This is the first in a short series of blogs based on research conducted by IDG Connect - and made available exclusively through Base One - into a fascinating area: the discrepancy between how marketers and prospective buyers view email communications. The findings, published this January, examine different perceptions of the drivers for engagement, intensity and open rates. Part one addresses the difficulties of B2B communication...

Opinion seems to be divided on blogging. Some marketers see it as a fading influence, yesterday's technology that is being fast eclipsed in importance by newer social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter etc. After all, blogging has been around for years - there must be something better by now?

But others recognise that a blog is still a great marketing tool if used correctly. It gives a brand a voice that connects personally with customers. It is versatile and cheap to implement. It has great SEO impact and can be used to create brand preference as well as driving traffic by giving people another reason to come to your site.

But, as always, if you don't have the right content you are doomed. Blogging may be the right strategy, but you do you have the content? Do you have the people to produce it? Do you have time to produce it?

These were question facing CWJobs, the leading IT recruitment specialist, when we started talking to them about heir social media strategy 18 months ago. Together we found a solution that has more than met their objectives - read all about it here:

B2B_social_media_case_study_CWJobs.pdf.

It seems like we've been writing about it for ages, but real documented accounts of successful social media marketing campaigns are still fairly thin on the ground.

Is this because it is not working? Not at all. There is plenty of research that confirms that social media marketing is a viable, powerful and increasingly important part of the marketer's toolkit. It's also well known that companies are planning to invest far more in social media techniques in 2010 than in previous years. But it is taking a while for the case studies to filter through.

So we thought we would document some of our experiences to date, and have produced three case studies based on our work with three different clients, and will publish them here in a series of blogs over the next week or so. The case studies are quite different in scope and cover the following topics:

#1: Building a social media presence
#2: Creating and populating a community
#3: Blogging for people who don't blog

We don't want to suggest we have prepared a 10,000-word thesis on each one, or that they feature the world's biggest brands. But what we have written is an honest, practical account of what we - and some very forward-thinking marketers of course - tried to do and how we got on.

We hope our experiences may be of interest to others out there who are considering the same thing, so we thought we'd share it. That is the principle of social media after all, isn't it?

Download the pdf file by clicking here: B2B Social Media case study: Building a Presence.

It's tough being a small business, especially in B2B. There is never enough time in the day to manage the day-to-day business, let alone think about promotion, so making a foray into social media marketing is the last thing on many small business owners' minds.
 
But when I read Diana Huff's discussion on LinkedIn that small businesses may not be able to compete with large companies because of the difficulty of creating content, I thought the opposite was true: social media is in fact a great leveller.
 
The reason is, as has been discussed on these pages before, that the impact of content does not depend on the money behind it. True, if you have a big budget and people to organise it, you can produce highly polished videos, and beautifully designed ebooks, compared to the hastily-compiled Wordpress blogs that the time-pressed entrepreneur may have to make do with.
 
But if the content itself is valuable - if it is useful, original, thought-provoking, expert - it will work as well as the big-budget productions of the blue chips.
 
The beauty of content marketing is that it does not carry a crippling media buying cost. Small businesses cannot compete in advertising terms with the big boys, because they cannot afford it. So, in the past, when brand presence depended on advertising in the business titles, the small players found it hard to compete. But in the brave new world of content marketing, media is not paid for, it is earned - by usefulness, by creativity, by expertise.

If the small business has an interesting, valuable, expert, useful angle, it will be spread by others and posted in lots of other places.

If they have the creativity, they don't need the spend.

 

Image courtesy of the great iPhone app, iHandylevel - available for download at all good AppStores.

What will 2009 be remembered for in the world of B2B marketing?

From our point of view, it was the year that B2B went beyond business as usual. What do we mean? Maybe this is best illustrated by a brief track back through the Base One Beyond blog and flagging up the most read posts. After all, we can think what we like but the acid test is what attracts the most readers. If the people don't get it, it's not working.

One of 2009's most used words was 'social media' and it dawned on many B2B marketers in 2009 that this was something to take notice of. This then spawned the term 'Buyersphere', which we have been quoting ever since we first blogged about it in March.

The following month saw a great example of how social media makes people tell the truth. Or rather how it exposes people when they don't, with the story of Damian McBride and his smear emails.

But the realisation of how B2B marketers needed to change what they were doing - and change how they were thinking - came to the fore during the summer. Our take on these developments was summarised by an interesting chance encounter with a traditional magazine editor (one of a dying breed in 2009), and by the fascinating debate over who exactly should be talking for your brand out there in the Brave New World of social media.

Whose job is it anyway? Your PR dept? Your marketing guys? Your CEO? How about - just possibly - it might be everyone's job. One of the realisations of 200 was that, as marketers, our job is perhaps not so much to do it as to enable it.

But there was also a wonderful feeling of goodwill around in 2009 - which is odd considering the economic climate. The awareness that peer-to-peer information sharing was increasing - the fact that buyers were talking to buyers - convinced many a gnarly old marketer that we could no longer talk at our customers. It was all about sharing and, well, being nice. Etiquette was big news in 2009 as it became clear that brands needed to give something of value if they were to receive the valuable attention of their target audience. A popular metaphor was that we were all invited to the world's biggest cocktail party - and we had to behave accordingly.  

But where was the proof that all of this was working? As proponents of the 'new way of working' we were keen to flag up a good success story when we saw it, and May showed us why it was more important than ever to listen to customers!

The following months, the discussions continued, with pieces on the problems with data capture, the true meaning of viral marketing and how to spot spammers. (I've also learned not to include the word 'spammer' in a blog post - search engines don't like it...)

As if to prove that going beyond business as usual was not limited to the business of social media, we then introduced a little culture into proceedings with B2Beat poetry - an anthology of inspiring verse from our very own poet laureate, Noel Ponthieux.  This obviously struck a chord with marketers around the world as the modest print run that we produced quickly sold out.

We chose scandal for our next topic, with the outrageous story of how Pepsi endorsed casual sexism in its social media marketing. This was followed by Jamie-Lee Wallace's excellent lesson in selectivity, before we then segued effortlessly into a comparison of Star Trek and B2B marketing. Trust me, the link is highly logical.

So in summary, it has been a year to remember for B2B marketing, and one for which we were proud to provide a commentary here on the Base One Beyond blog.

As an aside, it was also the year when someone pointed out that the words 'gold' and 'blog' are mirror images of each other. This makes 'blog gold' at the same time a palindrome, an excuse for a logo (see below) and a great name for the award we give to our best blogs.



And for 2009, I can think of no one who has boldly gone further than Ms Ponthieux with her Star Trek piece.

Thank you all for reading - see you next year.

If, in the early years of the 20th century, the Wright Brothers had set out to build a machine that would carry hundreds of passengers across the Atlantic, with toilets fore and aft, they would have failed.

Instead, they focused on the short-term goal, which in their case was to prove that it was possible for a self-powered, heaver-than-air machine to fly. The distance was unimportant, they wanted to see if it worked.

So when the Wright Flyer bumped back onto the Kittyhawk sands after its maiden flight - a distance of a mere 120 feet - they had achieved what they set out to do.

Whilst reluctant to drag the reader away from aviation pioneers and back into the 21st century world of social media marketing, the parallel is an important one: you cannot expect to go into social media marketing and achieve everything at once. You have to learn to walk before you can run. Or, to extend the earlier analogy, if you want your brand to really fly, you've got to do the basics first.

Here's why - and what you can do about it.    

This post has been contributed by Jamie Lee Wallace, a good friend of Base One, who is also one of the founders of Savvy B2B Marketing - a collaborative blog offering unique B2B marketing insights delivered with healthy doses of humility and good humor.

One of the number one complaints about social media is that it takes too much time. 

Companies considering the leap into the land of blogs and tweets often run screaming into the night after they glimpse the reality of what it takes to launch and maintain a worthwhile social media presence.

I don't blame them. The onslaught of digital information is overwhelming, but there is hope. The key is in being selective.

OK, picture the scene. You are a male in your mid-20s. You're in a bar packed with beautiful women, and you have one thing on your mind. How do you increase your chances of 'success'? That's right: turn to family brand Pepsi, who have sanctioned an incredible piece of social media marketing, built around an iPhone app.

The application - available now free from an AppStore near you - offers advice on how to 'score' by way of promoting its spin-off beverage, Amp. "Amp up before you score" is the line behind this amazingly insensitive marketing idea.

 

In the new era of accountability responsibility and state-authorised bonuses everyone is trying to measure everything.

Most of the time, this is a justification of activity, inactivity, existence or jobs. But in the world of advertising, we need to be particularly careful what we measure. As the saying goes, **we know that only half of our advertising is working - we just don't know which half**.

Online marketing has the beauty of being 100% measurable - or so we are led to believe. The use of cookies and pixels enables us to track who has seen our ad and what they did after it. And all this is beautifully packaged as "analytics"  - a lovely word implying science and absolutes.
 
But online analytics don't tell us as much as we think they do. Is it enough to know how many people viewed an ad? What about how people think and feel? How do you measure the whole experience?

**Measurement v money**

With media budgets shrinking across the board, it has become even more important to justify every penny spent. And so it seems strange that marketers are still so attached to one-dimensional metrics when they really need to know as much as they can.

We've taken an overview of advertising measurement - both on- and off-line - in our whitepaper: Finding Out Which Half Of Your Advertising Is Working. Please feel free to download it here - and leave a comment or get in touch if you want to continue the discussion or find out more.

One of the things I really love about my job is that I'm always learning - in particular about my clients, their responsibilities, their worries, their jobs and their businesses.

I especially love meeting new people working in businesses, industries, and markets where I know very little. This is a fantastically privileged position to be in. How many people have this diversity in their day-to-day lives? How many people get to learn so much from such knowledgeable people?

I was thinking recently about this 'process' of getting to know people and their businesses... how, in those first few meetings, it's all about intently listening and asking questions... or at least that's what I thought I was doing.