We’re inordinately proud to announce the launch of a new microsite by Salesforce UK that Velocity helped with. The site is called Social Success and it’s all about helping businesses harness the power of social media. Our job was to find the considerable pockets of expertise within Salesforce (the place is crawling with very, very smart people) then help package up their ideas and best-practice advice into content assets for the site.

The core piece of content on the site is a chunky eBook called The Social-Powered Enterprise: how social media is transforming your three most important disciplines. The three disciplines are sales, marketing and customer service and the book presents plenty of action points and cases in each area. There’s a form to fill in to get the eBook — but it’s worth it!

If you’re putting social to work in your business, the rest of the Social Success site is full of best-practice content and expert advice for you, including:

Social Media Expert Interviews
With people like Jacob Morgan on Social Collaboration and Brad Cleveland on Social Customer Service.  These guys really know their stuff and the interviews capture their thinking really succinctly.

Social Media Resource Roundups
These are short curated pieces that summarise some of the best resources out there across the web on subjects such as Mobile Social Media and Social Business Metrics and Social Selling (among others).

Dreamforce Takeaways
Dreamforce is the hottest tech event in the world, attracting amazing speakers. Dreamforce Takeaways are our attempt to summarise the most social-media-relevant sessions in a quick, easy-to-digest way. And you can listen to the original sessions and see the slides here too.  Our favourite is the Social Roadmap session with Gary Vaynerchuk, Charlene Li of Altimeter Group and Adam Brown of Dell.  But there are five more excellent ones to browse through.

Social Media Mini-Guides
These are more extensive articles on specific social disciplines including Social Selling and Social Customer Service.

Social Media Articles
Including this crowdsourced piece on Social Media Business Etiquette that had dozens of top-notch contributors or this one on Social Innovation.

A killer Social Media Infographic
On the Six Principles of Social Media Success from the eBook. It’s the social ethos captured in one rather tall graphic.

The site is a major initiative by Salesforce UK and it’s all about helping growing businesses (and businesses that are already massive) to get social media into their DNA – as Salesforce itself has done.  It’s not about selling software, it’s about evangelising something the company really believes in (working with them, we’ve seen how they walk the talk).

The project was the brainchild of Kieran Flanagan, the Search Manager for Salesforce EMEA and it’s an impressively ambitious play — the content will be rolled out to France and Germany this year. We’re not kissing arse when we say this (maybe a little) but Kieran has been hugely impressive through the entire process. He mined the considerable expertise and experience inside Salesforce to make sure we were capturing best practice strategy and real-world tactics. And did it with intelligence, focus and charm.

We loved working on the project and learned a hell of a lot on the way.

There’s a lot more to come on the Social Success site. Drop in, find the content most relevant to you – and do share it with your Twitter followers, LinkedIn connections, Facebook friends and Google+ circles. They’ll thank you for it…

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B social media, B2B technology marketing, Content, Content Marketing, Social Media, Thought Leadership

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You just can’t deny the attraction of lean startup methodology. It brings the frisson of an all-night party to the blood, sweat and tears world of the entrepreneur. A quick primer:

1) It was coined by Eric Ries, a software entrepreneur inspired by Toyota’s lean manufacturing methodology.

2) It builds upon the roots of agile project management.

3) It’s all about producing software quickly, releasing it and studying its success, or failure, and then iterating (called continuous deployment).

4) It endorses “minimum viable product” – a bare bones product with only those features that distinguish it as a functioning product. Nothing more.

5) It replaces development cycles of weeks or months, with cycles of hours or days.

6) It aims to quickly and rigorously test our assumptions about what the market wants, and ruthlessly weed out wasteful thinking.

Now that cloud computing power can be purchased incrementally and software tested quickly, lean startup’s gaining ground. Arguably, it’s already succeeded at killing off thousands of business ideas that would have come to the market D.O.A.

Intuitively, we know most business ideas are doomed; there’s no market interest, or the timing’s wrong. Lean startup’s about finding that out before you’ve lost two years of your life to the effort.

Lean startup applied to marketing
And instinctively I see parallels to my work in marketing. Like startups, marketing is full of failed ideas, waste and shattered dreams. If lean startups can rapidly expose their product to the market’s whim, can’t marketers do the same with messages?

Boards of directors spend weeks, months, even years, strategizing on their marketing, and then roll out a big putsch with bombast and big budgets. Then, what? Silence? A damp squib? A flicker of interest?

Given the time and effort that go into these marketing campaigns, expectations are impossibly great. Sometimes they may even be met, but what’s the batting average? Probably not great.

