I learned from everybody. One of the things that Stephan Spencer talked about, that I thought was really helpful, was his expertise in blog visibility. So if you're writing a blog, how do you get a lot of traffic to your blog? Now, he has a post about SEO blog mistakes, all the things that you're not doing right. Since it's a blog post, I recommend that everybody just go read that. Just Google Stephan Spencer from Netconcepts and blog mistakes, then you'll find that it's very popular.

In reality, what he's doing is actually something that he talks about on the show called “link baiting.” Link bait, as he describes it, is something that you write that everybody wants to point to, some definitive piece of information. As a matter of fact, I just wrote on my blog, “The 12 Considerations for Social Media,” using his model, hoping that many people would link to that story as link bait. So that was one of the things I learned.

I also learned from Danny Sullivan that Google and others are moving more toward a blended search capability. Now, when you go to Google, you'll notice that instead of just being the organic results, you're getting maps, you're getting local information. You're getting a lot more things woven into the results. He says that marketers actually need to change their strategy, the whole way that they're managing Search to think about the new blended results. If they're optimizing for their keywords and their phrases in the blended results, that are the way the world works now.

Simon Van Wyk: It's a real challenge [xx] that the Search environment because it's so much noisier now than it used to be, almost in every category.

Susan Bratton: Well, that’s what Ellen Siminoff said. She said, “As you noted that there are a lot of global campaigns now, you know. You used to do a campaign for MSN and one for Google and you were kind of done. Now, not only are they global campaigns, but they're also campaigns where different business units in the organization have different business objectives and different keywords.” So, all of it has gotten more complex, yes.

Simon Van Wyk: Manufacturers are actually, in some respects, competing with the distributors in the Search space and that’s a real challenge for the average marketer.

Susan Bratton: Absolutely. Yes, right, the channel conflict of the Search space, that’s for sure. You mentioned something, too, Simon, when we were talking and preparing for the show. You said, the thing with John Battelle, that John Battelle’s had struck you was how Google is not a media company. Would you talk about that thing you were just saying to me because I thought that was really insightful.

Simon Van Wyk: I was fascinated. A friend of mine was just telling me that their Search traffic to the automotive category had dropped by 20 %. It's kind of obvious because people are just not buying cars anymore. But John points out that media really is a cyclical industry, and I don’t think anyone, I certainly didn’t thought of Google as being subject to those same cycles. But as a media company, they are. The fact that people aren’t buying cars like they were just means people aren’t searching for cars on Google and their traffic has dropped. So their revenue from that category is going to drop, and that’s an enormous change for a company like that that’s really had a bad day in the last ten years.

Susan Bratton: Yes. John does a whole treaties on the things Google needs to do to think like a media company. That was a good part of the episode.

Simon Van Wyk: Since we're talking about blogs, in Australia, we've just started to see a few brave companies start with blogs, but really a lot of large organizations, I'm not quite sure where to start now. I think you’ve got some of the same issues here, I say, some of the same discussion. You’ve interviewed many people – Seth Godin; John Battelle with his network of blogs at Federated Media; Andy Beal had a lot of insights for companies looking to promote themselves to blog. This whole space is a new challenge for marketers. It's so different to anything they're used to. What have you learned from your people about getting a blog started and things to worry about; things not to worry about, how to draw traffic?

Susan Bratton: The number one thing that I've noticed people saying, all the blogging experts, and the social media experts is that a corporate blog is probably the very best and first thing that most companies can and should do to put their toe in the water of the conversational marketing or social media space. I've heard some good ideas recently about how to do that. One was make sure that more than one person in the organization is participating in the corporate blog. Two, establish an editorial calendar and a specific date each week or a specific time each week that a blog post goes live so that it's kind of baked into the calendars of the people responsible so that you don’t get blogged, get paid [sp].

The other thing that I heard that was a good idea recently was to have your customers blog on your corporate blog for you. There are a lot of customers who use products and services in unique ways that can create some good ideas. So it doesn’t just have to come from within the company. That was another really good idea that I heard.

