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2013
Change the content marketing world

We must in fact change the world

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Content marketing’s disrupting…everything. Either you’re part of the disruption, or you’re chasing irrelevance

Vote

The B2B Marketing Fun Poll

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We’re convinced that – even for the driest of B2B markets – successful marketing is fun marketing.

2012
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B2B Content Marketing Roundtable

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Doug joined Joe Pulizzi of the CMI and Jim Burns of Avitage on this Marketing Made Simple TV show. Check it out.

Piktochart Infographic

Using Piktochart: a marketing technology review

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A friend alerted me to Piktochart, the online Infographics creator so I thought I’d give it a try. Here’s my first impression after making two infographics, the one you see above (which took about 7 minutes) and a spoof Content Marketing Strategy infographic I cranked out last week and shared on Pinterest (yes, it did [...]

To all B2B media: A modest proposal

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Make branded media available on your site, behind a special “paywall”, build more traffic, brand love and social goodness.

B2B Marketing Research: content marketing goes mainstream

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A quick bit of B2B marketing research: a comparison of ‘Content Marketing’ compared with the general Advertising and Marketing category search volumes and with other related terms. From Google Insights for Search.

The editorial calendar for content marketing: a round-up

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As B2B marketers get serious about content marketing, they’re starting to bring together the people, processes and technologies needed to run a continuous content-generating machine. An editorial calendar is central to this new discipline and the core of a marketing plan. To call it best practice is like calling breathing a best practice technique for [...]

Content Marketing Strategy Infographic of sorts

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There’s a new infographic born every minute. So we used Piktochart to crank out this Content Marketing Strategy infographic that’s completely, 100% devoid of content just for fun. Share away! Did you learn much about content marketing strategy from this? Do you think it might even help us rank on the term Content Marketing Strategy? [...]

How to use Prezi for B2B content marketing

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Prezi is the cloud-based presentation software that’s like Powerpoint on LSD. Its ‘zoomable user interface’ (ZUI?) with swoopy transitions and infinite drill-downs make it a sexy alternative to boring old slides. Here’s how and why you should put it in your B2B content marketing toolkit…

How to build a B2B content marketing team

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Great B2B content marketing is teamwork. But it’s rare to have all the necessary talents in one person, so here are the ten types you need on your team…

Sexy new FODM 2012 mailer. Oooh….

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The Future of Digital Marketing event (FODM) is a highlight of the digital marketing calendar and one of Econsultancy’s longest-standing events. So we were thrilled when Laura Wall asked us to do the main print promotional piece for the 2012 event.  We gave it to Luke Donaghey to design –– he did last year’s bright, [...]

Salesforce Social Success case study

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Kieran Flanagan has written an excellent summary on SEOmoz of the Salesforce Social Success content microsite. He tells this B2B content marketing case story so well, I won’t try to re-tell it here.  Just wanted to share my favourite graphic from it: Says it all — the sweet spot for all B2B marketing is where [...]

Pinterest for B2B marketing: Velocity dives in

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At Velocity, we never let a bandwagon rattle past without at least making a token effort towards hopping on board. So when Pinterest started to pick up steam, we registered without a moment’s hesitation. Our excuse? We need to learn about this stuff even if it’s not exactly suited to our business. As soon as [...]

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Sh*t Birders Say

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Okay, this is a B2B marketing blog. But I really wanted to share this short video my brother Jason made, Sh*t Birders Say. It’s beautifully edited and funny as hell — even if you’re not a birder. If you do know any birders, do send them the link.

Structuring a B2B content marketing argument

The problem/solution structure in B2B content marketing

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When it comes to structuring a B2B marketing argument, it’s hard to beat the good old ‘Problem/Solution’ structure. It’s stood the test of time for some very good reasons: It gets the target audience nodding in agreement – if they recognise the problem you’re describing, they’re much more likely to lean forward and give you [...]

Is B2B content marketing jumping the shark?

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‘Jumping the shark’ is one of my favourite expressions. Wikipedia tells us it means “the moment in the evolution of a television show when it begins a decline in quality that is beyond recovery. The phrase is also used to refer to a particular scene, episode or aspect of a show in which the writers [...]

Content Differentiation: Doug Does Mad Marketing TV

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I was honoured to be invited to be Jeff Ogden’s guest on Mad Marketing TV, the excellent series of interviews with B2B marketers. Here’s the interview — and the ‘after-party’ chat — on Content Differentiation (the next big challenge for content marketers).

Conversations with Lucy: the trouble with virtual customer support

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Lucy is a virtual customer care agent who works for my mobile operator, O2. I have spent many hours talking to Lucy, sharing my hopes, my dreams, my ambitions and, yes, my fears. But I feel that Lucy is struggling with commitment issues and, when confronted, tends to hide behind a rather cold officious facade. This is hurtful but I can’t seem to get through to Lucy and earn her trust. Here’s a recent conversation:

The problem of content quality

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For readers, there is no quality content problem. For publishers, there is a quality content problem.

How far are we from blind software taste tests?

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So many pieces of enterprise software, so little difference. Could we start thinking branding and emotions as part of the software product? Is there room for delight, serendipity?

Viral videos? First have a B2B video marketing strategy

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A client asked for a bit of help in putting together a video strategy for next year’s marketing plan. In writing a reply, we realised that there are so many different ways of using video in B2B content marketing – not just the obvious video demos and viral videos…

Starting with an earthquake and building to a climax

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Sam Goldwyn, legendary Hollywood film producer (famous for malapropisms, paradoxes and errors of speech) once said: “We want a story that starts out with an earthquake and works its way up to a climax”. I’m not sure we quite achieved that at Velocity’s first live Marketing Masters one-hour-long interview with John Watton from Expedia.

Friday post: B2B AWESOME!!!

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This is a Friday Velocity post. That means all bets are off, and this is totally NSFW. But fuck it. I think it’ll make you feel awesome.

2011

Velocity’s B2B content marketing research trip to Paris

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To stay at the cutting edge of B2B content marketing you can’t just sit in your office. So Velocity decided to get out of London and discover how B2B content marketing works for B2B content marketing agencies over in Paris, the French capital of B2B content marketing. This B2B content marketing blog post is a [...]

Highlights from Econsultancy’s social data briefing

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If there are two bulls barging through the marketing tea party, they’re social media and data analytics. Econsultancy’s latest digital intelligence briefing charts the damage when the two meet.

Unethical persuasion in B2B content marketing: a call to all ‘compliance practitioners’

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I finally got around to reading, “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” by Robert Cialdini, Ph.D. It’s a summary of the secret techniques used by what he calls ‘exploiters of the weapons of automatic influence’ (‘marketers’ to you and me). Cialdini Ph.D. highlights six of the most powerful techniques that, when invoked, apparently turn us all [...]

B2B Content Marketing Agency Velocity Issues Tweet

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Velocity Partners, the London-based B2B content marketing agency today announced the production and distribution of a new, self-promotional tweet on the popular Twitter micro-blogging and self-aggrandizement service.

Billboard boycott – let’s start with B2B billboard ads

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Having spent my entire career in marketing, I’m hardly an anti-capitalist. But there is one form of advertising that I’d happily see banned tomorrow: billboards. The multi-billion dollar outdoor advertising industry is built on a premise that all marketers should reject: that it’s okay to sell people’s eyeballs without their consent or benefit. As a [...]

The Marketo Revenue Rockstar Tour Review

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I just got back to the desk the day after Marketo’s Revenue Rockstar event in London so I thought I’d file a quick report on it. The event was fantastic. A buzzing, interesting, challenging day full of best-practice insight on demand generation and marketing automation. Not to mention the chance to meet lots of people [...]

Content Development: Nine Tips for B2B marketers

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Content marketing has hit the tipping point for B2B marketers. At Velocity, we used to have to evangelise the concept of content marketing , then spend lots of time telling clients and prospects why it’s such a powerful thing. Today, those conversations are a lot shorter. B2B marketers have discovered content marketing as the engine [...]

Now THAT’s an infographic (most B2B infographics aren’t)

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We’ve been huge fans of information graphics at Velocity ever since Edward Tufte self-published his brilliant ‘The Visual Display of Quantitative Information‘ book. But as the B2B marketing world has gone B2B infographic crazy in the last year or so, we’ve been much more likely to be disappointed than delighted. Most B2B infographics are really [...]

Excellent IBM CMO study interviews 1,700+ CMOs

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It’s the closest thing you can get to “the state of the marketing union”, including new technology, social media, analytics and digital-driven change. Some highlights.

Content Development using Inbound Writer

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Ryan came across a blog post by Jay Baer on a tool called Inbound Writer which is designed to help writers create better B2B content marketing pieces. Jay was so enthusiastic that Ryan gave it a go and Ryan, while considerably less enthusiastic, thought it might be worth playing with. So I’m creating this very [...]

Are you coming to FUNNEL?

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FUNNEL is a great idea (well, we did help develop it). It’s a B2B marketing event that covers the entire sales/marketing pipeline. It happens on 1 November at the Lancaster Hotel in London. As a friend of Velocity, you get a 20% discount to the event just by using this code: FLD508. Four tracks: Attract, [...]

Why you should give away the very thing you sell

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As content marketing gains momentum, we find that we’re not having to work quite as hard explaining the principles to prospective clients. But one objection does keep popping up that we thought would have died off by now: “Why should we give content away that tells people exactly how to do what we do? Won’t [...]

Content marketing & marketing automation webinar

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In case you missed last week’s Content Marketing & Marketing Automatation webinar put on by DemandGen’s John Sweeney, here’s a link to the archived talk with slides. In it, Bob Apollo of Inflexion Point and Hubspot takes you through his principles of content marketing and Doug Kessler from Velocity shares Twelve Lessons learned from our [...]

Two important B2B marketing events in London

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You can learn a lot about the new B2B marketing from a few day’s worth of Google trawling. But to get up to speed fast, there’s nothing like a really good face-to-face event. Here are two you ought to know about: The first is FUNNEL 2011, from Econsultancy, running on 1st November in the Lancaster [...]

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

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If you’re not burned out by the 9/11 media festival, here’s one small, short film shot and edited in the three weeks after the towers fell. I say ‘small film’ because so few people have seen it; but it’s really a huge film. It captures the only truth that can come out of such an [...]

Are you the bore in the corner?

