We blogged a while back about the idea of guerrilla video for B2B websites — foregoing expensive video productions to just go out and get the footage you need to tell a story.

All it takes is an idea — and a client with some vision and courage.

Our client VNL has plenty of both. Marketing guru Pär Almqvist and CEO Anil Raj responded to our ideas for bringing their story to life on the small screen with just three words, ‘Let’s do it’. A few weeks later, Pär and I were in Deorhi, a small rural village in Utar Pradesh, armed with two Sony HD camcorders.

VNL is the inventor of microtelecom, the re-engineering of the mobile infrastructure especially for rural markets. That means base stations that are solar-powered, incredibly low-cost and easily assembled by people with no technical expertise.

VNL sells to mobile operators but we wanted to make the promise of rural connectivity come to life by talking directly to the operators’ potential customers: the villagers themselves.

Deorhi was the perfect village for our needs. Two hundred kilometers from Delhi, Deorhi receives what we call ‘accidental mobile coverage’ because of its location near an important road between to larger towns. The people of Deorhi were never targeted for mobile services, but they got them by accident.

Deorhi is also where VNL’s Chief Technology Officer, Krishna Sirohi, grew up (his father founded the first school in Deorhi and served as it’s principal for 42 years).

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

We expected people to like using mobiles — after all, it’s the first connectivity of any kind for Deorhi. But we were really blown away by the impact that mobile services are having on people’s lives — both for personal and business reasons.

The people of Deorhi were incredibly open and generous. As guests of the Sirohi family, we were also guests of the entire village. That made it easy for Pär and I to conduct over thirty interviews with everyone from 6 year-old kids to an 88-year old man.

After just a few interviews, we knew we’d got what we came for: even without professional cameramen, the footage looks great (bright sun and pretty amazing camcorders helped). We used one camera on a tripod and the other as a hand-held for cut-away shots and footage of the village. The stationery camera used a lapel microphone to make the sound as clear as possible (hugely important).

Pär composed and created the soundtrack himself. He’s not just a ‘marketing dude’, he’s also an incredibly talented musician and kick-ass web developer (he designed and coded the entire VNL site, which we wrote).

The footage was edited by Hugh Gormley, our quasi-in-house editor extraordinaire and posted on VNL’s Resource Library, designed and coded by Pär.

It appears alongside an interview with CEO Anil Raj that we shot over a few hours in Delhi (again, using our two camcorders). It’s a long piece so we cut it into chapters for easy navigation.

Looking back, a few lessons from these first forays into guerrilla video:

• Just do it – The costs of this kind of project are so low, you can shoot first and ask questions later. If you don’t like the footage, abort.

• Keep it simple – Start with a simple idea. No actors. No dramatisation. Just one idea executed well.

• Don’t ignore production values – Yes, it’s the YouTube ethic, but problems with sound, lighting, framing or focus will distract from your message.

• Invest in post-production – The film is made in the editing. Get a great editor and let him do his job. (Thanks, Hugh).

• Skip the committees – Pär and Elise Alpen were the only client contacts for both of these films. We checked in on the key decisions but they let us get on with everything else. It helped that Pär could handle a camera and both kinds of keyboard.

• Go for the end customer – B2B markets can be a bit abstract. Think about skipping over your direct customer and talking to the end consumer for some real energy and context.

Maybe we got lucky with these two films. But the point of guerrilla video is to keep costs low enough to be able to switch to Plan B or kill the project if it isn’t shaping up the way you want.

It isn’t just a video thing: this ’shoot from the hip’ marketing is on the rise as companies harness the power of blogs, forums, wikis, social media, pay-per-click and email.

As our name implies, we LIKE this kind of marketing. It’s fast. It’s fun. And it makes a real impact in the time it takes traditional marketing to arrange a conference call.

We’ve got more videos in the works for VNL and for clients like dotMobi – and we’re hatching a few new case study ideas for ourselves. Don’t touch that dial.

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:

1) Identify a need
This is mostly a rational process and largely buyer-initiated. The FD knows when she needs new accounting software and she knows why.

2) Draw up a shortlist
This is usually an irrational process. People draw up a list of vendors to investigate by asking around, thinking of past experiences, following a gut feel. Google may have changed this somewhat, but it’s still largely an intuitive exercise.

3) Evaluate proposals
Mostly rational again. Buyers look at price, terms, delivery and specs. They compare competitors side-by-side. Marketing is present here, but at this point, it’s largely down to the offer (product + price).

4) Buy
Weirdly, this last step has a big irrational component. Buyers often do not choose the vendor that wins on paper. They choose the one they feel best about. The one they trust. The one they feel will get them to the goal in the least stressful way. If there’s a salesperson involved, this is their moment.

Where does marketing fit in with all this?
If you think of B2B marketing as the delivery of pure business information, its role is mainly influential during stages 1 and 3. Helping buyers identify a need and helping them evaluate options.

If you think of marketing as creating a brand, the job focuses on steps 2 and 4 — the largely irrational steps — drawing up a shortlist and making the final decision.

Let’s look at the four steps again with this in mind:

1) Identify a need
Marketing can help here by showing someone that the way they do things now is flawed (’selling the problem’). Or by convincing them that one of their perennial problems can now be taken away. Or showing them that their competitors are jumping ahead of them in some way.