So it continues to be a very important part of moving from push-based advertising to connecting with your customers using these Web tools. You talked about some of the people on the show, one of them was Seth Godin. His book, “Meatball Sunday,” we talked about the fact that some of Seth’s books were, I think, you called it a little bit light or trite or something. “Meatball Sunday” was good, really good if you're trying to embrace the new internet marketing. He said that bloggers are the new gatekeepers and the bloggers have often attract a larger audience than print publications now.

Andy Beal gave some really good advice on the show that he did. He wrote a book called “Radically Transparent,” and he gives these really specific pieces of information like this “Way to find your most aligned targets for bloggers” if you're going to do a press out reach and you want to connect with bloggers and brief them about your company’s products or services or whatever it might be. He talks about getting blog site traffic from Compete.com; getting a vibe for the citations or the level of respect the blogger engenders from traditional media by checking to see if they’ve ever been quoted in Google News. They might not have the most traffic but they might be a real pundit that has some influence for you.

He talks about using Google Search to see which bloggers rank for your target keywords and phrases. He says check the number of inbound links a blogger gets and from whom they get those links on Yahoo’s Site Explorer. Then, of course, you can check on the authority of bloggers in Technorati. So he uses a lot of Web tools to kind of look at many bloggers and then zero in on the ones that are the best profile for his company’s target message. That was a really densely packed interview with a lot of good points and that because it was [sp] excellent.

John Batttelle talks a lot in his interview about how you build conversations between bloggers and readers and some of the ad campaigns they’ve done on blogging sites that are very clever. So that’s a good one as well. So those what, I say, be some of the top things that I've learned about the world of blogging from some of my guests.

Simon Van Wyk: Actually, I agree with that, the point you made at the beginning that the blog is actually the starting point of an organization’s involvement in some kind of social marketing. If you don’t have a blog with a central point at which a company puts out its message in the voice it chooses, in the tone it chooses, where the organization correctly brands itself, I don’t see how any organization can embark on social marketing without that central place out of which they start those conversations.

Susan Bratton: Yes, like they have to have their own online personality that goes beyond just what their website looks like.

Simon Van Wyk: Yes.

Susan Bratton: Yes. It's funny, too, that reminded me, I've another interview I did with Rohit Bhargava. He wrote a book called “Personality Not Included.” One of the things he said was that a lot of times, your corporate website doesn’t have much personality. But your corporate blog actually can, through it's dehumanizing effect of the people in the organization and things that they write, create some more personality around your brand. He says it's not about authenticity. It's actually goes much beyond that to the personality of your corporation. Where does that come from? You can have agencies create personality for brands, but ultimately, it's probably still a reflection of the people and their values and what they bring to the table.

Simon Van Wyk: Yes. That’s what their customers are buying, isn’t it? The personality of the company.

Susan Bratton: It is. Absolutely.

Hey, Simon, do you mind if we take a break right now? I'd like to thank my sponsors.

Simon Van Wyk: Not at all.

Susan Bratton: Alright. Good. So I'm your host, Susan Bratton, and I'm with Simon Van Wyk. He's with the Hothouse Interactive Podcast and he's the Managing Director of Regional Media Networks out of Sydney, Australia. I'm your host, Susan Bratton, getting the tables turned on my bad self and we're going to go thank my sponsors, as you know, I dearly love them. So stay tuned. Stay with us, we've got more things to cover, and I'll be right back with Simon.

[podcast break]

Susan Bratton: Alright, we're back. Its Susan with Simon Van Wyk. We're going to talk some more about social marketing, marketing as conversation, ROI, all kinds of good stuff when Simon interviews me about the best of “DishyMix.” Let's rock it!

