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.    

When I go to the cinema I've usually eaten half my popcorn before the film starts. One of the reasons for this (apart from loving sweet popcorn) is the 15 minutes of trailers that you have to sit through before the film starts. For me they're as much an integral part of the cinema experience as the popcorn itself.

The same does not apply when I'm watching a DVD at home. Here I'm in control.

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.

I've just been looking through two sets of brand guidelines, both for household-name b2b brands. They are nice, shiny, well produced documents. Look great in print. But I'm looking for guidance on how we use the brands for online projects we're planning.

What we need to know - and I think should reasonably expect of proper, complete, fully-rounded brand guidelines - is how the brands should live in the online environment.

And nope, there's nothing there. It's completely absent. It doesn't appear seem to have been considered at all. They aren't even that old - the last one was produced in 2008.

So I've come to the conclusion that most of what these 'guidelines' contain is a now total irrelevance to the way a brand needs to be used now.

A decade or so ago, when email had reached critical global mass, we all realised that certain attachments had the power to propagate themselves.

The video with the cat jumping out of the bush. The spoof Ferrari engine sound effect that ultimately spawned the Crazy Frog phenomenon. The endless forward-this-for-good-fortune-but-die-a-painful-death-if-you-don't emails. They went round every email inbox and very quickly marketers had the brilliant idea that they could do the same for their clients.

They (we) were right of course. If you had the right piece of content, you could seed it with a few and it would spread to many. We have grown up a lot since those days. The viral marketing epidemic is over.

Sometimes, it’s good to return to the basics.

I have been looking for a way to distil the essence of social media marketing for B2B and, over the course of a number of conversations with clients, it has become clear that there are just 3 things a B2B organisation needs if it is going to have a strong, useful presence on the social web.

Yep. Just three.

The simple (or simplified) truth is that if you can answer ‘Yes’ to the following three questions, you will make a success out of social media marketing…

Was it something I said?

Although I was initially alarmed to find I had lost more than a hundred of my loyal and dedicated (?) following on Twitter last Friday, I was reassured to hear that this was just Twitter clearing out some of the spammier accounts.

They should be applauded for doing this, although I wonder how they identify spam accounts. I'm sure they have some very sophisticated algorithms for identifying unacceptable behaviour but, without these facts to hand, I thought I would offer my 5 suggestions to help you spot the spammers in your Twitter stream: