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:

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?

Marketing Automation and DIY marketing tools are great.  Powerful tools for the marketer that directly enable you to communicate in a more frequent, relevant and timely manner with customers and prospects.  No need to rely on an agency to send out every email (still smiling!).  I am an absolute advocate of these tools - if used correctly. 

Yet when in untrained hands these tools can quietly erode your brand right in front of your customer's eyes in a way that almost goes unrealised if your antennae is pointed elsewhere. 

I write following recent experience as a recipient of a series of emails as a customer of the sending business (I'm not going to name names).

The basic fact is that you send most emails to people you already have your best relationships with: customers.  Don't underestimate this.  These are the most important people in the world to your business.  Yet email is often delegated as focus put on other 'higher impact' comms.

Why?   Because we 'now have a template',  and with that QA seems to go out of the window.  Yet systems and users have a habit of managing to break templates pretty quickly.  'Those 1000 words will fit.'  'That 1200 pixel wide image will CAN be a thumbnail.'  'Over-compression - they love it!'

Templates are incredibly useful as they let you send out frequent comms without the need to re-invent the wheel each time.  But how thought-through and tested are they?  How understood is their use? Does your sender understand good communication design principles?  Are these being tested across all email clients using tools such as Litmus? Just whose hands are you putting them into?!

So here's the recipe:  a lack of understanding of the brand or good design, consequent template abuse, and the desertion of QA.  Put these in a pot and stir.
Let's see what you get:

So I get an email...  here's what happens in about 5 seconds.

I recognise the sender so I open it.
First impressions: it looks like spam. 
There's an heavily over-compressed logo.  Why has someone turned that into a JPEG?
I can't believe that image has come from an approved library.

Poor text formatting: can hardly read it.  Margins and spacing are everywhere.
Too much content.  Too many links - unstyled.  
Nothing stand-out. 
And didn't I get this before last week?
Delete.
My opinion of the brand has just gone down a few notches.
I will probably just hit delete if it arrives again.

Maybe the primary concern of the sender is about 'just getting it out'. 
That's a phrase I hate. 

So what's the point of this rant?   I suppose I'm trying to point out that even activity deemed 'routine' should be crafted with as much care and attention as the sexy stuff. 
When you consider the audience who receive it, you could easily argue its impression and effect matter far more.

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.)

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?

Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher, believed that change, in all its forms, was pivotal to the cosmos. It's unlikely that he was thinking about B2B marketing at the time, but I can't help feeling that his doctrine could be easily applied to what B2B marketers are doing today - especially when thinking about how B2B buyers are changing.

Working on a recent campaign for a client (Epicor), I was reminded of this very point. Individual roles within organisations are radically changing and changing fast. Expertise in their chosen field, flexibility, commitment, all that is still required, but what is different, is the level of influence that each individual is now expected to exert on decisions relating to issues and topics which previously, they would not have even been consulted on, let alone asked to actively participate in with greater and greater insight.

One such role is that of the Finance Director or CFO...

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: