There's an interesting report just released by McKinsey about the adoption and satisfaction with Web 2.0 technologies. Whilst I'm not keen on the label of Web 2.0 and the bundling of these technologies into a category, it is an interesting snapshot of how Enterprises are recognizing the potential value (slowly), including an analysis of what gets in the way.

We have a couple of clients who have tentatively dipped their toes with the idea that they will evaluate performance and then make a decision whether to dive in, and we know (if we're honest) they haven't really got it. Yet. In this report there's an analysis of dissatisfaction with Web 2.0 and a perception of the barriers. Those that are most dissatisfied identify the biggest barriers as being:

• My company's leadership team doesn't encourage the use of Web 2.0
• My company's culture doesn't encourage the use of Web 2.0
• My company doesn't understand the potential financial return from the use of Web 2.0
• My company doesn't provide sufficient incentives to adopt or experiment with Web 2.0

This highlights some of the challenges facing those of us who believe in the potential. We have to be clear about our arguments. We have to engage businesses at the highest level and we have to paint of picture of just what is possible.

Coincidently, I heard an interview on the radio this week with the author of a book that charts the development of medical sciences and recounts the resistance the Victorian "so called" medical profession offered to things like general anaesthetic. Apparently, at the time a good surgeon was one who was best at restraining patients through the pain, and so they saw the idea of an anaesthetic as a threat to their prowess. It was the surgeon who was known as being the fastest who could see the benefit, as it enhanced his reputation.

To me this suggests that we will have more success in introducing new techniques to B2B marketers who recognize their true role as building sustainable brands and reputations, not supporting sales or creating brochures. If you are one of those, please put your hand up.

When a new client comes to Base One wanting to increase their position in search engine results, there are two options:

pay-per-click advertising (PPC)

vs.

search engine optimisation (SEO)

SEO means optimising a client's website so that search engines can bring it to the top of their organic results page when potential customers type in relevant queries. These results are known as organic results because the engines find them naturally - there is no money exchanged between sites and engines (stay tuned for PPC below!).

The Base One SEO assessment typically includes analysing a client site for visitors' usability, reviewing the types of links the client site holds, altering the site's infrastructure to make it more search engine-friendly, and other top secret techniques.

Pay-Per Click on the other hand, is just that - clients paying for every click their site receives. You probably recognize the neat little 95-character boxes from these advertisers, which turn up on the right side of the search results; these are called paid results. 

When trying to reach top placement in paid results, there are two key components. First is the "bid" and second is the client site's quality (engines do not give away exact %'s on which factor is more important). A client bids on keywords relevant to their website's products, competing against other sites bidding on the same keyword; whoever has the higher bid and better quality site is placed at the top of the page. Base One works hard to build a strategic, well-coordinated PPC campaign so all relevant keywords are covered within each client's budget. 

Each method, PPC and SEO, has its drawbacks. In PPC, if you bid high enough, a brand-new or poorly constructed site can be placed at the top of the PPC results, but this will mean high costs and will be expensive to maintain. SEO is a slower beast, needing time to be register in search engines as a worthy and relevant piece of content that deserves to be at the top of the results pages. But in the end, it's virtually free.

Plus, users are more likely to refer to the organic results on a page, so clients have a greater chance of being clicked on by ranking higher in organic results. SEO improvements can also improve a PPC campaign's quality score so that clients don't have to bid as high; instead they can rely on their site's quality score to put them at the top of the paid results page.

Ultimately, both tactics deserve space in a client's search plan. To immediately increase traffic a PPC campaign can be a great catalyst, during which time implementing SEO tactics can improve the organic listings of a client's site. Eventually, depending on the competitiveness of the industry, PPC can form less of the equation.

The New York Times recently flagged up this issue, which was probably overdue to appear, in Griping Online? Comcast Hears You and Talks Back. Comcast, a US cable services company, not only has a full-time staff to trawl blogs and other social media for customer complaints, it has a policy of responding immediately online - by commenting on a complaining customer's own blog, for instance.

Well, why not, you might say - if it's a public blog or Tweet, everyone's invited to chime in. But at least seven Comcast customers have called the practice 'creepy'. It's one thing for companies to respond promptly to customer complaints on the company blog, quite another to up periscope on customers' own turf.

But maybe it's just the shock of the new. I admit it seems vaguely Big Brother, as one customer mentioned in the article, but it also seems to be the next logical step in conversation marketing, B2B or B2C.

Could be it all depends on the quality of the response. At least one Comcast customer received much faster resolution to a service problem thanks to the spying, I mean proactive listening, than he was getting from phone-based customer service.

And of course, anyone can delete a comment they don't want from their blog, just like that.

What do you think: Big Brother or fair play?

A recent survey of the online experience of Base One employees showed that while we're a pretty web-savvy bunch, there are some popular web tools we currently don't use very much - namely RSS and social bookmarking.

This stood out to me for two reasons. Firstly, according to our survey over 40% of us don't use these tools - a higher number than I expected. Secondly, I think RSS and social bookmarking are some of the most useful online tools available to us right now.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) brings the latest content (feeds) from your favourite sites straight to you. The RSS I use is especially convenient as my feeds are collated alongside my online email so I can check them at the same time. I'll admit I'm not sure if I'd find it as useful if I had to use a separate programme to collect feeds, but even so it would still be quicker than checking out 10 separate sites several times a week.

There are several well-known social bookmarking sites on the web (I personally use del.icio.us, but there are plenty out there) and it's invaluable to have your favourite sites bookmarked centrally. So whether you're at work, at home, or travelling, you can access your most frequently used web pages regardless of which computer or browser you're using.

The really useful content in a site is often buried deep, which usually means the URL you need may be too long to remember days later. This is just one of the things that makes social bookmarking great for online research - you don't need to remember URLs, you just check your bookmarks anywhere, anytime. And since URLs are tagged by other users as well, you can search those tags as an alternative route to finding related, useful content.

So I'm left wondering why RSS and social bookmarking came out so low on our internal survey. Are they not as well-known as I think, or are they considered merely the domain of the geek? Or maybe it's simpler than that, and we're all so dependent on search engines that we see no reason to remember a site when it can be found again with a quick visit to Google? I'm still not sure...

There's a little itch I've been wanting to scratch for some time and I'm curious as to how many other people share my view.

Marketing chaps, advertising gurus and the wily designer all work in harmony like a well-oiled eel responding to the briefs that flick our way with the most up-to-date hard-(and soft)ware, using the latest technologies, keeping abreast of the latest trends, predicting the next big thing (animals are the next swoosh by the way) and inventing the future of business to business communication. So why have we attached a playground label to our noble profession? 

I'm thinking of petitioning a move away from B2B towards a more grown up BtoB. We're not at school anymore, scratching on the desk with a compass C+R4Eva. While Prince might be able to make a nice living writing cute pop songs like Nothing Compares 2U that doesn't make it OK.

There are numerous (pun intended) examples out there of companies who also suffer from the same symptoms - Phones4U, Talk2Me (not what you think, just google if you're curious), and Parcel2Go, as well as snackfoods/Golf solutions like Pro2Go (obviously H2Go, a New Zealand bottled water with a clever name and a blindingly sweet logo, is in a totally different league).

Shouldn't we advise our clients better? Just consider the continued hassle of giving out a url over the phone to a call centre inTimbuk2 trying to order the latest Zappasonic® C5.2 (or a crowded bar in oh-so-trendy-Shoreditch to that certain someone) that you are damn sure will fulfill your every business need, plus you have a coupon for 10% off orders over $499.99... "My email address? Sure, Alex at Eating 4 2 dot com" you say. "Alex at eating for too dot com?" crackles the reply. And you blame your IT's overzealous spam filter regime?

So rally round and join me with my 26 little alphabet friends and lets kick that 2 into touch.

N.B. If you happen to know what the word is that describes the word/number interchange shenanigan please post it in the comments!

I like to think it's a poem (going all pink now), but it's mostly an invitation. Something to start the conversation. That one you keep hearing about, but maybe haven't jumped into yet.

It's a bit of a nudge, too. Just a pinch. Being in B2B is no excuse for one-way marketing and static mindsets. You're better than that. You can roll.

But you don't have to go it alone. Let's debate how and why (if?) marketing is changing...share influences...move it along...mmm...feels good to stretch...

What do you say?

PS: The ad first appeared in the B2B Marketing Business Directory, but we're planning a series for the magazine and other outlets - just so's you know.

You have no idea how many times I get asked this, and the different ways I have tried to explain what it is, and why it is so important. In fact, in some cases I've just given up. My mum, for example - I just let her believe I work for Google, and leave it at that.

But I'm kind of worried people think SEO is just some buzzword, like "Web 2.0", which by the way in my opinion sounds like a mysterious disease, like colic or IBS. You can just imagine your doctor saying "I'm sorry Sir, you have Web 2.0".

Back to the point: SEO is NOT a buzzword, it's not something you possibly should do to be keeping up with the Joneses. No, no, no sir! If you are serious about your online presence SEO isn't something you should consider - it's something you should most definitely do.

Ok, before you think I have totally lost my marbles and I get lost in a tangent, let me start with the basics, defining SEO:

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and it describes how you adapt and moderate a website specifically so that it is indexed and ranks highly within a search engine's organic (free) listings. See below for where the organic listings are.

To optimise (modify) your website to get traffic through the search engines (mostly Google as they own over 80% of the UK search engine market share) you need to know a lot about how the search engines work, and more importantly how the search engines' algorithm (the mathematical equation) determines which web page is more important than another. Now I'm not going to go into details on these techniques here, as that's a totally different tangent.