Simon Van Wyk: Let's talk a little bit about social marketing. You've interviewed a lot of people like Justin Smith from one of your latest interviews from Facebook and Stephan Spencer who made some interesting points about social media PR; highly entertaining Peter Shankman; again, John Battelle’s advice for B2B marketing, marketers at that, using social marketing; and, of course, Charlene Li and the “Groundswell” book because, I think, for us they’ve got some really pragmatic views on this whole space. Also, the most entertaining Marc Canter interview, but most particularly, his Bud TV explanation. Let's talk a little bit about social marketing because most organizations now are looking for a way into social marketing for something to do. For a lot of them, there's got to be something more than just posting a video on YouTube or your TV commercial on YouTube.

What have you learned from all of those thinkers?

Susan Bratton: It's funny that you say more than just posting a video on YouTube because one of the things Marc Canter said – you brought him up – he says, “A hoot and a half” as we would say out here in the West. Canter said that that whole Anheuser-Bush Cable Television Channel that they created for Bud.TV was a complete waste of time. They actually would have been better off putting those shows on YouTube.

So, I'm not sure that we're beyond YouTube yet at this point. One of the things I see here that people are doing is creating content and then doing almost promotional videos that they place up on YouTube to draw traffic and the interest. So, everyone knows trying to have a viral marketing show is almost impossible, but at least, they can use video to promote content.

Simon Van Wyk: Viral, it seems to me, is not a strategy, it's a lottery.

Susan Bratton: Oh, that’s well put. Not a strategy, a lottery. I like that.

Simon Van Wyk: How does any major marketer run a viral campaign and hope to get a return? Sometimes, they do, but most of the time, they don’t.

Susan Bratton: Yes, that’s not a deal I'd want to take.

Simon Van Wyk: I suppose this is what Charlene Li and the people at Forest have really given marketers a set of really good tools that they can use and think through. What did you get out of your interviews with Charlene?

Susan Bratton: Here's what I will do. I will just point people to her book, “Groundswell.” In the book, I think the best part of it is that she actually goes through some ROI calculations. She shows you how you can actually guesstimate the value of the time spent doing a corporate blog just to come full circle to the corporate blog thing. If you're trying to sell that into your client or into your CEO and they're not buying, there's a really good worksheet that you can do to estimate the actual value of doing that work. That’s what I would recommend from the Charlene piece.

Simon Van Wyk: They did a lot of work for General Motors, didn’t they, around that General Motors’ blog and that value to the organization of that?
 
Susan Bratton: Yes. GM was smart. They were early on, so we got a lot of credit for that. They got a ton of publicity for it, too. I think that there's so much value in being a first mover in these kinds of new medium because the press that you get alone can be a tremendous value, that earned media.

Simon Van Wyk: One thing that struck me about the General Motors blog and some of the people you’ve talked about was that…I remember reading it really early in the piece and the guy had been down to a trade show. He’d looked at one of the cars that it come through the design studio. He’d gone, “Hm, I liked it when it was in the design studio, but when I saw it at the trade show, I wasn’t quite sure we’d hit the mark – I think it was the Thunderbird.

Susan Bratton: Yes, I don’t think they had the mark with that. It really didn’t come out a little bit. They got junkie little toy, didn’t they?

Simon Van Wyk: That’s really weird.

Susan Bratton: Yes.

Simon Van Wyk: But, I thought that was a really authentic comment. I'm sure that’s what good engagement.

Susan Bratton: Yes, that’s true. There were a couple of other pieces to that whole social marketing thing. You talked about Peter Shankman. I was just with him in Boulder, at the Aloha Social Media Summit. Obviously, the first one was in Hawaii, and then we did one in Boulder. We did this really fun exercise where we got the whole room together and we talked about your personal versus your professional online persona in the world of the Social Web.

Now, people are posting their pictures of their vacation in Montana, on the Dude Ranch, yet they work for corporations. Where do you draw the line? We actually created a discussion and we came up with a twelve considerations before you begin dabbling in social media. Think about who you are and what personas you need to hold online and what are some of the rules of the road. I posted that on the “DishyMix” blog and that might be something that people would enjoy checking out.