All this falls under a banner they used to call ‘creating a need’. In reality, marketing can’t create needs. It can only address them. Doing this is all about getting noticed, then making a rational case for change. The ‘business information’ side of the B2B marketing equation.

2) Draw up a shortlist
Good marketing shines here. It gets companies on shortlists by raising awareness and by associating the vendor with the critical issues that relate to the problem (positioning and thought leadership).

On the warm, fuzzy side, marketing works here by building a brand that people feel good about. Engineers tease us about this part but it may be the single most important thing we do. As our client Anil Raj likes to say, there’s no such thing as business-to-business, there’s only person-to-person.

Clearly, the salesperson is the most important element here. But a great brand works with the salesperson to tip the scales. People like working with companies they feel good about. They feel good about companies that demonstrate they understand their problems, speak frankly and intelligently about them and show conviction, confidence and passion in everything they do.

3) Evaluate proposals
The salesperson’s work is the main agent here. But the ‘business information’ side of B2B marketing can contribute enormously by providing the information the buyer needs to make the decision (and convince others); as well as by helping frame the issues in a way that tilts the decision the right way.

4) Buy
It’s down to two or three credible products and vendors. All look like they can do the job or they wouldn’t have made it this far. Now, the ‘brand’ side of B2B marketing kicks in again. Buyers will choose the company they feel best about. The one they want to spend more time with. The one they respect and trust.

A great salesperson will overcome all but the worst marketing in stages 2 and 4. But great marketing will give your company the best possible chance of walking right up the four steps, contract in hand.

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.

Looking at the guts of the technical environment, it’s clear that much has happened since the heady days of BT advertising ’surf the mobile web’ with a dodgy GSM connection and a two-tone, LED-like WAP browser. Now we have 3G, in-home Femtocells for maximum coverage, and a mini super-duper iPhone in our hands. As a result, the mobile web is now ready to be used as a killer marketing platform.

But where to start?

This is one of the most interesting questions in ‘new media’ marketing right now. Nobody’s really developed the killer app or the definitive campaign yet. And it looks like in many ways we’re also recreating many marketing mistakes of the past.

Just like the desktop web took a bunch of successfully established marketing activities and deliverables and ‘transcoded’ them online into brochureware web sites, Flash microsites and the like, the mobile web seems to chock full of broken e-commerce sites for ringtones, poorly formatted mapping services and mind-numbingly frustrating directory listings.

The view from here is that we really need to stop and start again when it comes to building successful marketing experiences on the mobile web.

Here’s some obvious - but often forgotten - points to take into account:

• Phones screens are small (less content is more)
• Usage patterns have different restraints: time, location, etc (think running from tube to bus into town for a meeting and trying to check up on some facts)
• Speed is important. Not in terms of speed of connection (although this obviously helps), but in getting to the point as quickly as possible. Fewer clicks to action, easier to search and find, that sort of thing.
• Development standards and processes are different. See ready.Mobi for an example of how different by running your url through their free page and site checker. It’ll show you how your site looks on a Nokia (or a Motorola, or a Samsung…)

That’s a lot of difference - but, if you can build this kind of thinking into your creative plans at source they ought to present a bunch of great marketing and communications opportunies.

For example, how about a mobile version of your site that serves mobile-centric content only….? Like creating a stripped down ‘About’ and ‘Products’ section, but a top line presentation of those important white paper pdfs in an iPhone browser-friendly format so that - instead of playing Sudoku - executive types can read them on their long train ride home?

Mobile-thinking seems to be the future of the mobile web. What do you think?

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….

ShipServ is the shipping industry’s #1 e-marketplace, and, as of today it’s also winner of the Red Herring 100 Award for European innovation.

It’s a very cool company.

Eight years ago the shipping industry was awash with e-marketplaces making bold promises of new beans for the ‘new economy.’ Today, only ShipServ flourishes (the others are toast). They got in touch with us towards the end of last year to see how we could help revamp their brand and their online presence.

Here’s what we did.

We took them from this:

…to this:

Along the way we’ve worked hand in glove with ShipServ’s VP of Marketing John Watton, and CEO Paul Østergaard to redefine their core positioning and messages, turbo-charge their corporate pitches and plan their next brave moves into the world of web 4.7.

So, we’re thrilled that the new site is now up and sailing.

Thanks to John and Paul for giving us the space and direction to do work that we’re really proud of.

Big thanks also to the extremely talented Ben at Jackfruit for his superior web development skills (Ben’s the guy who did the physical build); and thanks to Rob and the team at RMA for their work on another top drawer piece of design (they’re the guys who created the site templates).

…And watch this space - because there’s more to come.

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.”

Boring copy is all the same:

It uses the passive voice
“The interaction is further enabled by automated screen-scrape optimization technology…”

It’s jargon-soaked
“…utilizing a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) that combines traditional Business Process Management (BPM) with Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) into a seamless, scalable Blah-De-Blah (BDB).

It’s abstract instead of concrete
“…enabling better processes through systematic automation of yadda-yadda-yadda.”

It’s all in the 3rd person
“The software helps financial services companies better manage their customer-facing…”

This last point is rarely talked about but is especially crippling. Pick up your last data sheet. Now go through it and change the third person phrasing into second person singular: the subject is “You” (the reader).

You’ll have to rewrite the copy to make it sound right. And once you do, you will have made it better. More engaging. More down to earth. More personal.

