I was astonished to see a recent piece of research from Experian that showed how little impact Google+ is making.

According to The 2012 Digital Marketer: Trend and Benchmark Report (a study that is as long on detail as it is in its title), the top 10 social media sites are not what you would expect.

The list is below, but the interesting thing to me was that Google+ is really not making the waves we all thought it would. With 61 million visits in March, it achieved a fraction of Facebook's traffic (7 BILLION in the same period). It is narrowly ahead of MySpace (!) that is hanging on in there with 43m, yet trailing in the wake of Pinterest (104m) and even Tagged.com (72m). No - I hadn't heard of that one either, but it's outperforming Google+. And that got me wondering.


Marketers are sensible enough to know that Google will give search prominence to Google+ posts, and we all flocked towards it. The web was full of posts and whitepapers explaining how to formulate a Google+ strategy.

But all the strategy in the world isn't going to help if it is a ghost town. I wonder how many of the 61 million visits were from marketers, posting stuff in the hope of getting some kind of SEO benefit.

Maybe I'm wrong, but we've already seen Google Wave level out, and Google Buzz quieten down. Maybe there are only negatives in store for Google+?

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.

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.

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.

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...

An updated EU ePrivacy Directive comes into effect on May 26 with a controversial new stipulation that websites must ask users for permission to set cookies, and during this process must explain what the cookie is used for.  

The legislation is driven by concern about how some cookies store user data that is then shared between sites without the knowledge of users. This is a genuine issue that quite rightly needs guidelines (though often hyped up by scaremongers), but however well-intentioned the legislation is, it will be difficult to make work in practice.   For instance, the Directive takes a one-size-fits-all approach to cookies and doesn't distinguish between a purely functional cookie that stores no user information and a more 'intrusive' cookie used (say) by 3rd party advertisers for behavioural targeting.

For this reason the legislation touches just about every website as the web is underpinned by cookies, and they are not going away anytime soon.  The main issue facing businesses right now is how to comply given there's such a short time before it becomes law.   No one exactly seems to know what to do or how far to go.  

The truth is that everyone is watching to see how everyone else is going to tackle this.  Even the Information Commissioner's Office website has 6 cookies placed when you visit it, so it'll be interesting to see how they manage things (as of time of writing they are still in the same boat as everyone else).

The government have announced that, while the law comes into effect on 26 May, they will give all businesses a reasonable period of time to adapt and adjust, and that no one will be in trouble providing they are taking steps to comply.  They appreciate that making changes and updates will take time and will cost each business money.  

The first thing every business should now to is audit their site to understand how cookies are used.  But you know this already don't you?  After all this should be disclosed in your existing privacy policy (a legal requirement since 2003).

There are then probably five options right now for businesses:

1. A strict interpretation means implementing a strict opt-in policy for every type of cookie your site.   This pretty much means the death of user experience, and just watch your bounce rate rocket.  See this humourous example of how bad it could be.
   
   
2. A similar but slightly less irritating version involves putting a single popup/layer/splash page in front of first time visitors asking them to agree to place cookies on their site.  This should be a one-size-fits-all statement covering all cookies that could at least be styled a little nicer to the example above.  Still not good for first impressions, and we still imagine some adverse effect on bounce rate.
   
   
3. A subtler approach, and one we think can be used as a stop gap, is to have a clear flag/button on your homepage about the EU Directive (e.g. a tab on the top left that expands on user click), that lists the site's cookie usage.   If you clearly state that 'We are working hard right now to comply with the EU directive etc', then your are following Government guidelines.  This then allows you to....
   
   
4. 'Wait and see what others do'.  This will be the most common approach.   Do nothing drastic right now and let's see what the ICO and others implement on May 26 and shortly afterwards then to see what standards emerge.   (In fact, many businesses (including large brands) are quite unaware of the legislation, so are taking this approach through ignorance).
    
   As advice on implementation has been woolly and no one has any idea how the legislation will be enforced (if at all), sitting tight to see what others do first is arguably the best approach.  You are unlikely to get 'done', unless you being very naughty and unscrupulously selling on user data.
   
   
5. A final method is to develop a new or alternative site that will never use cookies.   This is fine for a simple, flat site, but ultimately will be limiting on functionality and (when more functionality is required) will cost a lot more to develop as timely workarounds will need to be coded.  But this isn't economically or functionally feasible for most businesses.  
   

I'd suggest a combination of #3 and #4 above is best for the next 2-3 months. If your business is the type whose legal team starts hyperventilating at the mention of this legislation then maybe you need to consider #2.   Overall, we think that a practical, usable approach will emerge, gain consensus and be adopted over the next 6 months or so, and as long as we make it very easy for users to understand what cookies are being used for, we feel it's good to sit tight for this consensus to appear.>

Ultimately, in future this issue will probably be solved by browser developers, so that users can set their own personal cookie preferences within browser settings, allowing users to set the types of cookies that they will allow and (in fact, Firefox 4 already has an option allowing users to block Google Analytics.).  

But to do this, standards need to emerge to classify types of cookies.  This is going to take time, and similar but (of course) subtly different US legislation is due out soon, which also need to be accommodated.  

So in the meantime, be seen to be taking steps to comply, then let's see what  practical approaches emerge.

Download Buyersphere Report 2011 here

Search for the term "information overload" on Google and you get over 6 million results. It's a pretty common problem and nowhere, you might have guessed, would this problem manifest itself more readily than in the world of business.

The web is awash with articles, webinars, blogs and guides all designed to offer information to buyers who are wondering what product to buy. But, incredibly, it seems that buyers are hungry for more.

The recently released Buyersphere Report 2011 surveyed over 1,000 business buyers about the information sources they used when researching purchases. Not their opinions, mind - the survey was specifically designed to find out what buyers actually did, rather than what they thought - and the results show that the hunger for information shows no sign of being satisfied as yet.

According to the story, the cobbler's children went around with no shoes. This frequently happens in business. If you have ever worked on building a new system for an IT company or an ad campaign for an ad agency, you will know what I mean.

And so it was that, when B2B Marketing, the leading publisher in the UK business marketing sector, decided to rebrand itself, it wanted to do it right. With an expert audience to impress, it wanted to follow best-practice and relaunch itself with a new brand and a new website that would win the respect of thousands of customers who do B2B branding and website builds for a living.

Having worked with B2B Marketing since they began in 2004, Base One was offered the job of managing the rebranding project - a challenge we were delighted to accept. That was last year. Now, two weeks after the launch of the new brand, we can breathe a sigh of relief, look back on a job well done and share some of the learnings in our case study whitepaper: New Brand, New Website: The B2B Marketing Case Study.

If you are embarking on digital branding exercises, or building a new website - or if you would simply like the inside story on the industry's favourite publisher - download it here now.