The other one that you mentioned was Justin Smith’s, that’s a brand new interview. He writes an e-book called “The Facebook Marketing Bible.” You know how Facebook just redid their whole design, and so it's like the new Facebook now. Well, there are a lot of new add formats and marketer opportunities that were never there before. My recommendation is that a) you buy and download “The Facebook Marketing Bible.”

Justin, if you buy a subscription, he updates it every maybe 30 or 60 days. Listen to the podcast while you're in front of your computer and he talks about all the different add formats that you can potentially get involved with as a marketer. What's the difference between a fan club and a Facebook page and a group and a personal profile? So, almost being able to get a guided tour of Facebook from the guide who wrote the Bible on Facebook marketing. That’s a really good just overview of how it all works because it's changed.

The other thing that was helpful, on LinkedIn was Stephan Spencer. He gave three or four really good tips about what you can do in LinkedIn to increase your connections. For example, I'll give you some of the [xx] every show and listen to them. He said, “Where you put your name in LinkedIn, also put your e-mail address in the name space so that if someone doesn’t have your e-mail but they want to connect with you, they can get your e-mail address and just send you the request.” He also said, “Connect with a lion.” Have you ever heard about LinkedIn Lion?

Simon Van Wyk: No, I haven’t.

Susan Bratton: I think it's got something like a LinkedIn Open Networker. These are the people that have connections to five or ten or 20,000 people. If you link to one of those lions that’s kind of tangentially in your field, in your area, then you have access to all those people that is connected through and it makes your network get a lot bigger and faster to be able to do maybe one or two hops to someone that you'd like to meet.

The third thing that he said was, “When you're in LinkedIn and you're filling out your profile, you can actually make links to all your blogs and your Web pages. Those inbound links are really valuable and they can actually be your URLs that you put right in there. So that’s another way that you can, on a personal and professional level, increase your Google rankings and things like that. So those were some of the tidbits I learned in kind of the social media world that I thought were helpful from my “DishyMix” guests.

Simon Van Wyk: The whole concept of marketing now being a conversation, the David Weinberger and “Clue Train Manifesto,” I think. We, in our industry, are so glib with that term because we've lived with it for a long time and most of us understand it. But I'm not sure that the average marketing executive actually really does understand what “marketing as a conversation” means. What do say “marketing as a conversation” meaning now? How has that changed from the way marketing was even five years ago?

Susan Bratton: Well, a couple of things. One, we have gone from scheduling our media and kind of blasting it out to everyone, blasting our ad campaigns that our marketing messages out to our consumers. To consumers, through consumer-generated content, being able to have their own voice on the Web be potentially equal to all of the work that we can do as marketers, so that lone voice. One of the guest that I had on was Pete Blackshaw, and he wrote a book that is – it has a very long title – but the short name of the book is “Tell 3000.” I'm going to butcher the name of the book, but it was something like a happy customer tells three people about your brand and an angry customer tells 3,000.

So the “marketing as conversation” is two things. One, as marketers, instead of buying measured media and blasting it out to our customers, go where our customers are having the conversations and get involved with those conversations – discussions, social networks, message boards, other places like that. Then the second thing is, understanding and knowing your online reputation and tracking very closely what customers are saying about you.

Andy Beal, the guy that wrote “Radically Transparent,” he has a product – that I just signed up for – called “Trackur.” I don’t get money for any of the stuff, by the way. I'm a champion. What I did, I used to use Google Alerts to track all my keywords – my vanities, Susan Bratton Google Alerts and Personal Life Media and all those things. But I was tracking so many that I was getting a ton of e-mail.

What a Trackur does is, essentially, track more than even Google does because they track MyBlog logs, Bloglines, Twitter, all kinds of things that Google’s not tracking yet. So they can measure the conversation and the buzz that’s out in the market about your brand and then they roll it all up into a single digest so that all the words you're tracking come to you. You can go to the site and get them or you can get them in a digest in your e-mail so you can see what the latest things are that are being tracked about your brand.