I’m not suggesting you only use the 2nd person. That would be weird. But try using it and see if it doesn’t help you focus on a specific reader or listener — and help them focus on your message.

Case in point: you’ve probably noticed that the first half of this post is written in the third person. The second half is written in the second person singular. And it’s just that extra notch more engaging. Don’t you think?

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).

The author, Carmine Gallo, refers to the Jobs approach as a ‘ten point framework’. Really it’s just a list of ten tips, but they’re excellent tips. If you follow them, your presentations will be much better — and many of the tips apply to written communication, too.

Lately, we’ve been exploring ways to deliver really powerful web seminars and these tips will all come in handy. I won’t paraphrase them but I do recommend the article.

And since writing the draft of this post, John’s CEO, Paul Ostergaard, sent a link to this terrific presentation on Identity 2.0 by Dick Hardt, founder of Sxip Identity. It’s an entertaining, funny introduction to a concept that Sxip is evangelising and an excellent example of how to sell a technical, abstract story without being technical or abstract.

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…

Think about it: if ‘do nothing’ is even an option for the prospective buyer, you’ve probably got an uphill battle… and a sales cycle that could resemble Napoleon’s march into Russia.

Overcoming inertia means selling someone a problem before you can sell them a solution. Convincing them that the way they’re doing things now is doomed to failure. But no one I know is actually in the market for problems. We’ve all got enough, thanks.

It’s like walking into someone’s office and saying, “See that rock in that corner? Well, there are little monsters under that rock and they’re going to come out and get you one day. The good news is, I’m going to turn over that rock and kill those monsters.”

To which most sane people would reply, ‘Don’t touch that rock!’

The pioneering technology faces exactly this resistance. The prospect has been happily doing nothing for a long time, despite what you claim is a serious enough problem to demand attention now. That can only be because of one of a few reasons:

• They recognise the pain but find it endurable
  Your need to show them that a pain-free life is easy to achieve

• They recognise the pain but see it as someone else’s
  You need to find that other person.

• They don’t feel it as pain at all
  You have to prove that it is pain, and that it’s a symptom of more serious risks.

• They know that all their competitors have the same pain
  Your need to show that this is no longer true: their competitors are now gaining an advantage.

• Their job depends on this pain existing and persisting
  You need to reach their boss.

Clearly, these are all difficult attitudes to overcome. In many ways, it’s easier to duke it out with a direct competitor.

Often, what the competitor-free pioneer is doing is aggregating low-level pains that attack different departments and job titles. If the pain were already in one place, there would probably be some competing solutions (direct competitors or viable substitutes) trying to solve it.

The choice is either to get those different influencers to think like a team so they can also aggregate some budget; or to find the person they all report to and show how all those little headaches are really one big headache and it’s their head.

Another strategy is to break down your solution into smaller apps suitable for the specific pain points, selling each for less but selling to one person at a time. That means faster sales cycles and more entry points to upsell the whole solution.

So inertia just might be the most formidable competitor you’ll ever meet. For market pioneers, traditional competition should be welcomed. It validates the market. It tells buyers that there really is something going on here. And it gives you something to position yourself against.

Thankfully, inertia works both ways. A body at rest may tend to stay at rest but a body in motion tends to stay in motion. Get the market moving and you could be riding a big snowball down an even bigger hill (at which point a host of new competitors will come running out to play).

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…

Your goal for SEO: to generate ‘high value’ prospective customer traffic.

‘High value’ means visitors who are engaged with your product / services set and are actively looking for help.

‘Prospective’ means visitors who are new, or relatively new to you / your site and are looking to you as a potential vendor and solutions partner.

Broadly speaking, you need to capture the interest of people who are researching solutions to problems that you can solve, and to divert their attention to strategic points within your web site.

How? Well, one big thing to consider is your KEYWORDS. (There’s more to SEO than this, but we’ll just concentrate on keyword principles for now…)

Your aim is to structure your on- and off-site content using the words that your audience is using to search the web - so that you improve your chances of featuring on the first couple of pages of Google in relation to a given search query.

For example, if you’re in the business of IPTV and your audience is searching around your backyard using phrases like ‘IPTV content management software,’ then you need to align the language you use to describe yourself with these terms.

At the same time, you need to be aligning yourself with a set of keywords in a ‘win-able’ arena amongst competitors: some keywords will have no competition, others will be red hot.

In simple terms, this last point creates a ‘keyword index.’ You need to place a calculated bet on where you want to play. Your choice should be calibrated by the following formula:

Volume of daily searchers on any given key word

(…divided by)

Volume of other web pages that are optimised around those keywords

Clearly you want to engage with as many people as possible that are using search terms related to your products / services. At the same time, you want to position yourself where you can compete, given the resources you have to hand.

The challenge is best illustrated by a quick experiement….

If you’re in the business of software apps for sales support, you might choose to optimise around the term ‘CRM.’ This would currently give you an audience of 563 searchers per day on Google. Unfortunately, it would also put you in direct competition with 129 million other web pages that are optimised on that term. Alternatively, if you were to focus your keywords around the concept of ’sales management software’ you’d have a total audience of around 50 searchers a day; and using this route, you’d be up against approximately 150,000 other pages.

Clearly the chances of capturing the attention of a ‘CRM’ searcher are more remote than for a ’sales management software’ searcher…. and this ought to give you plenty of food for thought, because conventional branding wisdom becomes a little cloudy in the face of hard data.

