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.

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?

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?

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:

Over the last 2 years, social media monitoring has become a must for any self-respecting company, B2C or B2B, and for good reason. A tool supposedly developed to support a new marketing approach has turned out to have useful applications in many other areas of sales and marketing.

Of course it's not the be-all and end-all, but monitoring has already delivered success stories in sales support, crisis management, reputation management and of course the planning and management of social media campaigns and strategies generating measurable ROI. But is it delivering for you? Or are you one of the many companies who have bought this amazing, one-size-fits-all, magical tool only to be confronted by pages and pages of irrelevant data through which you wade for hours only to learn precisely nothing? Maybe you've even given up already?

I'm happy to admit that this was my starting point. Overjoyed with my shiny new monitoring tool, I entered some keywords and sat back and waited for oodles of precious, campaign-optimising, ROI-generating information to pour in. Now at the click of a button I would be able to generate reports telling me who my influencers were, what they were saying, and where they were saying it. I could pinpoint the people, subjects and platforms that mattered and stop wading around in social media semi-darkness using the suck it and see approach.

Or not.

You see, it's not as simple as that. Probably the most challenging aspect of monitoring is building - and optimising - your searches. If you think you can just enter a phrase to search for and only receive relevant results, then you've got another think coming - unless it really is very unique and specific, that is. Because the fact is that almost any term you can imagine searching for is ambiguous, and some far more than others.

Let's take brand mentions, for instance: do I even need to point out the challenge in simply setting up a search for 'Base One'? Once you've removed the hundreds, if not thousands - of tweets by American teenagers about their blooming sexual activity, followed by every conceivable (what base is actual conception?) comment about baseball matches and players, you might actually find something relevant. Or imagine you are interested in finding out what's going on in the world of Dun & Bradstreet? This would also mean searching for D&B, at which point you are into the world of, wait for it... drum & bass!

The same applies to almost any other search you can think of. You can't just enter your keywords and press go. You need to think of all the keywords to exclude, all the combinations that might work better, you need to work clever. Maybe it's best to look for specific rather than broad issues, even if this dramatically reduces the number of results you receive. And in an ideal world you need someone who has a thorough knowledge of Boolean search, as, in the main, the WYSIWYG approach doesn't do enough.

So basically the important lesson to learn is that you get out from monitoring tools what you put into them, and garbage in definitely means garbage out. Also, even the most refined searches will still produce irrelevant results, making monitoring optimisation and analysis an ongoing process. Every report needs refining and tidying up.

At Base One we have chosen to dedicate considerable time to building accurate and relevant searches, and conducting detailed analysis of results, excluding sites and identifying additional negatives. In the long term this is the only way to gain the tangible benefits properly managed social media monitoring can deliver.