So when “marketing as conversation” becomes a keyword from your key phrase for me, I start thinking about not only how am I going to get involved in the conversation, but how am I going to track the conversation that’s happening around my brand that I'm not involved in. I like Trackur for that, that works really well.

Simon Van Wyk: Yes, because I think we’ve tried to explain to our customers that…there was a time when marketers had databases of their customers. But now, their customers are going to have databases of the companies that they want to deal with.

Susan Bratton: Right.

Simon Van Wyk: I think that’s the fundamental shift in getting in the way, getting for a company to get on that database is getting harder and harder.

Susan Bratton: Well, like the fad badges. Now, you can be a fan of a brand on Facebook. Their badge, their logo is on your Facebook page. That’s exactly what that is, that’s a database of the brands that you care about, a showcase.

Simon Van Wyk: So let's talk numbers a little bit because every marketer wants to talk about return on investment now and the [xx] of industries kind of championed return on investment. It's funny now because I see a lot of people trying to talk about branding now instead of return on investment which I think is odd. But you interviewed Rex Briggs, who's, I think, one of the most articulate measurers of things digital. He's been to Australia many times and he's the one guy that nails it for me. He's just really clear about what we're measuring, how we're measuring it, and what are return on investment is. You also talked to Sean Cheyney who had some really interesting things to say about how he improved ROI of the insurance company he was working for. What's your take out for most of those people around this particular topic of return on investment?

Susan Bratton: Rex Briggs is brilliant and I also love how he speaks to an audience. He's kind of like an evangelical preacher. He gets down off the stage and gets right out in there with you. So if you ever have an opportunity to hear him present, it's like mad scientist meets evangelical preacher with bright red shoes. He's got such a personality, doesn’t he?

Simon Van Wyk: The marketers love it because all they want to hear is numbers.

Susan Bratton: Well, who doesn’t? Exactly, everything should be quantified now. He has this thing he calls ROMO. It's return on marketing objective. Rex is really famous for doing those cross media surveys and research reports. When the Internet was just coming to the fore here in the States, we needed to show that there was a place for interactive on the media buy because we were trying to move the traditional media dollars out of the traditional and into the Internet. Rex came up with Doron Wesly, who's also been on my show, and other people – Greg Stuart – with this idea that we should measure the value of the synergistic approach to media.

So I would recommend to anyone who's trying and knows in their gut that they need to have more online media spend because that’s where the eyeballs have gone, but they're kind of still stuck in the route, the process of their company and the historical way of doing things or the pipes and the silos that can't be broken down. So look at what Rex has done with cross media where he’ll do a control and test and test, “Okay, this is where we've done just print it online.” Or, “This is where we've done television and print with no online. Now, when we add online, what is the return on our marketing objective? What's the uptake in the total value of the campaign and the revenue generated by having a mix that models an interactive?”

When he talks about ROMO – the return on the marketer’s objective – he's also talking about measuring some things that are even less tangible than actual sales. Sometimes it's engagement or mind share or getting beyond just things like purchase and [xx] and other pieces of the traditional ad effectiveness research. So he's worth listening, too, and also, worth reading. He has a book. He has great white papers on his website which is “Marketing Evolution.” It's very helpful if you're in a more traditional company as well.

Simon Van Wyk: I think, for me, the thing that came out of his and out of Sean Cheyney’s was just that this is a long term thing and because you can measure it, you can do it step by step, you can do it over a period of time, and you can [xx] returns out over a long period of time by just understanding what it is you're measuring and trying to make changes to impact what it is that you're measuring.

Susan Bratton: Yes, Sean Cheyney, he works at AccuQuote.com. It's an insurance broker and he lives and dies by the leads that he delivers as the CMO to his sales people. He's big on [xx], I think, it is. That’s kind of the Web Analytics company that he has plugged in all over his websites so he can really watch, “Hey, someone lands on my homepage. Do they get through the quote process? Where are they going? What are they doing?” all the [xx]. He's doing a ton of multivariate testing on landing pages

He has to get people to fill out a form so that can generate a lead for sales people. He’ll have something like, I think, he said 230 iterations of a landing page with all of these little [xx] changes to see which ones, actually, from a design and his interface’s perspective, convert the most good leads for him, not just leads but the leads that actually convert to paying customers, not just tire kickers. I like that whole piece of the AB testing or the multivariate testing.