But choosing keywords is not just a question of running the numbers. Those branding considerations are absolutely essential to a successful SEO strategy.

For example, you need to consider the following things…

You brand equity – what’s does your overall investment in non-web language mean to this work? What about your sales patter and your product naming conventions? Do these things fit with your keyword findings?

Market maturity – does your current searching public really reflect where the market is at? Are you leading them or following them? What stage is your market in terms of possessing a common body of language to describe its problems and requirements?

Influential people – are industry analysts setting the market terms? Or are they just spinning far-fetched yarns? Do you need to follow or ignore them? What influence do they have on your customers? Will this influence matter tomorrow? Has it already had an impact?

Your resources – can you afford to compete in hotly competed areas? If you have a mega-budget, why not just nuke it out? If your resources are small, can you find smarter keyword arenas to play in?

The quality of the data sample – if you’re playing in niche territories, are you willing to bet a keyword / naming convention on a sample of 10 searchers per day? Once your product category matures, how are the trends going to change?

The state of the nation – can you afford not to play in competitive fields?

The above questions should create an interesting debate where branding ideas meet public perceptions of you and your products and services.

Ultimately, your SEO choices will be determined by your guts and your resources.

Some words of warning…

Be warned, branding babies should never be thrown out with the bath water.

Competition is also a key factor. To nuke it or to duck it is not always clear cut.

As ever, you’ll make plenty of branding compromises and web concessions along the way… The best advice we can give is to treat your keywords strategy as a journey - experiment, tweak and try again. The path to SEO nirvana wasn’t built in a day…

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?

The only problem is that these champions turned out to be extremely rare people. Like any early adopter (thanks Geoffrey Moore), they’re generally innovators and visionaries; they’re confident; they trust their own gut feel and are willing to work with young companies and unproven products. If these early champions didn’t exist, neither would the tech industry. But they can fatally mislead early stage tech companies.

Moore’s Crossing the Chasm is all about making the transition from these early adopter clients to a more mainstream audience who need different things and are moved by different messages. But we’ve worked with a handful of cases where the first one or two wins were the only wins in sight. In each case, the company, convinced by early success that they’ve got everything right, found it extremely hard to re-focus on the more common buyers: risk-averse people who need a lot more hand-holding and an easier-to-buy product

Also in each case, the vision itself was the problem. Not that it was wrong (usually it was simply ahead of its time) but that most buyers don’t want exciting new visions. They want specific problems solved. The early champions validated the entire vision, so that’s what the company continued to sell. They then waited forever for the next big win, getting bogged down in two-year sales cycles with prospects who look just like the early wins, but are fundamentally different.

Often, the answer is to downplay the vision a bit and break the product up into bite-sized applications. It’s painful, but it can spell the difference between getting customers to fund growth instead of needing lots of early stage investment capital (and the dilution it brings).

Early on, getting twenty $10k wins may actually be better than bagging that $200k elephant. They don’t trample your product development roadmap to suit their specific needs; the sales cycles are shorter; and the sales model is more replicable and scalable — it’s a foundation you can build a business on. One client, Sarah Haskell at Portrait Software liked to call these ‘pointy apps’ to differentiate them from the big, platform sell.

The right balance is to have a vision that underpins the smaller applications and puts them in context. And a set of apps that validate the vision.

No one would say you should turn down the big early wins. Just beware of being lured into the rocks by expecting more buyers to be just like the early ones.

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.

This post is about the most important part of every marketing communication: the opening. The come-on. The headline, subhead and first paragraph. If you’re reading this sentence, it’s only because I’ve passed one of the trickiest obstacle courses in marketing. I’ve got you to stop, read one line, read the next and decide to continue.

I accomplished this through a bit of craft and trickery (including a naughty word) but mostly through an incredibly powerful thing called empathy.
Empathy is at the heart of every great communication, from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address (among the most moving 700 words ever spoken) to classic ad lines that boil down entire marketing briefs into five words (like “Buy more beef, you bastards.” from the Australian Beef Commission).

Empathy demands that you stop being you and start being your target audience. If you can do that, you’re more than halfway to an effective piece of communication. If you can’t do it, you need to do more homework or find someone who can.

Starting from empathy does all sorts of good things for your marketing. For one, it forces you to create punchy, relevant, intriguing openings. Short, sharp headlines; subheads with a bit of context; introductions that speak plain English and tell the reader this is about them not just about you.

Remember, you’re not you. You’re a very busy person who knows nothing about your product, who has a toothache and whose boss is being a total jerk. Even putting your lousy ad, website, brochure or video in front of him is an affront akin to Oliver Twist asking his captors for ‘more’. How very dare you.

Since you’ve already interrupted your audience, the least you can do is to reward their attention by being clear, open, relevant and, if possible, just a wee bit entertaining. Let’s take these one at a time:

Be clear – For God’s sake spit it out. Save the business-speak for… on second thought, bin the business-speak altogether. The voice you’re looking for is the one that comes out of your mouth, not your pen or keyboard.

Be open – Most marketing acts as if it’s got a dirty little secret; a hidden sales agenda. Well guess what, it’s not a secret, it’s not especially dirty and your agenda is actually standing naked on the desk with a bird of paradise in its mouth. Just do your job and sell me stuff.

Be relevant – This is about me isn’t it? Well prove it. Start being about me right from the beginning. Start with an interesting way of looking at my world and my problems. Then maybe I’ll hang around.

Be entertaining – Like it or not, marketing is show-biz. There needs to be a spring in your step. You need to be enjoying yourself not getting a tooth extracted. If you think what you do is boring, I guarantee you that I will too. This doesn’t mean you have to be funny. Trying to be funny and falling even a tiny bit short is a very sad and embarrassing thing. Just be comfortable on stage, in the spotlight.

I’ll write specifically about headlines in another post, but these four points should help guide your openings (and, frankly, the middles and endings as well).

For an example of what I’m talking about, scroll up. You’ve just read this entire post so one thing you know is that this opening worked.

Send me one of your headlines and opening paragraphs and I’ll see if I can do a make-over to show what I mean (look ma, no brief!).

There’s a great piece in this month’s Fast Company that asks if Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling notion of a ‘Tipping Point’ is fundamentally flawed (see: Is the Tipping Point Toast?)

The conclusion is yes, kinda… and it’s no doubt sent Gladwell’s afro into a tight spin, as well as the rest of the globe’s marketing mavens

So, all those billions of marketing dollars that are spent on locating and ‘tipping’ a market’s influencers may be misguided?

If you haven’t read it yet, here’s a quick synopsis:

• Web/network guru who knows lots about network effects releases research that undermines the value of the ‘maven’ in turning ideas into marketing epidemics
• He looks deeply into some long-standing common wisdom about networked-ness, such as the six degrees of separation theory, runs new tests and concludes that the results were unrepresentative …that normal people are just as important at spreading stuff as ‘influential’ types
• Further, he does a number of other interesting studies to suggest that it may be impossible for us to gauge at any one time why a given idea/product/pop band is able to ‘break out’ from the pack and go big time

The guru in question is Duncan Watts, author of ‘Six Degrees: The New Science of Networks‘ and senior researcher at Yahoo (a big network). He knows his onions. What’s interesting about his research is that it takes Gladwell’s ideas and zooms out on them to create a far wider field of enquiry.

For example, Gladwell picks Hush Puppies as the memorable breakout brand of the mid-nineties NYC hipster scene. Watts asks why didn’t other stuff that they were wearing fare equally as well?

We think this is a really neat question to ask.

What’s at stake here? As the Fast Company piece says, the idea of influencers and tipping points lends itself really well to the world of marketing, where data is in short supply but pixie dust isn’t. Bigwig execs at agencies become arbiters of taste, identify a group and persuade brands to spend a bunch of cash dreaming up clever schemes of ‘brand advocacy’ that they hope will spread. Does it work? Well, sure it does in some circles, but in others definitely not.

What if the original idea is a bad one? What if the context is wrong? What about the bigger picture? Those guys in NYC may also have been wearing ski goggles in June, but their inability to ‘tip’ the eyewear - perhaps a failure of ‘brand empathy’ or just their general lack of ‘stick-ability’ - isn’t in question.

Here’s our take on the whole thing:

Influence is critical, but if the basic story is wrong, or if the marketplace isn’t ready then you’re destined to fail if you’re trying to create a buzz. Further, these three elements need to be aligned - cosmic style - for things to ‘tip.’

Taking them in reverse order, finding a receptive marketplace can be a research game or a ‘go with the gut’ game. Either one will do, but one should recognise that out of everything, getting this bit right is the most important thing.

Story is a creative game. It’s all about how you tell them. Good content and great execution really counts.

Influence is an interesting one right now. ‘Tipping’ and ‘brand advocacy’ in the physical world involves spending time, money and tea-leaves on finding the right people to help spread an idea. Online, however, this can be a relatively scientific exercise. Tools like Technorati can help you seek out influential bloggers; social media services like Digg and Stumbleupon can help you understand how people are engaging with and spreading certain stories. These things can also help you attract numerous people - influencial or otherwise - to your stuff.

Watts’ recommendation on the whole thing - through his work with Yahoo - is interesting. His latest research is on a new product offering called ‘Big Seed’ marketing, which at face value seems like a nod to the old days whereby creative campaigns are cast widely into the mass market (eg, via web banner ads) and folks are encouraged to pass them on. This is very different to the tipper’s tactics (go narrow, persuade and cajole): it’s big, bold, brash, and - importantly - very expensive. Tactically this is based on the assumption that ANYONE can be an effective tipper, and that reach and volume rather that type of people is the thing that counts - which is exactly what he concludes in his Gladwell-trumping research.

As a game of one-up-tipping-manship this makes for interesting sport. What we’d advocate is a mix of the two. Certain media, such as ad banners, will themselves screen important people out (SEO guru Aaron Wall points this one out in his excellent post on the theme). It’s far better to use the tools at our disposal to take a read of the market and go seed from there…

In other words ‘influential’ may mean something different to the narrow view that Gladwell prescribes. In the B2B sphere this is likely to be a mix of the maven, the uneducated and the unshaven…. if they’re active in the sense of passing ideas around, then everyone has a role to play. We just need to find them and engage with them in a cost- and attention-effective way.

How? Well, here’s a view on what we do at Velocity, courtesy of our web stats package…

The first spike occurred after we blogged about an event we spoke at. The idea had a market, the content had a decent storyline and we passed it around the folks that cared about this kind of thing. The second spike occurred after we wrote about something that we knew was interesting to our industry. Again, a decent story, a marketplace and (after some cursory research) an engaged audience. No rocket science here - we just tagged it on a few social media sites.