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When he was working for a big B2B company, Andrew Walker did a brave thing. He audited every piece of communication that his company put out, with a cold, clear eye. And the result was, in Andrew’s words, “overwhelmingly bad. Every page on our website, every article we’d written, every e-newsletter, every piece of collateral [...]

Five B2B marketing posts we think you’ll like

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We know you like the backs of our hands. You’re a B2B marketer who’s always looking for new ideas, strategies, tactics and technologies. (See? Nailed you in one sentence). With this persona in mind, via the magic of content curation, here are five blog posts we’ve enjoyed recently: Social Media, Pretend Friends, and the Lie [...]

B2B Marketing Webinar: B2B Content Marketing and Automation

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Content Marketing and Marketing Automation are the two new pillars of B2B. We’re taking part in an upcoming DemandGen webinar that brings the two topics together. It’s on 15 September at 1pm London time and you can register here. Facilitated by John Sweeney of DemandGen, the marketing automation consultants, the web panel will include Velocity’s [...]

Nine companies B2B marketers should know about

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You’re a marketer, we’re marketers. It’s good to share the things we like. Here are nine companies you ought to know about. They all help marketers make more money for their companies; they’re all great at what they do; and they’re all Velocity clients – which says a hell of a lot about their judgement [...]

Internet Marketing Strategy: a meaty new briefing for all marketers

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If you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the change taking place in digital marketing – and all the blogs, eBooks, videos and research reports that try to explain it all – take an info-break and read this one report from the Gods of Digital Marketing: Econsultancy. It’s the new Internet Marketing Strategy Briefing and, unlike the [...]

In case you missed these B2B marketing guest posts

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We’re big believers in doing guest posts on other marketing sites. It reaches new audiences, builds backlinks and boosts our page rank and overall search rankings. The only bad thing: our regular blog readers don’t get to see them unless they happen to follow the blogs we’re posting on. We wouldn’t want to simply cut [...]

Three content marketing vital signs

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Does your site have a pulse? Here are three content marketing vital signs you should look at. Stat. The Dead Cat Toss. The Hourglass Figure. And the Jesus Pizza.

An Agile Approach to Digital Marketing

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How many times have marketing projects stranded, or launched late (and lame) because life intervened after the project’s execution? Many marketing projects would benefit from a concept borrowed from web development: Agile project management.

12 Lessons from the Manifesto Campaign – Project Open Kimono 13

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We’ll be wrapping up the results of the B2B Marketing Manifesto campaign soon, but here’s a quick tour of some of the lessons learned as we brought the Manifesto to market. There’s some yadda-yadda to go with it but you’ll probably get the idea… 12 Lessons from the B2B Marketing Manifesto Campaign View more presentations [...]

Just buy the f**king product

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Inspired by the story of the new best-selling children’s book sensation “Go the f**k to sleep”, we bring you the story of a CEO* brought to the edge of desperation as he copes with digital marketing.

Company blog as B2B skunkworks

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How making your business’s blog into a testing ground for new ideas can drive innovation, and provide proof of concept for radical changes.

Rationality or emotion: which is the engine of B2B marketing?

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Most people believe that B2B marketing is all about making rational arguments that lead ineluctably to a sale, compared to the much more emotional appeal required by companies selling cornflakes, running shoes or sugar water. Should B2B marketers eschew the emotional appeal to their prospects?

I ♥ Jellyvision

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Interactive user design on a site has to be something more than click-through. Here’s how smoove user experiences are evolving.

‘Au revoir’ marketing scientist

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After three-and-a-half years, one of our favourite B2B marketers, top clients and all-round great egg, John Watton is moving on from his job as CMO at ShipServ, the leading ship supplies e-marketplace. Elected B2B Marketer of the year in 2009, he has transformed ShipServ’s fortunes on a limited budget over that period. Velocity has worked with him since 2007 and thought we’d interview to him to get the inside skinny on what’s hot in B2B marketing land.

Hasta la vista Stuart Rothwell

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Stuart Rothwell, stalwart designer and Liverpool FC supporter (though less die-hard than when he joined for obvious reasons) who ambled into our hallowed portals for the first time on April 1, 2008 is leaving us. While it’s really sad for us, it’s a great adventure for him. He’s off on a world tour (well north, [...]

B2B chalk talk videos: capturing your best experts

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Even the smallest company has at least one guy who can tell its story really, really well. He’s the guy you always want to bring to important sales calls and meetings. The one who can make your story seem so simple, clear and compelling. This guy is a priceless asset – but the one thing [...]

On first impressions and landing pages

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[This article derives from another blog post, called "First Impressions: On landing pages and landing in general"]. Taking the theme “you never get a second chance to make a first impression” to heart, let’s talk first impressions: Landing pages. For many of your potential leads, they’re the first meeting with your company. Either you win [...]

First Impressions: On landing pages and landing in general

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I’m the new guy, freshly landed at Velocity Partners, and this is the new guy post. Taking the theme “you never get a second chance to make a first impression” to heart, let’s talk first impressions: Landing pages. For many of your potential leads, they’re the first meeting with your company. Either you win enough [...]

A Long-Ass Landing Page goes live

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Check out this new landing page for Econsultancy, the digital marketing publisher, community, analyst house, training company and event organiser (whew). We’re students of landing pages and, when there’s a lot to say, we like them loooooooong. The project name inside Econsultancy was LALP for ‘Long-Ass Landing Page (or Long-Arse for the Brits among us) [...]

B2B content marketing around buying triggers

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There are lots of ways to build your content marketing strategy — around personas, products, organisational structure… We’d like to suggest a new way to go: build your content around your most important buying triggers.

What B2B marketers can learn from Charlie Sheen

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Charlie Sheen has shown himself to be a new class of braying moron: the braying moron who thinks that a sit-com character is the same thing as a human being. But what can B2B marketers learn from Charlie Sheen? Nothing. Just don’t be a braying moron. And if you decide to experiment with trending topics [...]

Post-Digital Marketing: The Rise of Meatspace

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Marketing is entering the post-digital era.  It’s not that digital is going away, just that it’s being dissolved into everything we do.  This means we can also stop the digital myopia and start thinking about ideas in the real world again (then spin them in digital directions). A cool example from the consumer world: The [...]

We’re Hiring: Digital Marketing Analyst

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Are you ready for the Land of Accountability? If you’re a B2B marketer with a thirst for measurement then find out why we might be your next assignment.

LinkedIn Maps: your network visualised

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We’re big infographics fans so when LinkedIn launched their new LinkedIn Maps tool, we were first in the virtual queue to have a play. The tool generates a colourful, dynamic map showing all your connections and how they’re related to each other. It colour codes the clusters it identifies and lets you assign your own [...]

A nice bit of visual B2B personalisation

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LinkedIn just sent me a nice piece of highly personalized B2B email. I’ve never seen ‘visual persoanlization’ in an out-bound email before but it’s pretty compelling to see the faces of so many friends and contacts looking back at me.  I also like the little scribbled comments like ‘See Simon’s new job’. The only question [...]

2010

Mel’s Christmas Posters

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Mel Bartheidel, ace designer from the Velocity stable (yes, we keep them in a stable) designed some very cool posters for the Somerset House Super Christmas Market. The background was made by tin toys, inked up, wound up and let loose.  Happy Christmas from all of us to most of you:

What B2B marketers can learn from Viagra Spam

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Viagra spammers have a tough challenge. They know that if they can get their message to a few billion people, a few thousand morons will place an order. But they also know that spam filters all over the world are set specifically to prevent them from doing so. One of the toughest hurdles: the email [...]

How to inject urgency into your B2B marketing

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We talk a lot about the Battle for Attention in B2B and about Buyer Attention Deficit Disorder and the relentless Mississippi of info-dreck that gushes through us all every hour of every day and about how the best-laid campaigns of the humble B2B marketer doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in Haiti anymore. But we haven’t [...]

Project Open Kimono 8: email follow-up and promotional defense barriers

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One of the experiments we ran in our B2B Marketing Manifesto campaign was to send a simple, quirky text email as a follow-up to our sexy HTML email announcing the Manifesto. In the spirit of Project Open Kimono, here’s what we’ve learned. What we did To announce the publication of the B2B Marketing Manifesto, we [...]

B2B Mobile Marketing: the distant thunder grows louder

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We’ve been spending a lot of time in Google Analytics lately thanks to Project Open Kimono (our ‘living case study’). On one lunchtime drill-down, we came across something that feels significant to all B2B marketers: visits to the Velocity website from mobile devices have started to appear on the radar screen: Last October: 32 visits [...]

B2B Marketing Agency campaign in a scribble

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We were mapping out the B2B Marketing Manifesto campaign on a sheet of A4 lined paper and this is what was left behind on the meeting table. Pretty much all there.

Twitter and the tyranny of the new

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Is it just me or have you noticed how Twitter buries the best under a blizzard of blah-blah-blah? Feels like it’s a medium that favours newness over quality and that has implications for humans and for marketers…

Five things I’ve learned in B2B marketing

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Well, I’m moving on to work for Thomson Reuters (the siren call of being able to walk to work proved to be too strong to resist), and I thought I’d get all reflective and try to sum up some of the (many) things I’ve learned at Velocity.

A B2B viral video gets contagious

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B2B marketers  often question the value of the kind of video people often call ‘viral’: the quirky, witty ones that demonstrate the human side of a business. It can be hard to quantify but we’re convinced that people buy from people they want to do business with. Showing your human side can only help. So [...]

B2B Analytics, old school

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Sometimes, when you forget your Google Analytics password and just need a quick look at the source of your downloads, it’s time for the Velocity Real-Time Segmentation Dynamics™ Report generator, developed with our partners at 3M (Post-It™ Division) and Pentel (Fineliner™ Division).  Fast insight, old school.

Cross-Promoting B2B Content: Project Open Kimono Part 4

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It’s time to talk about cross-promoting content as we approach week three of Project Open Kimono, the real-life, almost-real-time, warts-bunions-and-all case study of our B2B Marketing Manifesto campaign.  The idea is simple: in every piece of content you produce, tell the reader (or listener or viewer) about the most relevant other pieces of content you’ve [...]

Get the B2B Marketing Manifesto

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Click below to download The New B2B Marketing Manifesto. You might like one of our other eBooks: The Holy Trinity of Technology Marketing Technology marketing is actually quite simple: you need to be able to answer three questions quickly, clearly and compellingly. This eBook tells you what the three questions are and why it’s so important [...]

B2B Content Marketing Trends and Spends

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Marketing Profs and Junta 42 haven’t half been busy lately. They’ve produced a report into content marketing, surveying skills, resources, and trends. It’s the biggest and most comprehensive report of its kind, surveying 1100 American marketers in May 2010. These are some of the highlights. All in all it’s a bit of mixed bag: content [...]

B2B Marketing agency Velocity publishes “B2B Marketing Manifesto”

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Velocity, the B2B marketing agency, has produced a new eBook for marketers called the B2B Marketing Manifesto, available for download from the Velocitypartners.co.uk website. The B2B Marketing Manifesto tackles the choice facing B2B marketers today: either step up to the challenge of marketing in a digital world, or continue using the internet for digital brochureware [...]

Thanks for submitting your details for the B2B Marketing Manifesto.

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Click below to download The New B2B Marketing Manifesto. You might like one or two of our other eBooks: The Holy Trinity of Technology Marketing Technology marketing is actually quite simple: you need to be able to answer three questions quickly, clearly and compellingly. This eBook tells you what the three questions are and why it’s [...]

Copywriting: the unsung hero of B2B

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We bang on a lot about the importance of copywriting in B2B but we don’t often see good data to support our case. I found some while listening to an excellent webcast by Joe Pulizzi of Junta 42 and Jeff Ogden of Find New Customers (Jeff is a passionate pipeline marketer you might want to [...]

Sales and Marketing: the same hymn sheet

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Our friend Stephanie Tilton (one of the Savvy B2B Marketers) and the folks at AG Salesworks have just published an excellent eBook on the subject: Gear Up For Success: 8 Steps to Get Sales & Marketing Cranking in Unison:

The New B2B Marketing Manifesto

The B2B Marketing Manifesto

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A tirade against the reactionary forces of traditional marketing. A wake up call. Okay, a bit of a temper tantrum.

The Banksy of B2B Marketing

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I came back to the office today to find Stuart, our senor designer, all covered in spray paint. In this age of InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator, it’s great to see a designer actually get out the scissors, card and spray cans once in a while.

Sex, Lies, and Advertising

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Back in the 19th Century, you could make all kinds of wild claims about your Tincture of Gripe Water or Dr Astoundo’s Patented Baldness Liniment. Nobody could sue you if it didn’t do what it said on the tin. That changed in the early 20th Century, which is all to the good. It means marketers have to be more creative when promoting products or services, and not just resort to bare-faced lies.

Ten ways that B2B marketing copy goes wrong

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Let’s face it, most B2B copywriting is not very good. There are many reasons, but here are our top ten. Is your latest B2B marketing copy guilty of any of them?

Analytics can be fun, honestly.

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Ok, fine; maybe not as much fun as driving a speedboat up the Thames, but it can be extremely handy and oddly satisfying –if you get it right, that is. If you get it wrong, it’s less “fun” and more “total bloody nightmare”.

Why government and SEO don’t mix

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You can practically hear the moral outrage screaming between the lines:

“Four government departments spent almost £6m ensuring their websites appeared on search engine results pages in the last two financial years, according to newly released figures.” (BBC)

B2B marketing jobs in London

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We want your body. And your brain. We’re looking for talented copywriters, designers and project managers, so if you’re looking for a job in B2B marketing, come and talk to us.

B2B marketing’s virtuous digital circle: Spin Cycle

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At Velocity we believe in making our content work harder than we do. Find out how just a little bit of joined up thinking can make you the toast of your management team in just three months and still have spare time to enjoy the sunshine.

Bite me, Michael O’Leary

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Photo credit: Le Scribbler I’ve never flown Ryanair before. And now I never will again. If I’d wanted to raise my blood pressure, I could have done that for free by reading the comments section of the Daily Mail website. To anyone contemplating a journey with Ryanair, I suggest you shut yourself inside a biscuit [...]

How to structure a B2B argument

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B2B marketing always comes down to building an argument; telling a story that leads to an inescapable conclusion: ‘You need to buy this, now.’ If your argument isn’t solid, the creativity of Björk and the budget of Nike will not move your business.

Real women don’t sell

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Ultimo, the lingerie maker, has launched a new line of evening dresses. Interesting bit of diversification there – I suppose it makes sense for company that makes bras to also make outer garments. Hopefully the dresses will be designed with the logistics of bra-wearing in mind…

B2B Marketing Internship: My Week

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We’ve been advertising for geniuses at Velocity recently. And we’ve had one in the making with us for the past week in the shape of Surbiton High’s Fleur Kenny!! Read her blog charting her week with us and you’ll see why we all think she’s going places.

B2B Copywriting: hitting the sweet spot

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There are four kinds of B2B copywriting and they fall into the neat little quadrants formed when two important axes intersect: Clarity and Authenticity. If you can get both in your writing, you’re in the Sweet Spot and wonderful things will begin to happen to you…

Calnetix Power Solutions gets a dose of Velocity

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The problem: how to sell a ground-breaking innovation to one of the world’s most conservative industries. Calnetix Power Solutions has invented a technology that captures waste heat from engines, boilers and industrial applications and turns it into electricity. The process is called the Organic Rankine Cycle, and has been used in large-scale, big footprint applications [...]

B2B summed up in two words: the writing’s on the road

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B2B is a lot simpler than the gurus would have you believe. After all the e-tomes and blog posts and webinars it really all boils down to two words — and you can see them painted on almost urban street road in the land. When in doubt: look down.

What hugging cruets and joined-up marketing have in common

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Answer: Econsultancy. Let me explain… Econsultancy have a brilliant new event called JUMP (which we helped launch a few months ago). It’s the most exclusive “online meets offline marketing” event of the year, and it brings together senior marketers to learn about best practice integrated marketing – all the innovations and developments where online and [...]

Avoid marketing intranet pitfalls

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Here’s an eBook we’ve written and designed for our friends SmallWorlders, the people who create fun and social intranets for marketing teams. Since it’s been up on the SmallWorlders website they’ve seen traffic increase 10 to 20 times the usual, which is pretty damn impressive.

Join the iClan

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Just when you thought the Apple Cosa Nostra couldn’t have its fingers in more pies (or i’s) the iPad arrived to fill the void in your life that you didn’t know you had.

Turns out a picture is worth at least 2,380 words

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The old cliché “a picture is worth a thousand words” has been around forever so there must be some truth to it. But only a certain kind of obsessive compulsive neurotic (often our favourite people) would go to the trouble to do the maths. David Ash, a consultant at Camwood, the application migration experts, is [...]

London-Based B2B Agency Runs Out of Tea

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Velocity, the London-based business-to-business marketing agency, ran out of tea today in an uncharacteristic demand forecasting error. The agency, which recently acquired a large red teapot to support and enable its growing workforce, is now crippled by a complete lack of the beverage that contributes 50% of staff body mass and 76% of all good [...]

An infographic with sound

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We love infographics here at Velocity and are big fans of Edward Tufte and Information is Beautiful and Data Flow and stuff like that. But we just had to share this one: an infographic with audio called Fractions of a Second: An Olympic Musical. It’s by Amanda Cox and The New York Times and it’s [...]

The value of story? About 2,776%

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We’re always talking about how important a story is in marketing — but now someone has finally proven it with an ingenious experiment. As summarised in a recent DoubleThink post, the experiment (by New York Times columnist Rob Walker) is called Significant Objects and the idea is really simple: Buy cheap things on eBay Give [...]

Free B2B Hugs: 25 ways to reward your most engaged customers

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Everyone’s always talking about ‘customer engagement’ and we can see why: fully engaged customers — the ones who comment on your blog posts, join your Facebook group, reteweet your tweets, eat all your content, give you testimonial quotes, participate in case studies and attend your events – add tremendous value to your business and your brand.

Making the sales team irrelevant

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Roger Warner, online PR maestro, sent us a link to this Doug Richard video.  It’s a two-minute extract from one of his start-up seminars, this one on the relationship between marketing and sales. The quote we like: “A great marketing campaign is defined by the irrelevance of the sales people who follow.” We’ve always like [...]

We’re all B2B content brands now

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We just did a guest post for the excellent B2BBloggers on how we’re all becoming content brands now — and some tips for how to build a strong B2B content brand.  As content marketing gains currency, just having a new eBook won’t be enough. The post summarizes some thoughts for an era of ubiquitous B2B [...]

An antidote to all the hype

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There’s a lot of crap talked about the power of social media and how it’s transforming marketing. Check the Ad Contrarian blog for a bracing, acerbic and amusing antidote to all the hype.

Nativ gets its mojo on

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We’ve been working with a great company called Nativ, who offer a digital video content management and distribution platform and service.

Velocity gets medieval

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I have to confess to having no real reason for this, except that it’s spring and I always think of these lines from the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales whenever it’s April and it’s sunny.

It’s not what you said, it’s the way you said it

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The general consensus out there seems to be that French Connection’s new ad campaign is a right royal triumph. If you’ve been living under a stone for the past few months and haven’t seen it, click here to see what I’m on about. This Is The Woman, This Is The Man has a cool, art-housey [...]

We explain ourselves – in infographics

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As you’ll know if you got our newsletter we’re big fans of infographics over here. We got inspired by all of these and decided to have a go ourselves. This is our first, hand-made infographic explaining the Velocity process. It was a lot of fun, so maybe we’ll do some more soon. It was certainly a [...]

‘Margin Killers’ eBook reaches 600 downloads

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We didn’t mention this? We’ve been working with IBS, the wholesale distribution software experts, to produce a content series on the five big success drivers in wholesale distribution. To kick the whole thing off we wrote and designed an eBook called The Six Margin Killers of Wholesale Distribution. If you want to know what I’m [...]

What fashion and marketing have in common

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Here’s something I hadn’t really thought about: the analogous relationship between B2B and haute couture. In fact, fashion in general. And marketing in general.

7 Incredibly Rare Mistakes in Social Media Marketing

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There are literally thousands of blog posts, eBooks and articles called, “The 24 Most Common Mistakes in Social Media Marketing”. But no one ever covers the really rare mistakes in social media marketing — the ones almost nobody ever seems to make.

Marketo’s new Definitive Guide gets some Velocity

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We’ve been working with Marketo, the biggest cheese in B2B marketing automation, to design and sub-edit their new eBook ‘The Definitive Guide to B2B Social Media’. It’s the latest in the series of Definitive Guides (you can read the first one on Lead Nurturing here).

The Cliché and The Copywriter

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Trawling LinkedIn as is my wont, I came across this website which was thoughtfully shared with the world by Reuben Webb:

http://www.101cliches.com/view-the-101

Oh how I sniggered.

The power of B2B Lead Nurturing

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The sales team owns the sales funnel. But as a B2B marketer, you feed the top of their funnel. So you own your company’s revenue pipe. The success or failure of your company depends entirely on the quality and quantity of opportunities you generate. This isn’t about how many business cards your team collected from [...]

Velocity acquires Big Red Teapot

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London-based B2B marketing agency Velocity today announced its acquisition of a new, high-capacity teapot to support its growing team of B2B marketing professionals.  The new teapot, a 10-cup, 3.2 litre Globe from the London Pottery Company will go into service alongside the agency’s previous 1.5 litre facility. “We’re thrilled with our big, red teapot,” says [...]

B2B web marketing: the platform battle

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As B2B web marketing comes of age, a battle is brewing between some pretty big players (and a few upstarts) over who will become the primary dashboard for marketers. The three combatants: CRM, CMS and marketing automation vendors.

Why clients hate marketing agency folk

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I just stumbled over a piece from Canada’s Marketing Magazine called ” Here’s to 2010: Industry experts share predictions for the year ahead” and read this, among other forecasts.

Never mind the Barack, it’s mobiThinking

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Birth of a thought leadership website

dotMobi is a mobile Internet services company and the registry for the .mobi domain name. It’s backed by leading mobile operators, device manufacturers, and Internet players, including Microsoft and Google. Essentially, .mobi is the only domain name that tells users, ‘This site will work on your phone’.

You can have it done right, cheap, or quick. Pick two

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Fortunately, it’s very rare that we ever get a client who doesn’t understand that you can’t have all three at once. Yet it’s still something that a lot of agencies come up against. But perhaps these problems wouldn’t arise if we marketers explained ourselves properly.

EPiServer uses market momentum to go public

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We just learned that our client EPiserver is preparing to go public on the Stockholm Stock Exchange. The company offers the best Micorosft .Net CMS on the planet and has delivered some really impressive numbers over the last few years.

B2B marketing agency Velocity powers up IBS relaunch

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Velocity Partners, the B2B marketing agency for technology companies, has announced the completion of the first phase of their project to reposition IBS, the Distribution Resource Management specialists.

The rise and rise of B2B content marketing

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Content Marketing is rivaling social media marketing in the hype stakes — and for good reason. It may not be particularly new, but in the age of the informed buyer and zero-cost distribution (the Internet), it’s what works in B2B marketing. The 2010 Content Marketing Spending Survey by Junta 42 confirms the trend (though anyone with a passing acquaintance with Twitter, LinkedIn or any B2B marketing blog won’t need it confirmed)…

IBS injects Velocity into turnaround

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When we met them in 2009, IBS, the specialist ERP vendor, was in turnaround. They’d just finished a major restructuring to focus the entire global business on one sector, wholesale distribution, and asked Velocity to clarify their positioning, develop a new story and take it to market.

2010 Content Marketing Trends and Predictions

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Drumroll please… Introducing The 2010 Content Marketing Trends and Predictions eBook from ClickPredictions — a crowdsourced effort by “39 of the world’s top B2B marketers, e-mail marketers and social media gurus” (including, erm, me). Ambal Balakrishnan, the tireless ClickDocuments founder, asked each of us a straightforward question, “What are key marketing trends and predictions for 2010?”

You say tomato… copywriting for international audiences

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We have a lot of international clients. Most of them are European or American, but occasionally they’re based further afield. This generates an interesting issue: how do you accommodate international English speakers in your copy?

Should free B2B content hide behind a form?

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The debate rages on: is it better to ask people to fill out a form to download your content (chasing shy people away) or maximise downloads and go without a form (losing the list-building benefits)? A recent post by Kim Cornwall Malseed on MarCom Ink argues that reg forms are ‘killing B2B software marketing’ and [...]

B2B marketing agency Velocity creates new website for intranet providers SmallWorlders

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Velocity, the B2B marketing agency for technology companies, has just announced a new website for SmallWorlders, specialists in intranets for marketing and brand teams. The agency developed a new brand positioning for the company, new language to describe it’s services and a fresh online presence. Smallworlders built the new website on their own Sandbox™ platform. [...]

Our New Year’s B2B Marketing Resolutions

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Inspired by Neil’s resolution “to eat breakfast every morning”, I got everyone at Velocity to give me their B2B marketing resolutions. So here are the new year’s resolutions from the heavyweights (especially after Christmas) at Velocity: Speak at more B2B industry events - To get the message out there that the old way of marketing is [...]

2009

Velocity Does Video: Nine kinds of B2B web video

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As this quick showreel demonstrates, we’ve been doing more and more video for our B2B marketing clients. Why? because it’s a great way to get even the most complex ideas across in a clear, compelling way.

Low-tech videos for a high tech product

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We love these Google Features videos on YouTube. Most tech demonstration videos are all high-tech flash with little icon men and screen shots and slick animations.  These are the opposite: just simple ideas demonstrated with hand-made stuff (a slingshot, a crocheted rug, black ink in water…). More of this please, B2B marketers: it’s time for [...]

Let us march!

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My favourite quote from Ogilvy On Advertising is, “When Aeshines spoke, they said, ‘How well he speaks’. When Demosthenes spoke, they said, ‘Let us march!’”

How often do you need to publish content? 1-7-30-4-2-1

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Content Marketing is like publishing — you need an editorial calendar and a bit of discipline. This guest post on Junta42 by Russell Sparkman of Fusionspark Media talks about how frequently you should be doing different elements of your content marketing mix.

Velocity shortlisted for Econsultancy Innovation Awards

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Velocity was just shortlisted for an Econsultancy Innovation Award for its work with ShipServ.  The recent Content Marketing and Social Media campaign is up against 3M, IBM and Essence for the Innovation in B2B Marketing prize. The campaign, developed for and with John Watton, ShipServ CMO, combined content marketing and social media to increase web [...]

Velocity client John Watton wins B2B Marketer of the Year

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John Watton, Chief Marketing Officer for ShipServ, last night won the prestigious B2B Marketer of the Year award presented by B2B Marketing Magazine. Watton beat formidable competition, winning recognition from the judges for the way he transformed the fortunes of ShipServ on a limited budget. Joel Harrison, editor of B2B Marketing magazine, commented, “the quality [...]

Why CIOs don’t belong on the board

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We did a fascinating interview with IT industry evangelist and FT.com columnist Ade McCormack yesterday (watch this space) and he shared some controversial ideas about CIOs and IT departments being ‘damaged brands’.  Made us think. Ade feels that it’s time to give up the idea of CIOs belonging on corporate boards. To Ade, CIOs are [...]

Diary of a Tweet: Clarity vs Twitterjunk

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The birth of every every new communications medium is followed by a period during which the underlying technology actually cramps the communication it’s supposed to be enabling.  When it comes to Twitter, we’re all in the middle of this period – Gartner would probably call it the Trough of Technobabble – right now. A Twitter [...]

16 ways to alienate a B2B buyer

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Most B2B marketing doesn’t just fail – it actively repels the people it’s trying to attract. In other words, most B2B marketing would deliver better results if it didn’t exist at all. When I buy things for Velocity, I’m a B2B buyer. Here’s the best ways to alienate me…

B2B marketing predictions for 2010

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We were recently asked where we thought B2B marketing would go in 2010. Made us think. So here are some predictions for the next year:, including kind-of-obvious ones, less obvious ones and a few we’d wish would come true…

Lethal Generosity: a key principle of social media marketing?

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According to the Harvard Business Review, 90% of tweets are generated by just 10% of Twitter users, reflecting the fact that these people are subject-matter experts, passionates, mavens, and thought leaders. B2B brands that can create places where this type of exchange can happen are engaging in something called ‘lethal generosity’, a key principle of social media marketing.

You can’t have a conversation when you use a megaphone

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Most B2B marketing organisations are set up for interruption-based, broadcast style communications and this traditional approach to marketing consumes 80-90% of the budget. This is strange in a world where there’s been a dramatic shift from megaphone marketing to listening and engaging in conversations. There’s need for a new type of marketing professional called a content strategist. Do you agree?

How you market is almost as important as what you market

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In a world where B2B companies all communicate in the same boring way, the way you market is as important as what you market. A mixture of humanity, empathy and confidence in your communications will help you rise above the herd.

The Velocity B2B Marketing Tube Map

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We’ve always loved Harry Beck’s legendary design for the London Underground Tube Map, so thought we’d do our own version mapping out the B2B marketing landscape. Kind of makes sense if you give it some time. The junctions were the trickiest bits…

Brevity is the soul of traffic safety

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A friend sent this photo of a Velocity-related traffic sign. I’d like to say we couldn’t have said it better ourselves, but if that were true, we’d be out of business…

Quick Case: when content goes social

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It’s been about four months since we published the B2B Content Marketing Workbook and we thought we’d report back on how the campaign has worked so far. It was the first time we’ve used social media as a vector for our content marketing and so makes a nice case study.

Microsoft marketing hits new low

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We’ve given Microsoft’s marketing a hard time in this blog before and we’ve also had some nice words to say about them. But this one takes the cake: if you haven’t seen the new Windows 7 Launch Party campaign and the excruciating videos that support it, you must now drop everything and go see it.

Join us for a Demand Generation Webinar

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Stan Woods will be taking part in what’s shaping up to be an excellent webinar on Innovation in Demand Generation and we thought you, as a loyal Velocity blog reader, might like to drop in (register here). John Watton will top the bill with a short case study on how ShipServ created 75% more sales opportunities without extra budget or headcount.

B2B blogging for beginners

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Let’s face it: these days, if you don’t have a blog on your website you’re admitting that you have nothing to say about your market, your customers, their problems and your ideas for solving them. Is that really a message you want to transmit? We try to get every client blogging. But sometimes we fail. [...]

Ghost in the machine: who should write your blog?

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There’s a debate in the blogosphere about whether it’s right for a blog to be ghost-written, particularly one advertised as being written by a particular author. Rather than get exercised about whether this is right or wrong, the question is: can it ever work effectively? Find out what we think.

Why ShipServ won a 2009 CRM Market Award

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Once again, ShipServ has ‘scooped’ a marketing award (why are awards always scooped?) — this time the 2009 CRM Market Awards run by CRM Magazine. ShipServ, piloted by CMO John Watton, won a CRM Elite Award given to customer implementations that push new boundaries. The judges recognised ShipServ “for its holistic use of Marketo, Salesforce.com, and social media” — including viral video, eBooks, Twitter and a LinkedIn group (we’re kind of proud of our work on all these).

It’s Time For The Corporate Galactico

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The football season is here. But it’s not just football superstars who’ll make waves this year. Corporate comms teams are also looking for their Galacticos.

All CIOs (or CEOs) are not the same

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We’re often asked s for creative ideas that target ‘the C-suite’ – CEO, COO, CFO, CIO and so on. It’s natural because these guys are usually the ones to sign the cheques, particularly for significant purchases. But the question implies that these people are pretty much all the same in what they do and how they think and behave. In our experience, this isn’t true.

Check out the eBook Ebook

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We’ve discovered a great new e-book from Jonathan Franz, a great copywriter based in Massachusetts, about how to exploit ebooks in your content marketing effort. You should check it out.

The Web Form Wall

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It’s a perennial debate: give your content away with no registration (web form), or force people to give you their details to get the goodies. Both arguments are compelling and both approaches have penalties…

Why Real Research Is Better Than Norman Muller

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Well done to young Matthew Robson for his report into teenage media consumption. But anyone taking a look should remember that individual points of view are no substitute for real research.

Chalkbot sprays the Tour

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It’s not B2B but we just had to share this one. The Nike-sponsored Livestrong Chalkbot is driving the Tour de France about 8 hours in front of the riders, spraying messages on the road in emulsified chalk. Road messages are a Tour tradition but these are different…

V Shortlisted for Glittering B2B Gong

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We’re pleased as Punch to have been shortlisted for a B2B Marketing Magazine Award for our recent work with ShipServ.  It’s hard to come over all surprised about it – after all, we did complete the rather arduous application process – but we’re still really encouraged when good work gets some recognition.  Not for ourselves, [...]

Welcome Alcatel Lucent!

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Here are some things you might find helpful: Why B2B Marketing Is So Boring The deck presented on 8th July. The Content Marketing Workbook Content Marketing is probably the most powerful weapon in the B2B marketing arsenal. Here’s our view on how it works. The Hierachy of Benefits A quick discussion of how features and [...]

Velocity takes New Media Age Awards by storm (but loses)

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We were thrilled to have been a Finalist for the Best B2B Campaign in the New Media Age Effectiveness Awards, celebrated the other night at the Grosvenor House Hotel. We thought our work with ShipServ kind of deserved it, to be honest. But we didn’t bloody win. Microsoft did. Which kind of sucks.

Bloggers and Influence Part II

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Bloggers eh! No schedules, no calendars, no contact number. They just don’t play by the rules. So how can you get on their elusive radar? Our top ten tips pave the way to success.

The white paper is dead…or is it?

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I presented a webinar the other day where I stated that while white papers are still the staple of content marketing, they’re getting really stale as a communications vehicle for B2B. A few people were so incensed they contacted me to say I was talking nonsense. So click here to find out whether they changed my mind…

The Content Marketing Workbook

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It’s here. The book of the webinar of the movie: The Velocity B2B Content Marketing Workbook. Over 45 breezy pages of good, solid advice about thought leadership and content marketing for B2B marketers like you. Come and get it!

Choose your patients carefully

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The most respected surgeons in the world have the best survival rates. But they don’t have the best survival rates because they’re better surgeons. They have the best survival rates because they choose their patients very, very carefully. Here’s why B2B marketers should do the same thing…

Watch the Velocity web seminar on Content Marketing

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Stan just presented our web seminar with B2B Marketing magazine, called “Content Marketing: Thought Leadership in a Web 2.0 World”. Seemed to go really well. Over 130 people attended and the feedback was excellent. The seminar is based on our imminent Content Marketing Workbook, which you’ll be able to download from this site very, very soon…

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Velocity and B2B Marketing Magazine announce new webinar

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Velocity, the B2B marketing agency specialising in technology markets, and B2B Marketing magazine announced a new webinar for B2B marketers about Content Marketing.

The 20-minute webinar is free and runs on Wednesday, 3 June 2009 at 3:30pm London time.

Join us for our new Content Marketing Webinar

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Traditional, interruption-based marketing is dead (or dying fast). The new B2B marketing is Content Marketing. And while a lot of marketers think that’s what they’re doing when they crank out case studies and white papers, most of them really aren’t doing it at all. Our new webinar explains all…

The changing look of listing / portfolio sites

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Websites that present a portfolio or list of creative work are always a design challenge. They have to be easy to navigate, and present visual ideas without overwhelming the viewer. Here’s a peek at how they’re evolving: In 2004, Daniel Eatock (top notch designer) and Jeffrey Vaska (top notch programmer) developed Indexhibit, originally conceived as [...]

Viagra spam gets creative

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I received this excellent spam the other day: Penis enlargement spam with a twist – it made me double-take and earned a giggle. Just a little creativity gets you noticed.

B2B Bloggers and Influence: Part I

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The issue of bloggers and influence divides B2B opinion. Do you think they’re anti-social ranters or a genuine community of influence? Find out our verdict now.

Psion Teklogix Takes Digital Upgrade With Velocity

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Psion Teklogix has launched it’s new market vision and a new website to give customers an enriched digital experience. The new site is the latest phase of a six-month positioning and communication project.

Why we steal from our clients.

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In the marketing world, agencies are supposed to be the ‘creative’ ones and clients are supposed to be the dullards who are grateful for a fresh source of ideas. In our experience, that’s just not how it works…

Web personas and Mind Maps

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Like most good digital agencies, we’ve been exploring web personas for a while and we’ve found them to be a critical aid to great site design. If you do them thoroughly, personas mean you can develop better sites faster, ones that meet the needs of your customers, prospects and other stakeholders more effectively. They force everyone to think about what users might actually want to do when they visit your site and then shape the design accordingly.

Simple Steps To A User Focused Site

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We never tire of building websites. The sheer pace of technology change means no two sites are the same. But the same old battles are usually just round the corner.

New media frenzy: the medium is just the medium

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It’s an exciting time to be in the communications business. It’s not just that there are so many new ways to reach people. It’s also that we get to watch as each of these new media gropes for its place in the communications ecosystem. But all this new media is still powered by the same thing…

Bessemer’s Ten Laws for SaaS companies

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Just came across an excellent presentation by Philippe Botteri and Byron Deeter from Bessemer Venture Partners on the ‘Ten Laws of Being SaaSy’. It summarises the key principles of getting a successful SaaS business off the ground (and to IPO). These guys should know. Bessemer is one of the most successful SaaS investors out there (VeriSign, Postini, Skype and lots more). Very good advice…

Twitter in B2B – a Velocity Slideshare

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In the last few months, Twitter has shot from being a cult web app to a full-blown global fad. Celebrities are doing it (Stephen Fry has 361,225 followers as of today); businesses are doing it (not just techie ones either); bloggers are doing it; and, yes, lonely people are doing it. ShouldB2B marketers be doing it?

The Disruptive Idea: that’s what it’s all about

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Disruptive ideas are not the only way to build a successful business. Sometimes just doing lots of little things better than the other guys is enough. But a disruptive idea is probably the single most powerful weapon in the marketing arsenal. And most marketers spend far too little time generating them.

SouthWest rap elevates the brand

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Saw a fabulous YouTube video the other day, where a Southwest airlines attendant delivered the pre-take-off welcome and safety instructions via an entertaining rap. See it here.

ROI and social media marketing for B2B

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One of our clients is talking to us about  spending budget on creating online buzz. Naturally, she’s thinking hard about how to justify what is effectively a new cost line in her marketing budget. One option she’s thinking about is to shift resources out of the traditional PR and media relations budget to support a [...]

Velocity launches new Internet marketing portfolio

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B2B marketing agency ramps up digital marketing offer Velocity, the B2B agency specialising in technology markets, has launched a new portfolio of Internet Marketing services. According to Stan Woods, Velocity’s managing director, “Our new set of Internet marketing services transform your web strategy and online performance from a passive, broadcast model to a dynamic, fully-engaged [...]

A B2B Social Media Checklist

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You’ve just published a great piece of content. Don’t just stick it on your website. Use social media to drive people to it (and vice versa). Here’s a one-page checklist to help you socialize your content, driving traffic and downloads…

Cross-fertilisation in social media:
tweet my post and I’ll post your tweet

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Social media is a whirling tornado of content and comment. Throw a new white paper into it and, if you’re lucky, it gets tossed around in the vortex, throwing bits off into Twitter tweets, blog posts, comments and backlinks. This cross-fertilisation can feel distressingly self-referential but that’s really the source of social media’s power…

Atomizing your content: your B2B social life

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Web marketing used to be all about driving traffic to your website. Now, it’s also about driving your content out into the wider web to see who trips over it, links to it, re-tweets it, rates it, comments on it, shares it and (of course) follows the backlinks back to your site. This social media is becoming increasingly important in digital marketing. At Velocity, we have content all over the place, including…

Digital Velocity in eight tweets: accelerate your online engagement

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B2B marketing has become almost synonymous with digital marketing. If you’re not getting your story out on the web, you’re probably not getting your story out at all. Now, as social media beds down and Twitter takes off, we thought it would be a good time to summarise all the things we do to help our clients engage with their audiences online.

‘Inspired by Kittens’ – Five branding lessons from social media

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In September 2008, Fallon’s Executive Creative director, Al Kelly, posted a video to YouTube called Kittens Inspired by Kittens.Within five months, the video had had 4.8 million views on YouTube, 95,000 references on blogs around the world, 64,000 Tweets and 1.5 million Google searches (as well as 28 traditional media stories).

Is the Mobile Web ready for B2B (and vice versa)?

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B2B Marketing Magazine just published an article we wrote on what every B2B marketer should be thinking about the mobile Web. These are clearly still early days for the mobile web in B2B markets but it’s exploding in B2C and we can see the shock wave approaching on the horizon.

New ‘Clean Technology’ B2B marketing practice at Velocity

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Four recent Green Technology projects and wins build expertise 3 March 2009 Velocity Partners, the B2B agency specialising in technology marketing, has announced the creation of a ‘Clean Technology’ practice following some significant client wins over the last few months. Velocity has gained experience on a range of Green Technology / Clean Technology clients including: [...]

Velocity commissions new Alan Kitching poster

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Alan Kitching is a bit of a hero.  A master of letterpress design and printing, he’s done some wonderful, iconic work for all kinds of clients and cultural institutions from the Guardian to the Royal Albert Hall.  Now he’s done something for us. Alan now works from the Typograpny Workshop, a delightful, eclectic studio in [...]

7 tips for writing number-based headlines

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Recent research from Spurious has proven that every piece of thought leadership content in the world now has to have a number in the headline or it just won’t get read.  We never let a bandwagon go unjumped-upon, so here’s the Velocity handy guide to writing headlines with numbers in them: 1) Make sure you [...]

Microsoft gets it right

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We’ve given Microsoft some bad reviews here — especially for the “I’m a PC” ad campaign, so it feels only fair to give them some credit when they get it right.

Going social in B2B: seven automatic actions for every piece of content

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Time was, you generated a piece of thought leadership content, stuck it on your website and eNewsletter, then sat back counting the hits.  Today, whenever we produce a new piece of content for a client — whether it’s a video, an eBook, white paper, blog post or podcast — we immediately start engaging with the [...]

New mobile marketing eBook for small businesses

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Velocity Partners, the B2B agency specialising in technology marketing, announced the publication of a new eBook available on mobiThinking.com. The free eBook is called, “Marketing your small business on the mobile Web: the guide to low-cost, high-impact mobile marketing” and is available to all mobile marketers on the mobiThinking.com website. “The major brands are getting [...]

17 Strategies to Killer Ads

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I stumbled across a great blog today that attempted to categorise advertising strategies. Based on an analysis of The Advertising Concept Book by Pete Barry, it’s a really useful list of advertising approaches that underscores that it’s the quality of the original idea and the associated strategic thinking that really make great campaigns.

Who needs editors?

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Google has dis-intermediated the content business. You don’t have to hire a PR agency to kiss the arses of the editors any more. You just have to generate content that people really want to read and then make sure it’s findable by doing all those optimisation tricks and tactics of the digirati: SEO, PPC, social [...]

10 Tips for Using Twitter And Email Marketing for B2B

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We’re exploring how to use Twitter for B2B marketing right now (you can follow us at http://twitter.com/velocitytweets). As part of that exploration, I saw a great post from Chad Horenfeldt at his Anything Goes Marketing blog about how to use Twitter for B2B marketing in tandem with email.

B2B Content Marketing – five or so mistakes

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In B2B marketing, content marketing is what works.  It’s all about generating content that the target audience will value, then driving that content into the market and out over the web.  An example: mobithinking.com, a website packed with content for mobile marketers that we’re doing with our client, dotMobi. A recent Junta 24 blog post [...]

Digital PR: Shut up and listen

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A good interview on ScobleizerTV with Joshua Reynolds who oversees Hill and Knowlton’s global technology practice. Traditional PR firms get a lot of stick lately about being slow to pick up on digital, but this guy seems pretty switched on.

Slugwatch: the power of content marketing

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We were just having a really thought-provoking conversation about content marketing with Andrew Findlater and Hooman Bassirian from Reed Business and they told us about Slugwatch, a service for UK farmers from Bayer Crop Science. It does what it says on the tin: helps farmers monitor slug infestations by mapping slug activity.  It’s the polar [...]

The web is 6500 days old

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it’s only 6500 days or so since Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. At Christmas in 1990 he initiated the first successful communication between a web client and a server via the Internet and the first website was built in mid-1991 at CERN, where Berners-Lee was then working. What are the top 5 innovations over that period that have changed the tech marketer’s life?

2008

The perfect direct mail list: just 23 companies

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Ray Kessler needed to sell his vanity number plate fast. How did he generate a list of just 23 companies with a good chance of being interested? I know because I was one of them…

Papa’s got a brand new bag, maaan.

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A bravo for emusic, one of the best music download sites out there, and some thoughts on building relevant communities in B2B. ‘Build it and expect them to come’ doesn’t work in the wild world of social networking.

Drop-down positioning at the Royal Opera House

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Check out this very funny drop-down menu from a Royal Opera House web form. Did the ROH construct this delightful list of titles to avoid annoying its Earls, Dukes, Barons, Sultans and Rabbis (they must HATE having to choose Mr) or is this just a clever bit of subliminal positioning?

Five Basic Social Theories of Online PR

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Roger , our web wonderwall, posted a terrific article on the essentials of Online PR.  The central metaphor: the web is a party — work the room instead of stumbling around like a socially inept gate-crasher.  Highly recommended.

Survival kit for growth companies

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Max Bleyleben’s excellent Technofile Europe blog recently posted this Survival Kit for Growth Companies, suggesting a strategy (or at least a list of tactics) for surviving the crunch.  It ranges from the unsurprising — cut personnel costs and freeze general and administrative expenses – to the less so: reposition your products; analyse profitability by product; [...]

Opt-Out: Digital Marketing’s punch in the stomach

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Marketing used to be all about the upside. You fired off a message; some people responded; others didn’t. Net gain. In the digital world, there’s a downside that’s as painful as any upside: the dreaded Opt-Out. Here are some ideas for dealing with it…

Velocity December Newsletter: Tech-speak, feature-talk or benefit babble?

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We see this one all the time. A tech company that’s great at describing its technology but not so great at making the story compelling to prospects. Or a company that waves a big, bold benefit flag – that nobody pays any attention to.When we see marketing problems like these, we reach for one of [...]

Customer Value Propositions in B2B Markets

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Andrew Findlater from Reed Business Information recently turned us on to an excellent article in the Harvard Business Review (back in 2006 but still daisy-fresh):

Its called Customer Value Propositions in Business Markets and it makes a compelling case for what the authors call “Resonating Focus”…

New eBook: Best & Worst of the Mobile Web

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mobiThinking.com, the resource for mobile marketers, and Velocity Partners, the B2B marketing agency, today announced the launch of a new eBook: The Best & Worst of the Mobile Web.

Credit Crunch B2B Marketing: Demand Generation, Lead Nurturing and Online PR

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The CEO is stalking the corridors, blood dripping from his Budget Axe — and he’s on his way to the marketing department. How will you defend your marketing plan? At Velocity, we’re deeply into two powerful new weapons that are not only incredibly effective, they’re virtually Crunch-Proof™…

Evel Knievel, corporate positioning & corporate message development

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Engineers take the leap from tech features to Big Business Benefits like Evel Knievel approached the Snake River Canyon: they fall down. Our Hierarchy of Benefits gives you a better way to do corporate positioning and corporate message development. It provides a practical solution: the Bridge (or, for the Tarzan in all of us: the Vine).

Your new content may not be as relevant as your old

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All the best B2B tech marketers are mini-publishing houses — they never stop cranking out thought-provoking content on the issues their target market cares most about. But even the best thought leaders often follow a simplistic content promotion strategy that completely ignores the idea of a sales cycle. Basically, they pump out some new content, promote it, and repeat. What they’re doing is burying the best under the newest…

A really good newsletter

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We know we ‘big up’ Pär Almqvist, the Marketing Dude at VNL, quite a bit. But we thought you’d like to see what we consider a really, really good eNewsletter that Pär briefed in and designed (we wrote it for him).

Microsoft’s baffling “I’m a PC” campaign

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Apple got a lot of attention with its “PC vs Mac” commericals. They were simple, funny, well-scripted and seemed to capture the essence of what Mac people love about their Macs. Clearly, they got under Microsoft’s skin, because the crack Seattle Rapid Response team has leapt into action (what, three years later?) with an expensive riposte: the “I’m a PC” campaign. The result is wrong in so many ways, I can’t summarise them all in a blog post.

Because you’re worth it

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Why are so few B2B companies as good at naming things as consumer companies? B2B could learn a lot from beauty companies like L’Oreal, which uses naming to great effect.

Branding as body language

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A friend of ours who also happens to be a God of Branding sent us an article he wrote ten years ago but could have been written yesterday. He’s Axel Chaldecott, co-founder of HHCL, now the top creative on the global HSBC account at JWT. The article’s central metaphor is that a company’s visual identity is its body language…

I beg you: don’t bore the bejesus out of me

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Marketing is communication. B2B marketing is bad communication.
That’s how your audience thinks about everything you put out.
Their expectations couldn’t be lower. They’ve waded through thousands of case studies and brochures and web pages from people just like you and IT’S NOT FUN.

Tech marketing trapped in Plato’s Cave

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For 2000 years we’ve been told to research and change or suffer the consequences. It’s still an issue today. Learn how one of the biggest names in the tech has been reminding itself of the danger of following processes rather than customers.

Good Reasons to do Social Networking in a B2B Environment

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How can Social Networking work in a B2B environment? Well, you can start thinking about creating more ‘social’ content as PR tools that can be used by people for facilitating dialogue, spreading your messages and enabling you to manage relationships in new ways.

B2B Web Marketing Tools Around Town

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Being a nice chap, I thought I’d share a few of our secret web marketing tools with you. These are the apps and widgets that we use day in, day out to help our clients do wonderful things in SEO, PPC, and web content marketing in general….

Wordle Does Velocity

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James Pearce and his mobiForge blog turned us on to Wordle, the online toy that turns any text into a word cloud.

We pointed it at the Velocity blog and this came out:

Playing in the creative sandbox

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Despite living in a ‘creative’ world, most agencies are pretty linear. They take the brief, then they do the creative. Velocity is a bit different. When we do consulting engagements, we do a creative firestorm as part of the engagement, before any specific brief is on the table. Lots and lots of rough concepts — headlines, images, copy, straplines. Here’s why…

Buff Your Pitch Up. Google Suggest & B2B Content Marketing

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Often we marketers are our own worst enemy when it comes to marketing ‘ideas’. In my time I’ve had the pleasure of conceiving some truly dreadful ‘opinion’ pieces in the name of trying to grab people’s attention. The fault usually lies in believing our own hype. Here’s some Google-inspired ideas on how to avoid falling into the trap…

The C word: the importance of confidence in B2B marketing

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A great website. Lots of white papers and thought leadership content. Case studies and customer testimonials. Great campaigns and creative. Awards, editorial coverage and analyst attention. They’re all important to every B2B marketer. But there’s a factor that cuts across all of these and is probably more important than any of them: confidence.

Quick Start Pimp Your Content Guide to SEO

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I’ve been doing a stack of content optimisation for client web sites lately, so I thought I’d share some of my ‘how to’ notes with the interweb…. Read on for a super-simple guide to pimping your content to search engines.

Guerrilla video: VNL thinks beyond B2B

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Velocity and VNL go guerrilla. The idea for the video was simple: go to Deorhi and interview the villagers about their first experiences with mobile phones. We then edited the results into a warm, compelling piece that makes the VNL story come to life…

Riding the Hype Cycle

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A marketer’s guide to Gartner’s Hype Cycle – how you market depends on where you are on the curve.

The 4 steps to a B2B sale: rational meets irrational

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My old boss Steve Trygg (a great copywriter) used to talk about the role of marketing in business decision-making by breaking down every purchase decision into four steps — the four things buyers do before they buy…

Marketers everywhere – get a little mobiThinking

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…check out mobiThinking.com, which was launched today to help the world’s marketing community to better understand the opportunities and challenges presented by mobile marketing. (Note: it’s web marketing Jim, but not as you know it.)

Mobile Marketing Madness: What We Learned this Week

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We’ve been beavering away over the past few weeks on an important new campaign for one of our shiny new clients in the mobile internet space. It’s a fascinating area – full of over-hype and under-delivery a few years ago; now ripe and ready for prime time…

Guerrilla video for B2B companies like yours

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We used to do short films for clients that took weeks to plan, weeks to shoot and edit and never came in for less than £30k. Now we’re experimenting with ‘guerrilla video’ — planning and shooting in a few days, editing in a few more and getting it straight on to the web.

New Velocity B2B Marketing Newsletter Available!

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The latest edition of our semi-regular newsletter update is now available. It’s packed with goodness inside, including our star new white pager, Marketing, Meet Sales, which offers eleven ways to make your marketing activity really drive new sales…

Velocity B2B Marketing Newsletter May 2008

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What Your Sales Team Says About You Behind Your Back Sales people think marketers are wankers. Marketers think sales people are ham-fisted brutes. This antipathy is a major reason that so much B2B marketing is so… mediocre. Your friends at Velocity have just published a short, sharp paper on this topic. It’s called Marketing, meet [...]

The Velocity B2B Social Media & Web Engagement Mind Map

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This Mind Map gives you everything you need to do web / social media engagement by yourself. It’s easy. Just pin it on your wall and – once you’ve published a great piece of content to your site – follow the map clockwise and post it to the relevant destinations…

B2B lead generation with thought leadership content: ditch the web-to-lead forms and win

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For B2B web sites, the content that really matters in terms of positioning and prospecting isn’t your ‘markitecture’ pages – your product and services descriptions, corporate histories and such…. it’s your ‘thought leadership’ pages – the places where you express opinions and ideas rather than features and benefits. Here’s why…

Marketing, Meet Sales

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Marketers and sales people don’t always talk the same language. But they must. Here’s why — and a bit of how…

Love Writing? Love Tech? Love Marketing?

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We’re in hiring mode once again. We’re a fast-growing, insanely ambitious B2B agency specialising in technology markets. We need a copywriter who can turn dry technology into compelling stories…

Your First (Free) Baby Steps in B2B Web Marketing

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Your web site is not your field of dreams. Build it and most likely they will not come. Nope, once it’s built your goal is to make it work as a sales sweat house – and this takes real effort and a bunch of web marketing smarts…

Velocity at Pecha-Kucha night

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Intrepid Velocipedes Doug Kessler and Stuart Rothwell attended the first ever D&AD Pecha-Kucha night last night. Nine creative supremos (mostly digital marketers), each delivering their first Pecha-Kucha presentation to a packed house of 400-ish trendy digirati…

ShipServ.com Goes Live: a B2B Before and After

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We’re proud to say that shipserv.com launched successfuly this morning. May all who sail in her find reasonably priced shipping supplies from a broad (and competitive) selection of maritime vendors….

New White Paper Available: How to PPC in B2B

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Hey! We just published a new web marketing white paper on the thorny subject of how to do PPC properly in an B2B environment. It’s hot, hot, hot! Here’s a snippet…

How to PPC in B2B: Five Rules for Effective Lead Generation

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Pay per Click (PPC) is manna for marketers who operate in hotly contested B2C markets like online gaming. But what about the rest of us? If you’re struggling to use PPC effectively in a B2B environment, then we have some answers…

The power of “You”: the 2nd person singular in B2B copywriting

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Most B2B technology copywriting is so boring because its so neutral. The best copywriting looks the prospect squarely in the eye and says, “I’m going to sell to you and you’re going to enjoy it.” Part of this is the 2nd person singular voice. I’m talking to YOU…

17 credibility builders that make your claims believable

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Anyone can claim anything they like about their product or service. Claims are empty. Your job as a marketer is to get believed.

But credibility is a funny thing. It’s hard to pin down exactly what makes us believe one person and not another; or believe one claim while remaining suspicious about a very similar claim made by someone else. Need some cred-builders? Here are seventeen…

Why ‘Web-to-Lead’ Forms Suck for B2B Lead Generation

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I just returned from a great week away in the Lower Hebrides – the small cluster of islands to the west of Glasgow. The single malts were stunning, the weather bracing and the walks heartening. I’m missing it already. None of this, of course, has anything to do with B2B lead generation, but I did have one holiday experience that made me realise how wide of the mark we are when it comes to using ‘web-to-lead-forms.’

The next billion mobile users: VNL goes live.

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Velocity is very proud to announce the launch of the new website for VNL, designed and lovingly hand-coded by Pär Almqvist, VNL’s digital marketing supremo, working with Velocity copy…

March Marketing Madness

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Lots going on at Velocity. No time to blog. New clients: ARM; dotMobi; Magus; Forescout; and Datanomic. Learn more about them here…

How Steve Jobs (and Dick Hardt) wows the crowds

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Our friend and client John Watton, Marketing Director of ShipServ, recently shared with us a Business Week article that dissects and analyses Steve Jobs’s latest keynote at Macworld (the one where he launched the MacBook Air). This ‘ten point framework’ will make your PPT’s hum…

Fighting Inertia: the toughest competitor of them all.

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Most B2B technology companies have a clear set of competitors they’re battling. But for some (usually early stage) tech companies, there are no other companies to fight: they’re inventing a market. The only competitor is the inertia of the target audience. At first glance, it sounds like a great position to be in. Never facing a head-to-head competitor. Being free from the never-ending features arms race. But in reality, these can be the toughest marketing challenges of them all…

Keywords: how to build an effective strategy in B2B

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We’ve just completed a number of SEO strategy projects for various clients. Part of our work here is to help folks understand what they’re getting into and why – to explain what separates a good keyword strategy from a stinker. I thought I’d share a bit of the thinking with you…

Champions and the Siren Effect: how early wins can mislead

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Early stage tech companies would do anything for those first few big wins — especially from blue-chip companies. But we’ve seen more than a few companies who were steered off course by these early wins. The early ‘champions’ were dream customers. They bought into the vision. They loved the product. They ‘got it’. How can that be bad?

Empathy and foreplay in B2B Marketing

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I don’t know how else to put this: nobody gives a shit about you. Your software or service or widget may be the center of your world but the people you’re selling to have better things to think about. Once you accept this simple fact, your marketing will get a lot better – because you’ll realise that your first and toughest job is to stop people in their tracks and offer you a small flake of their most precious, scarcest resource: their attention.

Whose Tipping Point is it Anyway? A B2B Perspective…

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There’s a great piece in this month’s Fast Company that asks if Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Tipping Point’ is fundamentally flawed. It’s compelling stuff, but what’s the point of ‘tipping’ and the pursuit of ‘influencers’ in a B2B environment..?

Tweakonomics: Why B2B Marketing Agency Retainers Suck

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This post hereby announces the death of the good old monthly agency retainer. Tweakonomics is what you should be using to pay for your marketing services – it’s what we advocate for all our clients. Let me explain…

7 ways to improve the signal-to-noise ratio in B2B marketing

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Every marketing communication has two parts:

• The Signal – your message; the thing you want people to take away
• The Noise – everything else; the things that distract, delay and get in the way of the signal

Most B2B marketing – especially in technology businesses – is so full of noise, the static drowns out the music.

The ‘Big Mo’ in B2B technology marketing: are we listening to Gartner?

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As we seek to build our business, we’re meeting a lot of B2B tech firms. Pretty much every one of them says their own momentum is intimately connected to what leading industry analyst Gartner (which just happens to be a Velocity client, BTW) thinks about their company…

The Couch Potato is Dead

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‘Digital Proposition Management for on-demand entertainment’ can sound abstract (if you’re not an IPTV firm). So Velocity did something different for AssetHouse…

Building a B2B case: 8 tips from criminal lawyers

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We B2B marketers are in the business of building cases. We’re advocates. So I did some research into how lawyers do what they do, focusing in on the summation to the jury, where the whole case comes together into one clear argument…

Pico-Branding: New Rules for Marketing

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How does Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, blogging, and every other web 2.0 BlaBla service change what we need to be doing in marketing, and what are the concepts that matter? If you really want to know then read on…

The Power of Content: a video case study

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We’ve been experimenting with ‘guerrilla video’ as a promotional tactic for our clients and thought we should taste our own medicine. So here’s a short (sub-two-minute) video case story about a project we did for IntelliQ, an analytics company…

Building a case: structure before style

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Good arguments are always well structured. Bad ones tend to be poorly assembled. Structure isn’t especially difficult. The main thing is to decide on one and to follow it. Here are a few tried and tested structures…

B2B web marketing trends for 2008

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Here’s our first broad brush, crystal ball prediction of the year: 2008 is the year of web engagement for B2B technology firms…

Selling to existing customers

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They’ve already bought something from you. You’ve already jumped nine of the ten hurdles on the way to a sale (or however many there are these days). Wouldn’t it make sense to turn these internal ‘champions’ into a stealth sales force?

2007

Why Blog in B2B? The Final Word…

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The ‘why blog?’ question still rages in B2B – and nowhere more so than here at Velocity. Our conclusion: the biggest and best reason to blog in the B2B space is because – if it’s done properly – it’s a relationship winner…

LinkedIn: Facebook for ugly people?