Simon Van Wyk: Yes, I liked it, too, because that is the end of the line for our industry is measuring things and showing a return.

Susan Bratton: Absolutely.

Simon Van Wyk: Anyway, finally, the most important thing about all of these because I know you like to finish on a personal note.

Susan Bratton: [xx] didn’t you?

Simon Van Wyk: You’ve been really candid about the fact that you rediscovered your marriage and rebuilt a relationship with Tim as your business partner. Also, you’ve been interviewed some of the world’s greatest thinkers and, for me, the Ken Robinson one was one of the most memorable. So out of all of those people that you’ve interviewed, what's the most personal and important takeaway that you’ve got out of that from all the people you’ve interviewed.

Susan Bratton: Yes, Sir Ken Robinson is an amazing man and that’s a great interview. It's actually my number one most downloaded interview of all the interviews I've ever done.

Simon Van Wyk: It's a very early days one, too.

Susan Bratton: It is. He has staying power. He really talks about the need for revamping our education system and how we need to evoke more creativity in our students. It's funny because I just also interviewed Marcus Buckingham and he's written this new book. Funny, you just bought it, too, “The Truth About You,” which is what he calls “the strengths revolution,” which is working with your strengths and just, basically, just completely ignore the things you don’t do well. Try not to even do them. Get somebody else to do them and make your strengths even better and better and better.

I just love that whole world of strengths, the Strength Finder 2.0 book, where you get to learn what some of your key strengths are. All those things are really fun. I like to see what my guests’ strengths are but the thing that I would say, that I've noticed in doing now close to a hundred interviews in the last year, I would say – it's been year and a half, about 100 interviews – that what I noticed is that these crème de la crème of the thinkers and leaders in the digital media, marketing, and Web 2.0 world have no regrets.

I still have regrets. Regrets of saying stupid things, almost everyday I say something stupid. I think about things that I could ever should have done in my past. To a person, when I ask them, because I ask them questions like, “Okay, what's the worst fork in the road you’ve ever taken? What was your worst decision you’ve ever made?” They all say, “Yes, I've made some bad decisions but I actually really glad I did. I have no regrets. Always take the risk. Do it.” That is the thing I try to keep in mind because I am interviewing the winners, and that’s what I see.

Simon Van Wyk: Actually, I think, that’s true. We were talking about it earlier. I think that I have no regrets I've had where I didn’t make a decision and the decisions you make, whether for good or for bad, I never regret those.

Susan Bratton: I think, it's been really a good decision to do this show together.

Simon Van Wyk: Yes, I've enjoyed it, too. I've enjoyed it, Susan. I've been a listener, I've been a listener from the beginning and it was very easy for me to prepare for this because I've been through all of those things. Every couple of days, I go to the gym and I’ll listen to one of your “DishyMix” things from Australia and I've enjoyed it and passed it on to many people. So I really like to thank you for your time and thank you for being part of this today.

Susan Bratton: I appreciate you listening because it's a labor of love and I enjoyed it so much and I'm glad you did, too. Thank you, Simon.

Simon Van Wyk: We can tell it's a labor of love. Thanks, Susan.

Susan Bratton: Well, that’s it then. So, thank you all so much for tuning in to “DishyMix.” I hope you enjoyed our episode with Simon today. I want to encourage you to join the “DishyMix” Facebook Fan Club where I give away all kinds of goodies like lots of the books that we talked about on today’s show. I'd love it if you'd fill out my Listeners’ Survey. I want to know what you think. It's Survey.PersonalLifeMedia.com.

I'm your host, Susan Bratton. Have a great day and I'll talk to you next week.

Woman: Find more great shows like this on PersonalLifeMedia.com.