The effects? Well, lot’s more interest in Velocity than usual for starters. But the second item also ignited an old flame. The first also generated a rousing debate amongst some really interesting people that were relevant to us, and placed us somewhere near the centre of things. Does this qualify as a ‘tip’? Yes - in our world of B2B the first challenge is to seek out and engage with ideas in a very rational way. Our work may not have taken us to the top of Digg, but then we’d never expect it to. Our audience is a narrower one…. as I’m sure yours is too.

So we think that marketplace, story and influence count. When it comes to ‘tipping’ in B2B then the pursuit of influencers alone (without a well-researched, well storylined context to place them in) won’t necessarily help you.

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….

This post hereby announces the death of the good old monthly agency retainer.

Paying your agency a fat monthly stipend - agreed in advance and for a set duration - is not in your interest, because the dynamics of this type of deal are not stacked in your favour.

Think about it. Retainers mean the following bad things for you as a client:

• Type of work is agreed too long in advance
• Volume of deliverables is set for too long a period
• Style of work is agreed before you’ve had a chance to learn about one another

Retainers are broken because they’re geared to be retrospective. When you pay a fixed amount in advance for an ill-defined set of services, everything you do in the future will - in some shape or form - be related to either justifying or using up the allocated time and money.

This leads to the following unsavory effects:

• Meeting time devoted to activity reviews
• Lengthy paper reports that nobody reads
• Bargaining about the value of time spent vs work done

…in other words, the retainer model means a large proportion of time and output is devoted to justifying the terms of your financial relationship. And, worse, none of the above encourages speed, clarity and innovation - all of the things you want your marketing to be.

Wouldn’t you rather be progressive?

At Velocity, we think Tweakonimics is where it’s at.

Tweakonomics is based on an understanding that marketing is…

• A risky endevour (it’s a lot of cash to shell out on a regular basis)
• Something that needs to be directly linked to your sales efforts
• A constantly moving feast of activity
• In need of constant measurement, adjustment and tweaking

As such, we think it’s a bad idea to agree anything too far in advance (you wouldn’t do sales reviews on an annual basis, right?!). We prefer to structure our work loosely in the sense that we can always adapt to changes and opportunities, but tightly in the sense that we spend every minute of our time on something proactive and productive.

Here’s how we do it:

• Everything we do is a ‘Program’ (a ‘Marketing Acceleration Program‘ in fact)
• This program is geared to do one thing: move you forward
• We only ever plan on a maximum of 90 days activity
• We only ever ask for 90 days worth of funding (and so share your financial risk - if you’re successful within 90 days, then we are too)
• We only ever commit 30 days of activity to paper
• We don’t do time reports (but we’re crazy about delivering stacks of value activity)
• We don’t do paper reports of any kind
• We assess our work on a 30 day basis by asking one question only: ‘did we achieve everything we wanted to achieve (and if not, why not)’… and we do this face to face with our clients

By doing this we keep all our planning and reporting (ie, paperwork) to a minimum, and run everything we do to a 30 day cycle. This means we can always tweak for enhancements, adapt quickly and, importantly for you, it means we are constantly working hard to earn the right to support you for the next 90 days.

But above all, this notion of Tweakonomics keeps our work ultra-focused.

So - kill all retainers.

We’d love to be in your 12 month budget, but we’d rather you made us earn the right to bill against it. So think 30 days minimum, 90 days maximum. Think Tweakonmics.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between B2B versus B2C marketing. Thought maybe I’d write a white paper on it. Then I came across this cartoon in the New Yorker* and realised my job was done:

Kind of says it all. Why send in a white paper to do a cartoon’s job?

* in case the New Yorker resents my use of this, I will give them a free testimonial: the New Yorker is the only magazine on Earth that is incapable of publishing bad writing. Any article, any issue: it’s always well-written and usually worth the time. And the cartoons alone are worth the subscription price.

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 idea, obviously, is to drive out the noise and deliver clear, crisp signals.

Here are a few ways to do that:

1) Give yourself less space
The less space you have to deliver your message, the more likely it is that you’ll make the best possible use of the space you have. (You can always spread it out later without adding content).

Bumper stickers have very little noise.  No room for it.

2) Give yourself less time
Don’t spend a few days on that web copy or brochure. Spend a few hours.
It will be better.

3) Boil down mercilessly, then subtract
Take a page or a paragraph that you’ve already reduced to its bare minimum and cut another 30%.  Be ruthless.

4) Kill everything that doesn’t sell
The decoration, the frippery, the content-free photos, needless or unreadable screenshots, bloated captions, rules, boxes, sidebars. Kill them.  The support points, credibility builders, facts, figures, quotes, legitimate exhibits… let them live.

5) Have only one bull’s-eye per target
Decide what you want the audience to do or to think, then focus all of your efforts on this.  Don’t give them three other options or try to do four other things at the same time.  Focus.

6) Clean up your act
Clear communications look simple and inviting.  Nice type, plenty of white space, lots of subheads to break things up.

7) Make like Hemingway
Short sentences, plain language.

I could probably come up with seven more tips but that would defeat the purpose.
More signal, less noise.

As we seek to build our business and capture the ‘big Mo’ (the winning momentum that every US Presidential candidate is droning on about at a town hall meeting near some of you right now), 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, their products and their technology; specifically people care passionately about where they sit on the fabled Magic Quadrant for their industry or product segment.

Many of them do seem to spend lots of time and money - with PR companies and analyst relations houses in particular - trying to convince Gartner to shift their position to the top right of the MQ. And many others - usually the smaller, newer ones - exhaust themselves just trying to get on the MQ radar at all.

No surprise really. Customers - the people buying tech - use Gartner to create shortlists. But could tech firms spend less time, effort and money and have a bigger impact? And are they really paying attention to what Gartner says is important for Magic Quadrant success and then taking the relevant action in response? I’m not convinced, because Gartner’s advice is so explicit.

A quick reminder of what the Magic Quadrant is all about. As the expensively produced chart below shows, Gartner plots what it calls a vendor’s ‘Completeness of Vision’ against its ‘Ability to Execute, creating four quadrants ‘Leaders’, ‘Challengers’, ‘Niche Players’ and ‘Visionaries’. The higher on the Quadrant vendors are found and the further to the right they place the more seriously rich customers take them.

So how do you become a Gartner nominated ‘Leader’? Well Gartner is pretty explicit about this. It calculates a vendor’s Completeness of Vision by differentially weighting eight separate factors. The highest weighting is given to two things: the first unsurprisingly is a company’s capacity for innovation. This relates specifically to R&D performance.

The second is ‘Market Understanding’ - basically the ability of a vendor to align its marketing strategy with market needs. And two other marketing factors, ‘marketing strategy’ and ‘offering strategy’ - what most companies call product marketing - are also judged to be critical in a company’s Completeness of Vision. So three of Gartner’s eight criteria on this axis put great marketing at the heart of a great rating.

What about ‘Ability to Execute’? Well marketing is important here too. This axis seeks to measure how well the vendor in question is equipped to succeed in the market in question. It scores product function and feature, the quality of the sales force, the overall viability of the company in financial and organizational terms and the quality of the customer base. But the highest weighting (equal in importance to scale and quality of R&D investment) is what Gartner calls “Marketing Execution’, defined as:

‘the overall effectiveness of the vendor’s marketing efforts, and the degree of ‘mind share’, market share and account penetration that the vendor has achieved. Marketing execution is a significant driver of sales, growth and brand awareness and therefore receives a high weighting’.

With Gartner being so explicit about the importance of marketing to Magic Quadrant success, and buyers listening so intently to what Gartner says, why do so many tech B2B vendors see marketing as a cost instead of an investment? Frankly, it’s baffling.

We B2B marketers are in the business of building cases. We’re advocates. So it pays to look at how other professional persuaders ply their trades. I started with a little research into how criminal lawyers do what they do, focusing in on the summation to the jury, where the whole case comes together into one clear argument…

Here are eight tips, harvested from Jury Arguments and Texan DUI specialists Trichter & Murphy (there’s a lot of DUI in Texas), plus my notes for applying them to B2B tech marketing:

• “Your credibility with the jury depends on how they perceive your competence, your likeability, and your character.”
  In B2B, this is about brand, attitude, style and credibility.

• “Your passionate belief and enthusiasm about your case shows that you care.”
  Enough of the bloodless, jargon-packed techno-speak.

• “Appeal to all the senses: use persuasive visual aids or exhibits in your argument and opening.”
  At Velocity, we’re big on guerrilla video and Pecha Kucha (20 slides, 20 seconds each = rock & roll).

• “Present your argument in a way that caters to the juror’s world view, not yours. To do this, you must consider the juror’s values, wants, and needs.”
  The most obvious thing in marketing is still the least practised.

• “Tell the jury not only what the evidence is but what the evidence means. Your job is not simply to bring the facts to life. You must also interpret the evidence for the jury.”
  A benefit for every feature…

• “Reduce your theory to a short, one-paragraph explanation, clear of obstacles, that can be understood by a group of bright twelve-year olds.”
  The art of the elevator pitch.

• “Admit at the outset the weak points in your argument . You can expose your weaknesses in a better light than your opponent, who will expose them in the darkest possible way. An honest admission, having come from you, not only endows you with credibility, it also leaves your opponent with nothing to say except what you have already admitted.”
  We’re big believers in sharing Pros and Cons — admitting real issues that can’t be ignored and showing how trivial they really are. Ask me for an example from a recent piece.

• “Don’t misquote evidence or try to twist or interpret it into a form that doesn’t have legs.”
  At Velocity, we’re a tough jury. If you can convince us, we can convince anyone.

Who needs copywriters? Get yourself a good lawyer.

Aside from tinsel and cheap booze offers, it’s that planning time of year again. A special place where you need to create futurama fireworks out of Powerpoint.

Co-incidently, it’s also time for English F.A. to make a similar, but - we hope - longer lasting plan by way of selecting a new manager for the national football team.

If you’ve been on planet England for the past x2 weeks this won’t have passed you by. The race to succeed second-choice-Steve is reaching fever pitch.

Now, we at Velocity are keen students of soccer-ati. Each Monday morning we devote at least 15 mins to dissecting the latest Arsenal result (sorry Doug, but they’ll never keep it up). As such, we see an eerie parallel between life at Lancaster Gate and you.

You both have some big choices to make, and - judging by recent form - we’re only moderately optimistic.

