I've been listening to a fascinating discussion via Mitch Joel's blog. He and Mark Schaefer have been at loggerheads over the issue of ghost blogging, and debating whether it can be justified in today's business world.

It is an intriguing debate that can be summarised as follows...

At the risk of really annoying you, I have to admit that the above headline is not strictly true. The B2B Marketing Daily will not be on a newsstand near you anytime soon.

But it is online, and you can see today's issue here. By using a new tool called Paper.li I can offer B2B marketers a daily digest of all B2B news that has appeared on Twitter, beautifully laid out in a highly readable newspaper style. In fact, anyone can offer a daily newspaper on a subject of their choice just by choosing a hashtag and hitting the 'publish' button. If there is a hashtag in use, you can make your own newspaper.

Alternatively, you can create a newspaper based on Twitter stories carried by you and your followers. So if you don't have time in the day to follow everything happening in your tweet stream, simply use paper.li and relax with a cup of tea at the end of the day and see what's been happening.

Curation, not creation
It's a nice little tool, but I think it also has wider significance for marketers like us because it is an example of how we all need to be innovative when it comes to content.  If you want to be seen as a thought leader, you need to keep producing good, original content. But content curation - the art of managing and repackaging information to suit your audience's needs - is also an essential part of content marketing. And Paper.li is just a great example of how it can be done.

Find out more at www.paper.li. Go on. Read all about it.

How do you allocate your marketing budget?

There are of course many different ways, but I'm willing to bet that the most significant factor is precedent. Not only are we creatures of habit by nature, but we are also emerging from a particularly nasty dip in the world economy. Now is not the time to take big risks, so it's not surprising we like to stick with what worked in the past.

But it is interesting to look at a gradual evolution of marketing budgets over the years. Starting with the very origins of budget setting and the very first advertising model, I have taken a small - and quite unscientific - look at how marketing budgets have changed.
 
It is fascinating to see how this has changed because we stand on the edge of a further stage of evolution. We have to account for a very different marketing mix these days and it all starts when we sit down and work out where the money is going to go each quarter.

Let's start by recapping the last 100 years...

The phrase "customer experience" is on everyone's lips these days, so we thought it was high time we ran a series of blogs to deal with how this issue is being dealt with in the B2B world. So, over the next few months, that is precisely what we aim to do.

But before you can answer the question of how to improve customer experience, I think it is useful to ask why it should suddenly be so important. After all, isn't all a bit obvious? We've known for some time that making customers happy is a better idea than pissing them off.  But as with so much business thinking, there are some critical subtleties of meaning here. Look a little closer and you'll see why customer experience is actually a more complex issue than it first seems, and deserving of further analysis by B2B organisations.

Here are, I believe, the three main reasons that the concept of customer experience has risen up the business agenda.




Today's FT carries an interesting spread on the difficulties large brands face when their reputation is somehow besmirched by public perceptions of accidents (BP's oil spill and safety record), financial impropriety (Goldman Sachs paying huge bonuses after being bailed out) or just getting too big for your boots (Starbucks global expansion). An article by Morgen Witzel and Ravi Mattu looks at perceptions of leading brands and the difficulties of Asian brands like Tata to transcend local boundaries.

Today is my final day at Base One. I have had a fun and varied week and I feel that my stay here has been very worthwhile.

Although I've only been here a week, I have tried out several different aspects of marketing including competitor research and a variety of tasks for the Search and Social media department. I briefly sampled design on Wednesday morning but then I remembered why I gave up Art and D&T at school! I quickly retreated back to the safety of a laptop computer, away from the gigantic Macs that the design team uses.

From left to right: Mark, Dan, Me, Becks and Krupa

Hi, guys.

Today I thought I would try something different to a diary. I have been interviewing some of my co-workers and finding out what they think of Base One and what they think of themselves. Hopefully, it will give you a little flavour as to what it's like to work at Base One. Here's what they had to say.

Hi. I'm Nick. I'm 15, a student at Kingston Grammar School and doing a week's work experience at Base One. Throughout my time here I'll be writing a blog to tell you about all my new experiences as I sample the world of work for the first time. One of my new experiences will be writing a blog so I hope you enjoy reading about my unique perspective on the world of B2B marketing.

Hi. I'm Nick. I'm 15, a student at Kingston Grammar School and doing a week's work experience at Base One. Throughout my time here I'll be writing a blog to tell you about all my new experiences as I sample the world of work for the first time. One of my new experiences will be writing a blog so I hope you enjoy reading about my unique perspective on the world of B2B marketing.

There are a lot of people talking about content marketing these days - and so they should be. But amongst all the talk about how content marketing is perfect in principle for the modern business world, it's nice to see some concrete examples.

That was one of the ideas behind the Great Content Marketing Experiment, conducted on 19th May this year in London. To put the principles of content marketing to the test by doing a campaign in a day. To create and distribute useful content and to measure its effect within a targeted audience.

The whole experiment has now been summarised in the document below. If you are considering using content marketing, it is a fascinating insight into how it can work in practice - albeit in a 24-hour period! Please feel free to download and distribute - if you find it useful content, that's what it's all about after all.

Download the full story here >> content_marketing_experiment.pdf