2011 is the year of video. Actually, no - it's 2012. Or rather 2013.

Let me give you some news. It's never going to be the year of video. And this is why.

It's all about time. And the lack of it. Look around you in the B2B marketing space and you get a pretty clear picture what is happening. Everyone is talking about content marketing. The majority of marketers have stopped investing in interruptive marketing (advertising etc) and started putting their cash into creating content. I don't have to tell you why. Buyers are in control. Searching for information on their own terms. Self-selecting targeting, etc etc.

There is little doubt that this is a good idea right now.

And strangely enough this is the very reason why video, as a content tool for lead generation, is getting weaker, not stronger. 

What will the world be like in 5 years' time? What will we be doing? These are the questions we tried to answer in our most recent webcast.

A fairly brief but intriguing exposé of future possibilities, we look at ideas such as:

• big data (what is a yottabyte, and why does it matter?)
• human-centric planning (and why brands will be pretending to be human)
• the new world of work (easier commuting, but no one to talk with round the water cooler)
• how we will be doing marketing that focuses on the individual more than ever before

Have a listen and tell us what you think...

Are we just too digital for our own good?

One of the interesting insights to come out of our recent Buyersphere Report, a survey of the behaviours of 800 business buyers, was the suggestion that we may be overestimating the importance of digital technology. I'm not suggesting we abandon email marketing and go and live in caves, but the report highlights a very interesting development that may be hindering the effectiveness of our marketing.

This year's Buyersphere Report on B2B buyer behaviour shows a remarkable decline in social media usage amongst B2B buyers - but also compelling evidence that this is only temporary as younger 'digital natives' begin to make their mark. These are only some of the findings of this major report into B2B buyer behaviour - you can download the full report here.

Buyers are still hungry for information
The 2012 Report showed an increase on the previous year in terms of the sheer amount of content sought by buyers in the course of the buying process.


This is good news for all those marketers who are investing in content programmes and thought leadership campaigns. Buyers want content more than ever and they will find you via Google. A solid, well-planned content strategy and best practice SEO is a pretty safe bet right now.

But social media is down - which begs the question: are we over-hyping social media? Let's not forget that this survey asks the buyers themselves whether they actually used it. This is not marketer opinion; it's what the buyers actually did last year when they were wondering whether to spend money with you or with your competitors.

Let's look at why this might be happening...

It all makes perfect sense.

When a company is going through a branding exercise, it is excellent practice to put together a guide to how the brand should speak - otherwise known as a "tone of voice" document. The idea is that anyone involved with the brand - whether it is the CEO giving a talk to shareholders or a marketing exec creating an email blast - should be confident that they are helping the brand to communicate in a tone of voice that is consistent with the agreed brand.

It's a straightforward idea. So why do so many companies do it so badly?

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?