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

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.

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...

There's a proliferation of research into how, as B2B marketers, we are planning to leverage Social Media to grow our brands (Cyance / ABBA) and with some variations they tell a familiar story. Apparently we are all increasing spend on web based media, on Google and on social media whilst at the same time reducing our investment in advertising and direct mail. We are using email more and we rely on our websites for an increasing proportion of our leads. Some of us are also investing in Lead Management Automation and other automation tools in our bid to increase efficiency and ROI.

But how many of us can honestly say that this diversion of effort and spend is in reaction to any quantifiable change in our buyers' behaviour. Have all our buyers changed how they buy? Are they all buying in the same way? Is the rate of change the same for all our audiences and markets? The fact is, currently, we just don't know.

Since it's our job to advise on how to adapt to the challenges and opportunities of the Digital Age we decided it was down to us to help inform these decisions. Thus the research we are about to publish which looks at "The Buyersphere" in detail in an attempt to identify the differences and similarities in behaviour across sectors, ages and different types of purchase. This first wave focuses on B2B buying in the UK and we'll be looking at global and regional differences later this year.

The report is still being finalized but I can say that the data looks very interesting. Having looked at some of the early findings it is likely that some of us have been too keen to assume that our buyers are no longer influenced by traditional media having switched almost entirely to the Social world. I could also name a few that are missing tremendous opportunities as their audiences are the ones who have embraced the Digital Age.

One thing is clear, as predicted, there is a generational wave coming and if, as I believe we should, we use this information to help us plan around our audiences not around our own prejudices there is a tremendous opportunity for the B2B marketers that are ready to listen and react.

If you'd like to receive an early copy of the report let me know.

What will 2009 be remembered for in the world of B2B marketing?

From our point of view, it was the year that B2B went beyond business as usual. What do we mean? Maybe this is best illustrated by a brief track back through the Base One Beyond blog and flagging up the most read posts. After all, we can think what we like but the acid test is what attracts the most readers. If the people don't get it, it's not working.

One of 2009's most used words was 'social media' and it dawned on many B2B marketers in 2009 that this was something to take notice of. This then spawned the term 'Buyersphere', which we have been quoting ever since we first blogged about it in March.

The following month saw a great example of how social media makes people tell the truth. Or rather how it exposes people when they don't, with the story of Damian McBride and his smear emails.

But the realisation of how B2B marketers needed to change what they were doing - and change how they were thinking - came to the fore during the summer. Our take on these developments was summarised by an interesting chance encounter with a traditional magazine editor (one of a dying breed in 2009), and by the fascinating debate over who exactly should be talking for your brand out there in the Brave New World of social media.

Whose job is it anyway? Your PR dept? Your marketing guys? Your CEO? How about - just possibly - it might be everyone's job. One of the realisations of 200 was that, as marketers, our job is perhaps not so much to do it as to enable it.

But there was also a wonderful feeling of goodwill around in 2009 - which is odd considering the economic climate. The awareness that peer-to-peer information sharing was increasing - the fact that buyers were talking to buyers - convinced many a gnarly old marketer that we could no longer talk at our customers. It was all about sharing and, well, being nice. Etiquette was big news in 2009 as it became clear that brands needed to give something of value if they were to receive the valuable attention of their target audience. A popular metaphor was that we were all invited to the world's biggest cocktail party - and we had to behave accordingly.  

But where was the proof that all of this was working? As proponents of the 'new way of working' we were keen to flag up a good success story when we saw it, and May showed us why it was more important than ever to listen to customers!

The following months, the discussions continued, with pieces on the problems with data capture, the true meaning of viral marketing and how to spot spammers. (I've also learned not to include the word 'spammer' in a blog post - search engines don't like it...)

As if to prove that going beyond business as usual was not limited to the business of social media, we then introduced a little culture into proceedings with B2Beat poetry - an anthology of inspiring verse from our very own poet laureate, Noel Ponthieux.  This obviously struck a chord with marketers around the world as the modest print run that we produced quickly sold out.