The same technology developments that have enabled developers to deploy continuously and quickly, have enabled marketers to communicate continuously and quickly.

What does continuous marketing deployment look like?
I’ve written before about using the company blog as a skunkworks – a place to experiment openly with your business model, your audience and your product. CMS like WordPress, Tumblr and Drupal enable marketers to go live and mix it up instantly.

Obviously, social channels provide another ground to bounce and iterate ideas and messages.

But I can imagine even nimbler and quicker marketing executions. You start one morning with a team of three and determine to produce a minimum viable video product by day’s end. It wouldn’t need to be Hollywood quality, but simply carry the basic kernel of the marketing idea – minimum viable marketing.

The same thinking could be applied to webinars, eBooks, podcasts, emails, and even some visual collateral. The thinking: Develop an idea at minimum time and expense, release it and discover quickly if it’s a dud. Then iterate. Do it again, based on feedback.

There are a few pretty formidable show-stoppers to lean startup marketing, however:

1. Lean startups have little to lose from failures.
Expectations to the business and its professionalism have not really developed. How can a company with real products and real expectations signal that its marketing was tentative and exploratory?

Potential solution: Start by admitting that all marketing is tentative and exploratory; it’s in the nature of the act. But, with tone and style, we can communicate “DRAFT” explicitly. If it’s a video, we talk to camera, explain ourselves. If a blog post, we go first-person, and share the experiment. “I believe this, but I am not sure. So we decided to investigate a little…”

2. There’s zero – or very low – appetite for failure in most businesses.
How can you square that with a methodology that has as its purpose rapid and frequent failure? (At the same time, how many marketing organizations are effectively one big failure-in-motion, where communicating effectively to a market was long ago replaced by a series of deliverables detached from their successful reception.)

Potential solution: Measurement could help. Much of our marketing fails us, but either we do not measure, or we game the measurements to suit our ends. It’s a hellish situation to be in (as lies cover lies). A dollop of honesty, willingness to fail, measurement and steady improvement set a new and better course.

3. It’s a pretty basic tenet of branding that you remain consistent in your messaging.
One core idea is expressed again, and again, ad infinitum. How does that jive with constant, iterative change? Would you not merely create confusion in the market?

Potential solution: Surely the most biting criticism of lean startup marketing, there’s no denying the danger experimentation could have on a brand’s integrity. One poorly tuned message might tell your market that you’re not right for them. A solution may be to do your experimentation outside the main circus tent; for example, we in Velocity communicate differently on our Facebook page than here on our blog. A sub-brand, beta site or clearly marked experimental project may avoid this danger.

If you’re willing to agree that marketing can be highy valuable, you have to concede that it is often also very wasteful.

To some degree, we’re all already practicing lean startup. Only a few years ago, marketing messages for the corporate brochure, event stand, advertising campaigns and the like were months, if not years, in development. Today we spin much quicker.

But might a lean startup marketing methodology put us into another gear altogether, with less waste?

© Ryan Skinner for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: agile, experiment, iteration, lean startup, Marketing

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I’ve long had the wish to sit across a table from some of the world’s best B2B marketing minds, and fire questions at them. I want to find out what makes them tick, what makes them succeed and what knowledge they can share with you and me about the dark art of technology marketing.

We’re making this happen now with John Watton, a long-time friend, a client (first at ShipServ, now at Expedia), an award-winning B2B marketer, a panelist in Econsultancy’s Innovation Awards and a fan of Chelsea and new gadgets.

John and I will have a 1:1 video interview here at Velocity on the evening of 2 February, which you can follow live on Ustream (tech gods willing!), on twitter (@velocitytweets, for sound bites) or in subsequent v-log posts here. If you want a reminder of the interview, fire us an email (actually send it to Ryan - ryan@velocitypartners.co.uk) and we’ll push an email at you that morning.

In his understated way, John’s become a giant and leading light among us B2B technology marketers. He single-handedly brought marketing automation kicking and screaming over the Pond. He was the first user of Marketo in Europe. His pedigree reads like a top 10 in B2B tech: Oracle, SAP, Ariba and Microsoft. And he’s an experimenter and innovator par excellence.

So we’ve asked him to come in for an exclusive video interview. I’ll sit with John for a good hour and pull out every insight I can manage, and see if I can put him on the spot for some predictions and expectations for the future of B2B technology marketing.

So here are some of the kinds of things I plan to throw at @jwatton (but not all of them; I’ll keep some hardballs up my sleeve):

• How are the marketing organizations of B2B technology companies changing?
• I know you’re an active user of social media (twitter, blogs, feeds, etc.). Do you feel like social media is a channel that can scale in B2B marketing?
• What’s become achievable to B2B marketers that wasn’t achievable before?
• What kinds of things, in terms of services, products or solutions, would you like to see for B2B marketers that you’re not seeing today?
• What are the qualities in a B2B marketer that would make you think “I’m hiring that person tomorrow”?
• B2B and B2C seem to be converging in the software space. Do you think the two will be separable in 5-10 years?
• Do you feel like there’s a unique B2B marketing community in London? Why?
• B2B businesses typically don’t believe in or trust marketing? Should they?
• Who in the B2B technology marketing field would you most like to interview or talk to?

If you have any specific questions you’d like me to make to John, drop a comment and maybe we’ll put it to the B2B marketing master.

Hope you enjoy the show!

© stan@velocitypartners.co.uk for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
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The funnel seems kind of wobbly these days. Here’s why:

No buyer wants to think he’s in a funnel.
It doesn’t align with how buyers feel like they approach a purchase. Can we say a model is good if the protagonist of the story dislikes it?

You’re not in charge.
In a market characterized by information surplus and driven by search, social and rich content signals, the buyer owns the rhythm. Not the seller.

Buyers don’t proceed. They swirl.
The stages in the funnel (defining a need, drawing up a shortlist, etc.) just don’t sync with purchase journeys anymore. Buyers don’t do linear. They circle.

You don’t have time for mapping.
The funnel model assumes that there are some absolutes, that the ground isn’t shifting underneath the market. In fact, all is in flux.

Buyers’ journeys don’t just end.
The funnel assumes that there’s a pool of people called the market who don’t know you, and that your job is done once they’ve bought your product. “Plop! You’ve gone through the funnel.”

There are smarter people than me who have been saying much the same thing for years, like Steven Noble of Forrester, MarketingProfs and countless others who say the sales funnel is dead. They replace the funnel with flows, maps, nets, circles and webs – everyone wants to own the next model.

Does the death of the funnel apply to the big B2B decisions? Yes. We have piles of information from trillions of sources – this applies just as well to the professional as the personal world. Industrial tumult is just as strong as consumer tumult, if not stronger.

The funnel was a model for storekeepers. The top of the funnel was the street. Then the funnel led into their shop, browsing, comparing, asking questions and then going to the register. The current model needs to be crafted on an Italian piazza. Consumers bounce in and out and all over the place, asking countless questions, listening in to conversations, examining and gossiping.

Funnels don’t do bouncy very well.

So what’s the fallout of a post-funnel world?

If the funnel doesn’t fit well with buyer behaviour, then the tools based on this model won’t work. Prospects who don’t act like they’re in a funnel will get treated in ways that don’t suit their actual intent. Vendors seem to be racing to address this, but it’s a tough move, as many were built up on the foundations of funnel thinking.

Funnel-based content will start to feel funny. That one case study that applies to that one particular part of the theoretical buyer journey goes flat. It feels faked, forced, one-dimensional and lame to buyers who have a three-dimensional view of the market.

Efforts to push prospects through a funnel process meet resistance. Marketers who push themselves on webinar attendees to read the next piece of corporate literature fail. Prospects can see through tired funnel-driven tactics. They’re not buying escalation.

That’s a start anyway.

So what would I do, post-funnel?

I’d start by thinking facilitation. No matter where you think you have a prospect, you don’t. You. Don’t. Have. Them. They’re in charge. You’re just facilitating them. Help them. Don’t push, and don’t play games. To hell with your sales quotas. But do get serious when they get serious.

Build out your non-linear expeditionary forces. Buy a blogger breakfast. No joke. These independent expert-istas are the developing gauge of influence in a noisy market. They are the conversational coin in the new media bazaar. And don’t send them emails studded with your opinions and product news. Buy them breakfast. Lunch? Drinks? Then chat.

Think non-competitive business development. Start partnering with people who are in your space, but who you don’t compete with, to develop content, events, staff trades and such. A pretty clever marketer named Joe Chernov said: “When you are the only one tweeting about your infographic, you probably blew the execution.”

Assume you don’t know where people are coming from. When someone lands on a page of your website, do not think you know why they came there, or that you know what they’re looking for. Be humble. Offer choices. Like this:

Those are my ideas anyway. Do you have any of your own?

© Ryan Skinner for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, marketing funnel, marketing models, sales funnel

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Have you seen that picture of a glass that’s been going around? This one:

There needs to be, like, way more awesome in B2B. We could be totally running the show, you know?

I mean, technology is just technology, but we’re after love. The iPhone didn’t cut and paste at all, but who cared, you know? We loved it. Awesome!

When we’re talking about tech stacks and cloud instances, let’s just turn up the volume on that shit. Sure, there’s the “80% more efficiency on your TCO”-talk; Let’s do the “we give you like a billion percent more awesomeness across the board!”-talk! How awesome is that!

You want product benefits? Like reduced maintenance expenses, swifter enablement and better ROI? Hell, our product will give you a longer life, sex appeal like a Cannes starlet, VC stickiness and a Porsche in the drive! Awesome!

Let’s advertise on that sexy little blog that writes about our industry. Let’s invite the blogger for oysters at the top of the Ritz. No, wait, let’s do a microsite with him. Or maybe we could pay him to, like, write on our site. Oh, fuck it, let’s just buy his whole site, then he’s writing for us anyway. Awesome!

Our funnel is, like, totally empty. You know what that means. The world is ours. We can get like 1000% growth with just one new prospect. Let’s make a viral video or something. One of those abandoned shopping cart things. Totally awesome!

No one’s following us on social media. Let’s retweet some shit. Let’s retweet like everything for a week! Let’s get some conversational marketing going. Let’s respond to every mention of us with one word: “You’re awesome!” Wait, that’s two words: Double awesome!

Our case studies are, like, getting totally ignored. No one really cares why a little widget factory in Rochester chose our technology. So let’s do a fictional case study about how Richard Branson put our technology in all his space ships. Let’s make shit up. Maybe Branson will notice and just do it. It’ll be like suggestion. The jedi mind trick! Awesome!

Our website ain’t converting. Let’s slap some site optimization tools on that sucker, pour in some marketing automation, phatten it up with some social media feeds (could we replace the corporate feed with @Beyonce, you think?) and buy a couple gallons of content strategy. Let’s…pimp…it…out! Awesome!

Let’s just sit around and, like, talk about some stuff. Like who’s fun in our industry. And who’s lame. And let’s just record that bad-boy and throw it up on YouTube. Let’s record our CTO’s laugh into a podcast, because he’s got a sick funny laugh. If people start with that, maybe they’ll want to listen to his cloud compression story, too. Awesome!

Let’s disrupt some shit. I mean, none of our competitors are packaging a product that some nobody could start using tomorrow. Let’s do some SAAS infrastructure management product stuff with free sign-up. Like twitter for plant management. Facebook for enterprise security. Wicked awesome!

I’m totally into inventing a new industry! Today we’re doing scalable enterprise-level management tools. Tomorrow we’re doing, like, rainbow-chasing, lean-as-you-like, profit-cocaine-as-a-service enablement! Awesome!

I’ve totally gotten excited about B2B marketing and what we’re doing now. And you’ve read this whole thing. That must have taken you, like, three minutes! That’s awesome! Now go out and do some B2B shit and kill it and feel awesome about yourself! Because B2B should feel good. How about that? ISN’T THAT AWESOME??!!

© Ryan Skinner for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: awesome, awesomeness, B2B marketing, Copywriting

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Curation's not just for gallery owners anymore (Photo credit: Marshall Astor - Food Fetishist)

Zoom back 4-5 years, and curation was something only art gallery owners did. Now it’s such a hot topic with B2B marketers that you need a guide to choose a curation tool.

Content curation’s a funny thing, though. It’s either the greatest thing for content marketers, or horrible malpractice. Or, in fact, it’s both. Here’s a simple post on content curation by Michael Gaasterland describing what it is.

And here is a handful of reasons why curation’s a miserable art, and the arguments that oppose them.

Con Curation: It’s a sorry attempt at looking like a thought leader by doing nothing more than collecting other people’s stories.

Pro Curation: It demonstrates that you follow developments in your field, and understand which stories possess great significance.

Con Curation: It’s filling an already hugely noisy marketplace by regurgitating content that was already out there in the wild.

Pro Curation: Every point of view is unique, and smart commentary on the news can be even more clever (and useful) than the news itself.

Con Curation: No matter how carefully selected and vetted the content, you’re giving away your opportunity to evangelize to an unknown (generally).

Pro Curation: If you curate interesting people and voices in your industry, you build relationships and influence with people who see the world the way you do.

Con Curation: Far too often the original story is 100% better than the attempt at curation.

Pro Curation: A curation points attention at the original story, giving you (deserved or undeserved) reflected glory.

Con Curation: You curate when you do not have the time, energy, commitment or determination to create. It’s well-meaning spam.

Pro Curation: Let’s admit it. Everything’s somewhat derivative. Even the best creation is actually a well-disguised curation. Stories build on each other.

Every time I start talking about curation with a client, it’s with these conflicts in the back of my head. And I disdain anyone who talks about curation in entirely positive terms (jabbering idiot) or negative (stony-faced simpleton).

Curation can be done well, and it can be done poorly. Generally, when it’s done well, someone with a unique slant on a topic selects content of particular value and spends time putting that content in perspective. It feels insightful, and valuable.

At its most basic, it’s when you find a hidden gem of interesting content on a specific topic for a certain person, and you send it to them, with a note. At its most glorious, it’s smart story aggregators like Reddit or genius email newsletters like The Media Briefing.

Given this, a question that stands out for me is this: Do curation tools like paper.li, Curata and Curation Station do it well or not? Can a tool automate and speed up the process I’d described above?

I’m too wise to begin to answer that, but – if you think about it – when did you ever hear about an art gallery owner using a curation tool to create his or her next big exhibition?

Curation is the wrong answer when the question is:

“How can I fill our sales funnel with cheap content, quicker than quick?”

And it’s the right answer when the question is:

“How can I give people a deeper understanding of what I know and love?”

That’s what I’m thinking every time I suggest content curation.

Here are some principles I would offer for good curation:

• 1. Keep it 50/50: For every time you curate one story, you should create and publish another. That means your email newsletter would be 50% own content and 50% others’ content (with attribution, of course).
• 2. More than a link: This is the era of frictionless sharing, goddammit. Friction is a demonstration of care. Anyone can send a link. If you’re going to curate and share, add something. Some insight. Commentary. But no more than necessary.
• 3. Slap asses: If you’re going to curate someone’s content, you owe it to yourself and to them to be open about it. Preferably, it’s someone you follow and share comments with. And be sure to give them credit.
• 4. As narrow as possible: If you’re one guy with one hour a week, you can’t curate a good newsletter about cloud technology. The less resources you have at your disposal, the narrower should be your topic, your focus and your audience.
• 5. Give away the reins: To whatever extent possible, allow the people you’re curating for, to influence contents in the future. The likes of Reddit have made this idea their raison d’etre. There’s a reason for that.
• 6. If you doubt, don’t: We’re all overloaded with content. If you have even a moment’s doubt about sharing a piece of content, don’t do it. Better to wait for the right one than more or less spam someone.

© Ryan Skinner for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B Content Curation, content strategy, curation

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Martha,  joins us after two-and-a-half years at Milestone Marketing in Utrecht in the Netherlands, a well-regarded B2B marketing shop specialising in all things digital. While she was there, she worked mainly with DSM,  the multi-national life and materials sciences company that sells into the global pharma, nutrition and medical devices markets, among many others. She advised DSM on digital campaigns, digital channels and building communities. She worked closely with creative teams to develop thought leadership and content marketing programmes across the various channels. Pretty much what she’ll be doing here in fact.

I’m sure she’ll do a post soon introducing herself, as soon as she has her feet under the table (though she doesn’t have a desk yet), but as well as being an expert in all things digital,  she speaks Polish, German and English like a native. And has fluent French (having spent a semester in Paris at University Pantheon-Assas). Oh, and good Spanish (having spent  a few months studying in Rosario, Argentina). Did I mention that she can also handle Dutch, having been there for a while before Milestone/DSM (she did a Masters(with distinction) in Economics and Business at the world-renowned Erasmus University in Rotterdam)? She also has a diploma in Latin. We now have more languages at Velocity within Velocity than we do people as Martha’s nap hand joins Ryan’s excellent  Norwegian (after nine years in Oslo) and Jim, who’s learning Czech so9 he can speak to his prospective mother in law. And Doug speaks American.

Here’s a picture of Martha eating cup cakes with Doug on her first day. Hopefully all Velocity’s friends and clients will run into her in the next few weeks.

© stan@velocitypartners.co.uk for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
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Ever wanted to see two B2B marketers in an honest-to-goodness slapping competition?

Curious which of Velocity’s clients was recently named one of the 9 hottest startups by CIO magazine?

Wondered what it sounds like in Velocity Towers when no one knows you’re listening?