But WHY should you do SEO?

In essence, by ranking highly in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) for keywords that are relevant to your business, you will get relevant and targeted traffic. Optimising your website for search engines is the simplest and most powerful way to reach an audience that is actively looking for your product or service. Now this is a really important part, yes they are already LOOKING for your product or service by searching through the search engines for keywords that describes YOUR business. How's that for already doing half the sales job!

Some stats

• 80% of Web users visit a search engine every day
  
• Search is responsible for 49% of online purchases
• In B2B, 93.2% of customers use the internet to research a purchase or service

Now, why you need to rank Highly!!

Just being listed in the search engines is NOT enough. If you are position 56 on Google for a chosen keyword you are not likely to get any traffic. Why? If you think about it, when you use the search engines yourself, how often do you go past the first page of Google when you have done a search? Exactly! You are probably more likely to change your search query/keyword before you venture to that horrible "next page" button. Who has time for that, right? Here are some stats on exactly that:

• 93% of users won't go past the first page of a search
• Less than 1% goes beyond the 2nd page of a search
• The top 3 positions in the organic results receive 80% of the clicks

Here's a diagram from a company called Enquiro visualising the click distribution of the organic search engine listings:

For a while at Base One we've been questioning the logic of the single big idea as the basis of a brand's campaigns. Having spent years creating consistent and compelling campaigns around a single idea, why change? It's been proven to work and buyers are still buyers, surely?

Well, yes and no. The fact is that buyers are changing, as Chris Tacy, Chief Innovation Officer at brand experience agency Method, implies in his post 'Is "The Big Idea" Dead?':

'...now we have an entire new demographic who have grown up not having to take it. And as a result, the control relationship between brands and consumers has changed. And it's not going back. Technology has helped - but behavior is a big part of this. And at then end of the day...the chickens are coming home to roost. In this new world...The Big Idea doesn't really hold water. Without the control relationship on the side of the brands, it's not even justifiable.'

It's this change of relationship that is making us rethink. Brand owners have to realise that they will no longer have control of what people think or say about them. We can influence what they say and think but not control it. And our buyers fit many personas, so for each of them the brand can mean different things. Therefore, we need to start developing clusters of brand ideas that can be relevant to different groups, and yet all relevant to the brand.

Strong brands in the future (even B2B brands) need to resonate as part of the sub-cultures that exist within our markets. Sub-cultures are different, yet they overlap; so too must the ideas we place at the centre of our brands.

I agree with 37 signals dictum that it's best to create half an application rather than a half-arsed application.   What they mean by this, is that it's best to start small and realistic rather than create a bloated monster, ridden with functionality that no one actually uses or understands.  From this ethos they created the excellent basecamp and from it the whole ruby on rails development framework.  They make a LOT of money.

In software, the reason the American companies dominated, rather than the Japanese (who in the 70s and 80s dominated the home consumables market) is that they weren't afraid to quickly release their software and then update it once in the market with new features, rather than wait and perfect their product before launch.  So they were first to market and they then developed their software and its feature-set based upon feedback from the users.  Those who were successful saw their software as a iterative entity, constantly evolving, and were passionately hands-on throughout.  And of course i don't need to tell you who they were.

This is not a bad approach for the b2b marketer in developing a website: just focus on the core things, which will generally be generating leads from your core user groups, and get your site up quickly, and learn together once it's live, building it up in phases, being agile, constantly improving, constantly evolving, based upon what works and what your users do and want. Certainly helps your budget go a whole lot further.

It might mean your new site might not be as big as the one you have now, but is anyone really interested in those news items from 2002?  

Alternatively, you could spend 9 months and a whole lot of money developing a site then releasing it and just then letting it pretty much sit there for then next 3 years while you recover from the effort, before doing it all over again?  So, best to start with creating the perfect half-site than a scrabbling around for half-arsed content to fill your huge empty site.

For many marketing people, a new way of persuading audiences to buy is just another, albeit difficult, challenge in a row of developments that started somewhere after the soap powder era.

For some businesses it's just another challenge and a reminder that maybe you can never really persuade a business 'audience' to buy something that doesn't work or they don't need.

For others, and I count myself and the people I work with among them, it's a reminder of why we're in the business and a re-affirmation of a heartfelt belief that we're not in the business of smoke & mirrors but here to quite honestly help communicate the truth, well. And, that if we do that, then the most natural outcome of showing someone the light, is that they pass it on.

So this is great, but no great revelation. Word of mouth was always a channel, but one never focused on dues to the fact that more controllable channels were producing results. But since the soap powder days, those controllable channels have been yielding less and less results. Word of mouth has become almost an underground channel where people can talk to each other without the manipulation of marketing.

Our approach to it therefore has not got to be one of manipulation but one of facilitation, yes?