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Recently we’ve been talking a lot at Velocity about the importance of social media to our client heartland, B2B tech. In tandem, as we build our new company, I’ve been re-visiting old contacts and trying to create new ones as part of the process of finding Velocity-shaped holes…

How NOT to sell yourself online

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I was just uploading some images to our Flickr stream when I caught sight of the one of the most useless, intrusive banners of all time…

Sites we like: Flickr Tag Browser

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Normally the idea of an unconventional navigation scheme makes my skin crawl, but this is outstanding because it’s so slick and central to the tool…

Why Web Usability Matters

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You know the scene. You or your boss thought it’d be great idea to build a new web site and it’s the first planning meeting. Across the table someone shouts: ‘No! It’s gotta feel sharp!’

Big Eat: Pay-per-click as haiku

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In literature, there are novels, short stories, poems and — the ultimate distillation of emotion and idea — haiku. Three lines. Seventeen syllables. In marketing, there are white papers, brochures, data sheets and… the pay-per-click ad.

12 Days Later: SEO Velocity Style – Get Results Quick!

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Yes, we’re a living lab, practising what we preach and telling you all about it. 12 days ago I blogged about our (re)birth as a presence on Google. Today, we’re #2 on our key term ‘B2B technology marketing agency’ on Google.com (that’s right .com!). Here’s what happened in the interim…

The Rise of Clean Technology

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According to the The National Venture Capital Association (US), Clean Technology is the hottest thing on Sand Hill Road. During the first three quarters of 2007, VCs poured $2.6 billion into clean tech startups, compared to $1.8 billion for all of 2006, and a mere $533 million in 2005…

Four steps to a B2B sale

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B2B sales happen in four broad steps. Interestingly, only two of them are driven by rational decision-making. The other two are largely influenced by the buyer’s irrational side — and marketing plays an especially important role…

No such thing as B2B

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Anil Raj, mobile industry heavy-hitter (and a new client in an exciting venture) hates the term B2B. He’s sold at the highest levels of the mobile industry (as Head of Ericsson India for instance) and is convinced that businesses don’t buy from businesses…

What’s the freakin’ (Power)point!!??

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What’s the point of Powerpoint? A crutch to help you through an uncomfortable challenge (public speaking)? A useful visual aid to convey stories? A pain in the butt, killed to death, hackneyed, eyesore, head-f**k for boring people to death?

Straplines: preaching what we practice?

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Lots of tech marketers want a snappy strapline for their brand. Something taut and twinkly to tuck under the logo. We enjoy doing them and have come up with some that we’re proud of…

Content Sells: harvest your two big assets

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As a technology vendor, you’ve got two major assets that your customers and prospects value highly. Your job is to harvest them and put them to work for you…

A Second Life for Marketers?

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We’ve been keeping an eye on virtual worlds like Second Life for a while, waiting for the killer app for business…

A Busy Month: helping the world get smarter

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Doing technology marketing for a wide range of interesting clients means you never know what’s around the corner. We couldn’t have predicted it but Velocity came out of October having…

Frontpage intro

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Tech markets move fast. Windows of opportunity slide open and slam shut in the time it takes to say Betamax. We help tech companies take a running start and jump through their windows of opportunity. We’re the B2B technology marketing agency for the Interweb era. We connect marketing directly to sales in some interesting, challenging [...]

Going vertical: you can’t fake authenticity

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We’ve seen a bunch of companies try to take generic software into specific vertical markets. They succeed to the degree they can achieve authenticity. So instead of looking, feeling and sounding like, say, a Business Intelligence tool, you look, feel and sound like a BI tool for retailers, or lawyers or candlestick makers. There’s only [...]

Customer-guided marketing: is yours?

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Everybody in technology companies thinks they’re ‘customer-centric’. In our experience, few really are, in the sense that they start almost every process with the customer. In the marketing department, starting with the customer seems so obvious it goes without saying. Unfortunately, more often than not, it goes without doing, too. We start every major project [...]

(Re-)naming your company

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Naming a company (or product) is tricky. But it doesn’t have to be a nightmare. Here’s a bit of common sense.

Pecha-Kucha: the future of Powerpoint

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Pecha-kucha is the only way powerpoint should ever be used. Twenty slides, twenty seconds each. Done. Invented by a pair of architects in Tokyo. Pecha-kucha is pronounced to (almost) rhyme with tchotchke. If you can’t say it in 20 short slides, maybe it shouldn’t be said…

A letter from Mr Al Fayed. It’s how you say it that counts….

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I was doing some long overdue filing this morning and came across the following letter….a response to a misguided mass mailer that inadvertently invited Mr Al Fayed of Harrods to a seminar in London on the subject of (eek!) open source software…

Mechanical Turks & Zubka

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Could there be anything cooler on the web than Mechanical Turks? People who need stuff done post tasks. Other people do them for micro-payments using Amazon.com accounts. I’d love to hear from anyone who has used this to get something done. A good use: build a database of prospect names. Give people a list of [...]

Does search matter in B2B?

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Search matters. The Role of Search in Business to Business Buying Decisions by Enquiro and Marketing Sherpa reported the following: 93% of participants said they would research online when making a B2B purchase. 95% said they would use a search engine at some point in the task. It’s an old study but I can’t imagine [...]

x5 reasons to blog

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That’s right, FIVE reasons your company should blog. Count ‘em: Improved SEO – a steady flow of dynamic content published on a weekly basis to your web site. Search engine spiders will pick up on this activity, register it and re-index your site with greater frequency. Blogging also gives you the opportunity to create new [...]

Marketing whole products

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Just unpacked my new Apple MacBook Pro. A great example of a whole product: the hardware, operating system, bundled applications (about 30), utilities, web & phone support, set-up wizards, web-based services (called .mac) all pre-installed, integrated and ready for action. The battery was even fully charged when it arrived. Apple are masters of the ‘unveiling [...]

YouTube for B2B Technology Marketing

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Just posted a short film we did for BT Counterpane in the US on to YouTube. It’s an interview with Bruce Schneier, security guru. YouTube is fast, cheap (as in free) way to make video content available to anyone with a browser. As marketers wake up to the fact that broadband has arrived, we’ll be [...]

Earning the right to sell to CIO’s

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We just produced a powerful piece of high-end direct mail for BT Counterpane. The piece was sent to 150 select prospects — CIOs and CSOs of Fortune 500 companies in the US. They each get a little box with a sleeve around it. “The Security Shuffle, an executive playlist”. They slip off the sleeve, open [...]

What’s in a (domain) name – part deux

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See here another list of domain naming snafu’s. Note to all – before you book that domain name, write it down on a piece of paper and scan it real quick. Then think again. If an obscene thought doesn’t spring to mind, you’re free to go…. 1. “Who Represents” is where you can find the [...]

iinovate

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iinnovate is an intelligent video blog on entrepreneurship produced by some students at Stanford. The latest post is an interview with Tim Westergren, Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Pandora the online music recommendation service. If you don’t know Pandora, you’re in for a treat. Tell it some things about yourself and in a few [...]

Reasons a business should blog a lot…

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I’ve just read an interesting piece in this month’s Wired magazine on the subject of blogging. I’ve written elsewhere about the various benefits of blogs as early product conversations, focus groups and general sounding boards amongst a tight knit community, but here’s another thought….reputation management. Reputation management is a hackneyed term amongst PR folk who [...]

Fair Isaac

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Tech company names are usually pretty bad. All those coined words ending in ‘a’ — Plectra, Placenta, Adeptra, Conceptra, Integra, Concentra… But I’ve always loved the name Fair Isaac. Stands right out. Sounds like the opening of a nursery rhyme (“Fair Isaac, Fair Isaac with long golden hair/ Fair Isaac, Fair Isaac who fell down [...]

Yugo now

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Yugo Nakamura does some of the best things on the web. Check out his yugop.com. Full of fantastic, interactive, imaginative explorations of the web medium. A favourite: Clockblock. Worth a visit. Promise.

How (Not) to do email marketing

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Another great post from the “Permission Marketing” guru, Seth Godin. Basic rules for email relationships with customers/prospects – don’t go too quickly, but do try harder (than the next guy).

Insult to injury

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Pet Peeve: I HATE when a website asks me to register for something, takes all my details, validates my email, makes me jump through hoops, THEN tells me the service is not available outside the USA. If you only serve Yanks, tell me BEFORE I waste my time. One example from many: A very cool [...]

What makes a good web site?

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Originality, originality, originality!!! See “No One Belongs Here More than You”, a promotional site for Miranda July’s book. Now, I know its SEO will suck because it’s all images and no text, but I bet you it’s getting a lot of traffic and interest anyways.

Lovable Morons are back

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Every few years, they come back. The ad campaigns that depict the advertiser’s customers (or their own staff) as lovable morons. IBM is doing it now in the UK with its gormless IT staff doing cartoony things. Barclays Bank is doing it with their UK retail banking campaign showing it’s bumbling staff coming up with [...]

Logos we love: IBM

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Few logos have stood the test of time better than the IBM logo. Created by Paul Rand in 1972, it hasn’t changed much in, what, 34 years. Still strong. Still fresh. And almost as recognisable as Coke’s. I wouldn’t want to be the marketing guy who tries to sell-in a new one. A nice little [...]

Web 2.Over?

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Check out this piece from Peter Rip, of Crosslink Capital, a VC firm from Silicon Valley. It’s a nice summary of what legs the ‘web 2.0′ movement now has left…. And I guess he ought to know, being one of the guys that’s funding all of this shiny new stuff. His main point is that [...]

Basecamp shows how it should be done

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We’re helping Validis develop a website to sell their hosted application — a powerful app that checks any set of accounts for errors. In exploring the simplest, friendliest, most compelling ways to do this, we realized it’s hard to do much better than the website for Basecamp, the web-based project management app. Check it out. [...]

Second Life gets its own accounting software

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True. Linden Labs has rolled out NetSuite, financial and accounting software to help users manage their Linden dollars and real-world money (an increasingly blurred boundary). They’ve even got a virtual CEO of the virtual software company that looks after virtual cash for virtual punters. Guy named Zach Nelson. Go figure. Check out the economic statistics [...]

Secrets & Lies

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Just finished an excellent primer on digital security: ‘Secrets & Lies’ by Bruce Schneier, the god of security. Published in ’04 but still super-relevant. Schneier cuts through a lot of the nonsense, deflates the hype and makes you sceptical about pretty much all security claims. Weirdly, even though he points out dozens of attacks I [...]

What’s in a (Domain) Name?

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It’s usually best to think these things through – in this instance by writing a url string down on paper before getting hitched to it. God knows, the penny MUST have dropped when the name was purchased – ie, BEFORE they spent all their hard-earned on creating a web site that to the rest of [...]