We chose scandal for our next topic, with the outrageous story of how Pepsi endorsed casual sexism in its social media marketing. This was followed by Jamie-Lee Wallace's excellent lesson in selectivity, before we then segued effortlessly into a comparison of Star Trek and B2B marketing. Trust me, the link is highly logical.

So in summary, it has been a year to remember for B2B marketing, and one for which we were proud to provide a commentary here on the Base One Beyond blog.

As an aside, it was also the year when someone pointed out that the words 'gold' and 'blog' are mirror images of each other. This makes 'blog gold' at the same time a palindrome, an excuse for a logo (see below) and a great name for the award we give to our best blogs.



And for 2009, I can think of no one who has boldly gone further than Ms Ponthieux with her Star Trek piece.

Thank you all for reading - see you next year.

If, in the early years of the 20th century, the Wright Brothers had set out to build a machine that would carry hundreds of passengers across the Atlantic, with toilets fore and aft, they would have failed.

Instead, they focused on the short-term goal, which in their case was to prove that it was possible for a self-powered, heaver-than-air machine to fly. The distance was unimportant, they wanted to see if it worked.

So when the Wright Flyer bumped back onto the Kittyhawk sands after its maiden flight - a distance of a mere 120 feet - they had achieved what they set out to do.

Whilst reluctant to drag the reader away from aviation pioneers and back into the 21st century world of social media marketing, the parallel is an important one: you cannot expect to go into social media marketing and achieve everything at once. You have to learn to walk before you can run. Or, to extend the earlier analogy, if you want your brand to really fly, you've got to do the basics first.

Here's why - and what you can do about it.    

When I go to the cinema I've usually eaten half my popcorn before the film starts. One of the reasons for this (apart from loving sweet popcorn) is the 15 minutes of trailers that you have to sit through before the film starts. For me they're as much an integral part of the cinema experience as the popcorn itself.

The same does not apply when I'm watching a DVD at home. Here I'm in control.

This post has been contributed by Jamie Lee Wallace, a good friend of Base One, who is also one of the founders of Savvy B2B Marketing - a collaborative blog offering unique B2B marketing insights delivered with healthy doses of humility and good humor.

One of the number one complaints about social media is that it takes too much time. 

Companies considering the leap into the land of blogs and tweets often run screaming into the night after they glimpse the reality of what it takes to launch and maintain a worthwhile social media presence.

I don't blame them. The onslaught of digital information is overwhelming, but there is hope. The key is in being selective.

OK, picture the scene. You are a male in your mid-20s. You're in a bar packed with beautiful women, and you have one thing on your mind. How do you increase your chances of 'success'? That's right: turn to family brand Pepsi, who have sanctioned an incredible piece of social media marketing, built around an iPhone app.

The application - available now free from an AppStore near you - offers advice on how to 'score' by way of promoting its spin-off beverage, Amp. "Amp up before you score" is the line behind this amazingly insensitive marketing idea.

 

In the new era of accountability responsibility and state-authorised bonuses everyone is trying to measure everything.

Most of the time, this is a justification of activity, inactivity, existence or jobs. But in the world of advertising, we need to be particularly careful what we measure. As the saying goes, **we know that only half of our advertising is working - we just don't know which half**.

Online marketing has the beauty of being 100% measurable - or so we are led to believe. The use of cookies and pixels enables us to track who has seen our ad and what they did after it. And all this is beautifully packaged as "analytics"  - a lovely word implying science and absolutes.
 
But online analytics don't tell us as much as we think they do. Is it enough to know how many people viewed an ad? What about how people think and feel? How do you measure the whole experience?

**Measurement v money**

With media budgets shrinking across the board, it has become even more important to justify every penny spent. And so it seems strange that marketers are still so attached to one-dimensional metrics when they really need to know as much as they can.

We've taken an overview of advertising measurement - both on- and off-line - in our whitepaper: Finding Out Which Half Of Your Advertising Is Working. Please feel free to download it here - and leave a comment or get in touch if you want to continue the discussion or find out more.