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.




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

Can you prove that content marketing works?

More specifically, is it possible to create a piece of business content, from scratch in a day and use it to gain 1,000 clicks?

I don't mean funny videos or viral games. We're talking business content, and we have no ready-made Twitter following of millions. We're trying to do it the hard way - and we're trying to do it live in front of 150 senior marketers at the IDM B2B Marketing Conference on 19th May 2010.

Let me explain and, at the same time, let me invite you to get involved...

Are there two sides to your character?

Is there a nice 'you' and a 'nasty' you? A 'professional' you and a 'weekend' you?

To an extent, we all exhibit these tendencies. It is human nature and it starting to show up on social media.

New research suggests that the development of social media - and the people who use it - has reached a point where we are doing this more and there is an excellent reason for it.

I'm lucky to be surrounded by a lot of smart people in my work, be they clients or colleagues. So it makes it all the more amazing when I see examples of complete lack of vision when it comes to marketing - in this case, nurturing customer loyalty.

DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE COPY NOW

Everyone's talking social media. But are buyers really listening? The Base One B2B Marketing Buyersphere Report - launched today - lifts the lid on the channels that different buyers really use for information and what this means for B2B marketers.

The impact of the digital revolution and the rapid proliferation of marketing channels, tools and techniques is having a profound impact on how B2B brands talk to their audiences. But whilst the likes of blogging, social media, online video etc. are very exciting opportunities to potentially engage your customers, how much do buyers really use them? And how does this compare with more traditional forms of media?

These are amongst the questions that the Buyersphere Report, developed by Base One and B2B Marketing, set out to establish.
 
The report - which can be downloaded here - is based on a survey of 503 business buyers who have been involved in a purchase worth at least £20,000 in the last 12 months. The survey was carried out by Toluna, with analysis of the results by Base One, McCallum Layton and B2B Marketing.

The report maps the influence and frequency of use of key information channels at three different stages of the buying process: need definition, supplier identification and supplier selection. In doing so, it has unearthed some key patterns that will help marketers plan more effective buyer communications...

This is the third in a series of blogs based on research conducted by IDG Connect - and made available exclusively through Base One - into a fascinating area: the discrepancy between how marketers and prospective buyers view email communications. The findings, published this January, examine different perceptions of the drivers for engagement, intensity and open rates. Part three investigates the type of information buyers say they want...

Which grabs your attention first: 'New report published 24th March 2010', or 'Educational report from June 2009'? I think it's safe to say most people would opt for the former. Especially as rapid changes in technology, media and communication mean that all aspects of business are constantly evolving. But while it may sound obvious the research from IDG Connect shows that many marketers underestimate the need for topicality in their email communications...