Let's face it: we are not a socially adept nation.

It is well documented that we English lack social skills. That is to say that, although we crave the company of others just as much as the people of any national culture, we are just not very comfortable with dealing with other people. This has been most eloquently described by anthropologist Kate Fox, who writes very entertainingly about the English social 'dis-ease'.

She explains that this can be seen in a number of instances:

I was astonished to see a recent piece of research from Experian that showed how little impact Google+ is making.

According to The 2012 Digital Marketer: Trend and Benchmark Report (a study that is as long on detail as it is in its title), the top 10 social media sites are not what you would expect.

The list is below, but the interesting thing to me was that Google+ is really not making the waves we all thought it would. With 61 million visits in March, it achieved a fraction of Facebook's traffic (7 BILLION in the same period). It is narrowly ahead of MySpace (!) that is hanging on in there with 43m, yet trailing in the wake of Pinterest (104m) and even Tagged.com (72m). No - I hadn't heard of that one either, but it's outperforming Google+. And that got me wondering.


Marketers are sensible enough to know that Google will give search prominence to Google+ posts, and we all flocked towards it. The web was full of posts and whitepapers explaining how to formulate a Google+ strategy.

But all the strategy in the world isn't going to help if it is a ghost town. I wonder how many of the 61 million visits were from marketers, posting stuff in the hope of getting some kind of SEO benefit.

Maybe I'm wrong, but we've already seen Google Wave level out, and Google Buzz quieten down. Maybe there are only negatives in store for Google+?

While a PC might still be the centerpiece of most business desks, we are increasingly working on laptops, netbooks, smartphones and tablets, which now allow us to work outside the confines of the office.

Of these technologies, the tablet stands out as the most rapidly growing - the hot topic of the past 18 months or so. With the Apple iPad, what started out as a consumer 'must-have' is now creeping in as a business tool, and there is now some solid research to show that a switch is underway from smartphone-wielding commuters to those armed with considerably more conspicuous tablets.

In my household (an environment where iPad usage is largely dictated by a 5-year-old) it is mainly an Angry Birds display mechanism or a digital doodle pad. But the evidence is growing that tablets are commonplace business tools - and that marketers should be aware of this if we are to effectively target business buyers.

As B2B marketers, we invest a big lump of our marketing budgets in our websites. Of course we do. But with so much investment going into them, you would have thought that we would have learned by now the pitfalls that lie in wait for the team planning it.

I was recently talking to Paul Hatcher, our Head of Digital Planning, who surprised me by saying that the same mistakes get made time and time again.

Which means websites end up costing more, taking longer, and delivering less.

So I asked Paul if he would spend a little while writing up these mistakes and explaining how digital marketers could avoid them. Paul has been central to hundreds of B2B website projects over the years and has seen it all happen, and I was keen to share Base One knowledge with our friends via the Beyond blog. He explained that he's made his fair share of mistakes too, but the point is that we're trying to learn from the experience!

Two days later a comprehensive and splendidly written whitepaper dropped into my inbox - and this is my chance to pass it on to you.

Download The Big 5 Mistakes: How Not To Make An Effective B2B Website here. And I hope it helps you get more out of your next project.

Ever wondered what marketing is really all about? When I did my CIM (Chartered Institute of Marketing) Diploma, the first session was dedicated to defining the term. Officially, according to the CIM at the time, marketing was "the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer needs".

Fired up as I was with all the enthusiasm and rebelliousness of youth (I was 27, I think), I took issue with this. Come on. Let's be honest.

That's simply not true.

Marketing is about helping to sell more. It's doing what you need to do in order to make it easier for the sales guys to close the deals. It's greasing the wheels of commerce by creating desire for products, communicating in a certain way that makes more people like your company and your brand.

Isn't it?

Marketing Automation and DIY marketing tools are great.  Powerful tools for the marketer that directly enable you to communicate in a more frequent, relevant and timely manner with customers and prospects.  No need to rely on an agency to send out every email (still smiling!).  I am an absolute advocate of these tools - if used correctly. 

Yet when in untrained hands these tools can quietly erode your brand right in front of your customer's eyes in a way that almost goes unrealised if your antennae is pointed elsewhere. 

I write following recent experience as a recipient of a series of emails as a customer of the sending business (I'm not going to name names).

The basic fact is that you send most emails to people you already have your best relationships with: customers.  Don't underestimate this.  These are the most important people in the world to your business.  Yet email is often delegated as focus put on other 'higher impact' comms.

Why?   Because we 'now have a template',  and with that QA seems to go out of the window.  Yet systems and users have a habit of managing to break templates pretty quickly.  'Those 1000 words will fit.'  'That 1200 pixel wide image will CAN be a thumbnail.'  'Over-compression - they love it!'

Templates are incredibly useful as they let you send out frequent comms without the need to re-invent the wheel each time.  But how thought-through and tested are they?  How understood is their use? Does your sender understand good communication design principles?  Are these being tested across all email clients using tools such as Litmus? Just whose hands are you putting them into?!

So here's the recipe:  a lack of understanding of the brand or good design, consequent template abuse, and the desertion of QA.  Put these in a pot and stir.
Let's see what you get:

So I get an email...  here's what happens in about 5 seconds.

I recognise the sender so I open it.
First impressions: it looks like spam. 
There's an heavily over-compressed logo.  Why has someone turned that into a JPEG?
I can't believe that image has come from an approved library.

Poor text formatting: can hardly read it.  Margins and spacing are everywhere.
Too much content.  Too many links - unstyled.  
Nothing stand-out. 
And didn't I get this before last week?
Delete.
My opinion of the brand has just gone down a few notches.
I will probably just hit delete if it arrives again.

Maybe the primary concern of the sender is about 'just getting it out'. 
That's a phrase I hate. 

So what's the point of this rant?   I suppose I'm trying to point out that even activity deemed 'routine' should be crafted with as much care and attention as the sexy stuff. 
When you consider the audience who receive it, you could easily argue its impression and effect matter far more.

This piece first appeared as the European Perspective column in the print version of B2B Marketing Magazine October 2011.

Ever wondered why the British and the French use social media differently? It's all a question of context, apparently...

Anthropologists will tell you that Europe can be broadly divided into high- and low-context cultures. France and Italy, for example, are high context cultures, where routine communications are often based on experiences and expectations understood by all members of that culture.

This reduces the need for detail, and increases the tendency for verbal story-telling over factual description. Low-context cultures, such as the UK, Germany and the US make fewer such assumptions, preferring fuller communications and more detailed descriptions.

These two dimensions have a very direct influence on how people share and communicate their knowledge. High-context cultures may use stories and metaphors in explaining a learning situation whereas low context cultures may uses tables and figures for underlining arguments. Tables and figures are much more easy to share via online media, whereas stories and metaphors are more suited to face-to-face conversation.

Which may explain why business meetings over a long lunch might happen more in Paris than Berlin. And this may in turn contribute to the slower adoption of social media sharing in such cultures. Whilst LinkedIn is great for sharing infographics, it doesn't serve very good coffee...

Image courtesy of sh0dan, via Flickr and Creative Commons

According to a recent blogpost I read (and I can't remember whose, or I would have credited them fully), content marketing is a little like High School sex. Everyone says they're doing it, but the truth is very few really are. And those who are doing it, are almost certainly doing it wrong.

With this in mind, I thought it was worth sharing the methodology we use at Base One for helping clients to derive the maximum benefit from content marketing.



I couldn't possibly suggest that it is the only way of going about this. But it is a structured approach that you may find useful: it describes in five sensible stages what you need to do in order to identify the correct course of action for your company, as well as outlining a few of the tools that you might use along the way.

Even though we are an agency - and although this is a methodology designed to be applied to our clients' situations - I believe it is equally useful to B2B marketers who are working independently and internally. The same principles apply. (Although of course, if you want any more help, just drop us a line...)

(By the way, the webcast was managed by Brighttalk, and I have simply embedded it here. They may ask you to register to use the service. Otherwise, it is free.)

Although the Base One Beyond blog has until now always been written in English, our operations now extend across Europe, with offices in Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris and Milan. So we are delighted to feature a debut post in Italian from Alessia Di Domenico, Principal at Base One Milan (English readers may wish to use Google Translate):

Fino a qualche decennio fa, le aziende del b2b, protette o limitate (a seconda dei punti di vista) dalle dimensioni più ridotte dei mercati, dalle logiche distributive, da brevetti e tecnologie proprietarie, dedicavano pochissimo tempo e risorse sia al marketing che alla comunicazione.

Convinte che la qualità di prodotti e servizi, i margini che potevano assicurare ai propri clienti e l'esperienza nel settore bastassero a creare un "buon nome", a far crescere di anno in anno il fatturato e a convincere i clienti a ricomprare sempre da loro. E sia proprietari che dirigenti all'interno di aziende b2b spesso si vantavano di essere degli "operatori" anziché degli uomini di marketing, quasi ad indicare che la comunicazione nel b2b non fosse indispensabile per il successo. Oggi non è più così.

Who is the Chief Content Officer in your company?

I ask the question because it is a role that is increasingly common, particularly in the US.

In case it is new to you, a CCO is the single person who is responsible for the whole company's content output. He or she marshalls a company's internal army of writers, bloggers, technologists and amateur film-makers ensuring that everything that is posted in the company's name is of a quality and relevance that customers would expect.

And in this age of instant publishing and information-hungry, Google-happy buyers, the content made available is vital to maintaining a share in the market and a presence in the hearts, minds and bookmarks of the target audience. So I thought it was about time we asked (and answered) the question: what benefits does a CCO actually bring to a B2B organisation?