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?

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.)

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?

Salted liquorice is very popular in Sweden, the Scottish love deep fried Mars bars, and in Finland sautéed reindeer is a national dish. We're all different and it should therefore be no surprise that there are also preferences for different types of content around the world.

Because like food, most regional differences stem from what is available and how tastes and markets have evolved accordingly. But what kind of content do different audiences want? As marketers we need to know, and I have some recent research that provides some of the answers...

If you're an IT manager in Kenya you probably want different information from one of your contemporaries in the US, right? It stands to reason that research reports and papers aimed at one market may not be appropriate for another.

People in emerging markets might not even have the broadband speed to trial information promoted in European or US material. This all makes perfect sense when you think about it, yet I found some recent research that suggests most of us are failing to meet the needs of customers and prospects in different countries. Last month's excellent report by IDG Connect shows how different types of IT content are received in different regions and shows that the majority of B2B marketers are simply not taking localisation into account.

And that is costing us money and losing us sales.

Everyone's talking about it, but content marketing could be a really bad move for you and your company. Let me explain why.

I recently listened to an episode of the excellent FIR podcast (great for keeping in touch with marketing/tech news while commuting, I find), which featured Tom Foremski, a leading Silicon Valley writer/journalist. He is most famous for coining the phrase "every company is now a media company" - a sentiment which resonates in today's social media obsessed world. But I would like to take issue with Tom. Every company should not be a media company. In fact, if any of the following statements are true of your company, you should not be investing in content marketing right now:

It's not just the Italians. Why are the Belgians resistant to social media? Why do the British and Germans need more information before they make a purchase? In short, why do buyers in different countries behave differently?

Answering this question was one of the key aims of the Buyersphere Report 2011, a major study of B2B buyers that asked over 1,000 buyers from five European countries (UK, France, Germany, Italy and Belgium) about the information sources they used during the buying process.

And the findings were very interesting...