Would you like to hear Velocity’s unedited and uncut comments and ideas about B2B marketing?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you’re going to like what we’re trying to do with our new Facebook page. All these things are already there, and more is on its way…

I’m calling it “Unfiltered Velocity”, and the idea is to share all things Velocity without as much varnish as you’d find elsewhere. It’ll still be B2B marketing, more or less, but more immediate. Without any polish. Warts and all.

We’ll share pictures of stuff we see. Record ideas and thoughts that we have. Share posts and pictures and videos of things we find important.

At least, we’ll do it for a while, then we’ll see how it’s going.

So drop by on Facebook and like us. And see our zits and warts and stuff. (And once we’ve got 100 “Likes” Doug will write and produce another R-rated Xtranormal video!)

© Ryan Skinner for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, Facebook

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I present three shooting stars – apparently unrelated, but otherwise significant, events and pieces of news that proclaim a similar destiny: The enterprise software space is gonna get sexy in a hurry.

Shooting star #1

Business Insider (the publisher behind Silicon Alley Insider) announced that they were starting a new part of their site called SAI: Enterprise to focus exclusively on enterprise software. They cited cloud computing and consumerization of IT as the two trends that will turn enterprise software into a billion-dollar darling.

Bubble buster: Some may draw into question the foresight and authority of Business Insider.

Shooting star #2

The NY Times recently ran a peculiar article that started by praising one B2B technology start-up, then went on to gild the lily of a rapidly expanding B2B space taken as a whole. Says the Times:

While skyrocketing valuations for social networking sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook have kept Silicon Valley investors betting heavily on the next social start-up, investors are increasingly looking at companies that build software for other companies.

Bubble buster: To this ex-PR, the article had the whiff of being placed (by Splunk) and the B2B story was a weak hook to tie Splunk into a broader narrative.

Shooting star #3

Marc Andreessen (the Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz) recently gave an interview to Cnet editor Paul Sloan that suggested that innovation in verticals would bite at the heels of ecommerce giants like Amazon. Not wholly a B2B story, Andreessen’s verticals story would play well in B2B, where tech companies strive to get traction in verticals.

Bubble buster: Andreessen applies his thinking to smartphones, which many B2B tech companies seem reluctant to seize.

These three omens signal a revolution in B2B technology; they also portend a change in how these companies will succeed.

The New York Times and Silicon Alley Insider both make a clear case: The way enterprise software is bought and sold is undergoing a radical change.

As they New York Times piece put it: “Instead of aiming at the golf-playing chief information officer, the company took a quirky name and zeroed in on the culture and tastes of everyday I.T. employees, the ones who actually had to use, and program around, enterprise software.”

The crazy idea that begins to emerge is this: B2B companies who want to succeed in the future may have to do real marketing. Imagine that: Fewer ass-slap enterprise software buyers and more rubber-road enterprise software buyers. Fewer white papers. More user reviews.

Consumerization of IT, cloud computing and (forfend!) social business are all driving enterprise software to a funky future where small companies with great ideas can slay the enterprise giants of yesterday. But first of all they’ll have to speak directly to buyers, lots of them!, and play to the different needs of widely varying verticals.

© Ryan Skinner for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: b2b software, b2b technology, enterprise computing, enterprise software, enterprise technology

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We hopped on the Eurostar at an ungodly hour for B2B content marketers:

B2B content marketing love train.

On the way, we entertained each other by singing B2B content marketing songs (“Lonely days are gone/I’m a -comin’ home/My baby, she wrote me an eBook”).

Then Neil started telling B2B content marketing jokes.

Neil and his niche fan base.

But B2B content marketing jokes aren’t exactly suited to all audiences…

Bless.

Unfortunately, by the time we arrived in Paris, we had forgotten that we had come in search of B2B content marketing insights. So we just had a massive lunch at La Fontaine de Mars (Cassoulet to kill for) (no, literally: there must have been eight species in that bubbling, bean-studded ooze)…

The Last B2B Content Marketing Supper

Jim The Second

Luke

It was time to walk off that lunch and seize a B2B content marketing photo opp.

B2B content marketers

Followed by a boat tour on the Seine…

Jim mugs Simi

Past Notre Dame

And ended up back in one of the many B2B content marketing bars that line the Paris side streets…

Stan gets them in.

Followed by a brilliant, sunny next day.

Les Bollocks du B2B

Including a bit of shopping:

Le Bon B2B Content Marche

And the train back to the real capital of B2B content marketing: London.

Halina and Wendy

In short: a B2B content marketing good time was had by all.

Merry Christmas.

See you in the new year.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B Content Marketing Strategy

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