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...

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 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

FINAL UPDATE:

Thursday 13:31 BST

Now that the dust has settled I can report back on the whole experiment... The final count, including pdf and video views, was 570 downloads - and while I'm a little disappointed we didn't make 1,000, I'm still delighted that the experiment worked by proving clearly how content can spread if it is interesting.

570 people voluntarily accessed a piece of information - a fact that one member of my audience put into context by saying that it would cost thousands of media dollars to achieve the same effect by interruptive advertising.

The presentations at the conference yesterday were fascinating - made all the more lively by the fact that we were trying to demonstrate the power of content marketing live while the session was going on.

I will publish a document soon that recounts how the whole thing worked, and maybe create a graph of traffic over time, showing the effects of key retweets, blogs etc as far as it is possible with the analytics data to hand.

In short though, we also had 443 visits to the live blog [here], as well as 3 retweets

So we didn't get the 1,000 clicks but - if an experiment is judged by whether it demonstrates a point, I think it was a resounding success and I thank you all for helping make it work!

So what should we do as a follow-up? If anyone has any suggestions, I'm all ears!

Thanks again

John

15:34 BST

391 downloads.

Another video has been added to the IDM YouTube channel, an interview with Joel Harrison of B2B Marketing Magazine talking about his views on the opportunities and threats of Social Media.

Larry Kuntz, re your question: I will check with John who produced the document and let you know as soon as he's finished presenting!

15:00 BST

Session 2 starts, and we are now at 364 downloads. The highlight of session one was a question from the floor: wouldn't we get more downloads if John Bottom dressed up in a pink rabbit suit and was videod pleading for them? Frivolous maybe, but a little bit of drama is never a bad thing with this kind of campaign...

We have been asked how this can be an experiment when we have spent some of our time asking people to tweet about it. Well that's the real challenge with any Social Media campaign: you have to start by seeding them. We have generated going on 200 tweets so far. We have probably contacted 20 people.

If you haven't yet downloaded the white paper: Opportunities & Threats - the future of Social Media as viewed by senior marketers, then click here.

14:15 BST

Session one of two starts, and we are at 334 downloads. John Bottom shows us how research shows that Social Media is more influential for the under 30's than the over 30's.

We've also just uploaded our first video interview to YouTube - Opportunities & Threats, video stylee!

If you haven't done so yet, please click here to download the paper.


12:30 BST

Very interesting presentation from David Chalmers of Cisco, especially highlighting the power of Twitter, which they use extremely well as a messaging and recruitment tool for events, and also the importance of influencers. Here he gave an interesting example which I find runs very true: you may find your influencers on-line, but the best way to engage them is still off-line, in the pub, with beer!

One point I wasn't 100% on was regarding Facebook. David said he still regarded Facebook as a 'personal' network and not relevant, but that recent conversations with them suggested that they are going to change this. It's true that Facebook doesn't work for all businesses, but this is changing of its own accord.

Anyway, back to the experiment. We're now up to 245 downloads, so a big increase over the last hour and a quarter. The US is waking up (thank you friends from across the pond), and some selective messaging of influencers is proving fruitful. Still, we're hoping for a bigger boos during the experiment itself. One more update before it, though.

If you haven't done so yet, please download the Opportunities and Threats paper here.


11:15 BST

It's coffee time at the IDM B2B Conference, followed by a much anticipated session on 'Riding the hype of Social Media for B2B marketing' presented by David Chalmers of Cisco. We're hoping to ride some of that hype ourselves as we build momentum:

- 60 tweets to date using hashtag #GCME
- Document being posted to slideshare
- Discussions on various LinkedIn groups
- Video interviews with some of those quoted in the Opportunities & Threats paper will shortly be posted to YouTube

153 downloads in total, so 34 in the last hour. A good build-up till the actual sessions, running from 2.00 - 2.30 pm and 2.45 - 3.15pm.

 
10:15 BST

The conference is under way and the word is already getting out on today's experiment. We're up to 119 downloads of the Opportunities & Threats paper. Thanks for all those already helping with the push. More to follow....


Wednesday 19th May, 06:43 BST

It's a beautiful early morning in London, and the experiment starts here. On way to venue. Notice that the current download count of the Opportunities & Threats paper is already at 82, which is encouraging since we only really started at midnight. Lots more work today to get to 1,000 hits. If you haven't read it yourself, take a look.

Monday 17th May, 17:10 BST

There are just 2 days to go. Wednesday 19th May is the date of the Great Content Marketing Experiment. I will be blogging live from the annual IDM B2B Marketing Conference on the 28th floor of the Millbank Tower in Central London.

Just to recap, the aim is to prove the viability of content marketing in a live experiment. We therefore not only have my colleague John Bottom talking about the theory of content marketing in his presentation, but a larger team will be busy putting it all into practice by doing all we can to achieve 1,000 downloads of this document. Find out more about it and how it was created for the event here.

Look out for live updates on the day, and if you're on Twitter, follow the hash tag #GCME.

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...