Because - like the F.A. - you’ve enjoyed reasonable success on limited resources, but we know your ambitions are loftier.

So here’s your choices for 2008 - like Brian Barwick (F.A. Chief Exec) you have three:

Play safe: be a Sven Goran Ericsson (again)

Go maverick: be a Juergen Klinsmann

Just win: like Jose Morinho

Let me explain with (another) handy diagram:

To the left: you can do what you normally do. You know exactly what’s tried and tested (Gerrard, Lampard, Beckham), and you know they’ll buy you. A few ads in a trade magazine, an email campaign or five and a solid trade show will certainly not get you the sack. Used the way they were used last time, they’ll probably secure you a quarter final place in your market.

To the right: you tear up the rule book. You’ve been a student of ‘black hat’ tactics for some time (Ballack roams free, a left back that scores great goals and has zero defensive responsibilities, and a goalkeeper who scares everyone with his big mouth). You’re inexperienced in this domain but you have a hunch. You can’t prove it, but if you’re given the freedom, you may well exceed all expectations and secure a quarter final spot with that new Facebook application and a slew of desktop widgets.

In the middle: GENIUS (go with me here). You’ve been to the cutting edge. You hired x2 translation experts whilst you were there. You have a army of full of rough diamond, hand-picked talent (Joe Cole, Didier Drogba) to sprinkle carefully across your forward line. You’ve done your research and you know that SEO, blogs, and PPC campaigns can work wonders when mixed with a rock solid quartet of white papers, webinars, product demos and John Terry.

So, who you gonna be?

We don’t expect you to be a maverick - that way lies terrors unknown.

But you need to avoid being totally safe - that way lies many competitive threats.

Best bet: be a winner. Learn from this year. Mix what you know with what you know will make a real difference.

(Note: we love Jose. So do our wives.)

Today’s ‘Widgety Goodness’ conference in Brighton brought together some in-the-know folks and some much-needed clarity to the hoopla that is social media and widgets.

Organised by the good folk at Snipperoo (the widget platform people), it cleared a lot of excess fluff from my head. Top of the agenda was a BIG question…. what are widgets and what are they good for?

Well, I have a good handle on this now, so if you need to know, then read on…

From a practical perspective, Alex Bard of youminis, gave the best explanation of widgets that I’ve heard to date.

According to Alex (and I’d agree strongly), widgets are used by people EITHER as:

‘Stickers’

or

‘Utilities’

A ‘sticker’ is the kind of thing that you slap on your Facebook or MySpace profile in order to look cool - like a widget for your fave band. It sits there for everyone to see and says ‘Hey look! I reeeeally dig this thing!’

A ‘utility’ is more useful. It’s something you use in order to get something of value. For example, a widget for iGoogle or Netvibes that gives you feeds on the news or sports stories that you care about. Or, another example that we’re all probably more familar with might be a plug-in for the Firefox browser that enables you to control your iTunes.

To make a broad, reductive statement, sticker widgets tend to be used a lot by teenagers and dumped quickly when the next big thing comes along… whilst utility widgets tend to be used by folks who have a specific need or interest. Utility widgets also tend to have a longer shelf life (because they’re more useful).

Further, sticker widgets tend to live on social networking platforms (ie, my Facebook profile page), whilst utility widgets tend to be embedded in the applications we use day-to-day (eg, my Mac operating system interface, Windows, my browser, etc - in other words in places where I live / work).

Interestingly, as social networking platforms begin to take a stronger hold of our lives, we see utility widgets popping up here too. As people spend more and more time ‘living’ in Facebook (that’ll be me then), they also see value in embedding helpful things in it - so that they don’t have to leave one app to get a piece of info from another.

I’m paraphrasing Alex on all this, but I think this definition is useful. (Thanks Alex, great speech!)

As I’m a consultant, I thought I’d turn it into a special on-the-fly Velocity ‘Stan-o- Gram’ (Stan, my business partner sees the world in these types of charts, and we know they really help everyone to ‘get it’ quicker ).

Here it is:

So, what’s the point of all this stuff and why should we care as marketers?

Well, if you’re selling sugar water or Spice Girl lunchboxes, then you really ought to get in on the action with ‘Sticker’ widgets. This side of the chart is very viral. So, find a 14 year old influential sneezer-user, encourage them to attach your widget to his/her social network profile and just stand back. If your brand and your widget rocks, then their friends will probably be bowled over by how cool they are and go copy them. Bingo - a new meme is born. The impressive Ori Soen from Musestorm had some interesting case studies on how his tech platform has helped brands do this kind of thing.

If you’re not selling sugar water, and are in the more sober business of B2B, then think about how you can use all this widgety stuff to become a utility.

To my mind, this is a big big opportunity for smart companies to pick apart the value of their products and services and get them to people in new ways. For example, if you’re a firm that needs to relay time sensitive, high value info to business customers, then build a Facebook or iGoogle widget and go give it to your most important users…. they’ll then pass it on to their friends, and hey presto, you have a new outlet for your brand/services/information. On the other hand, don’t even try to build a sticker style widget because the chances are your customers don’t think you’re THAT cool. (Think about it, if you hand out free badges at trade shows do you think people wear them when they get home!?).

So…

‘Sticker’ widgets are fab in B2C where the budgets and the bets are big, the trends fast, and the payoffs large.

‘Utility’ widgets are great in B2B (and B2C) where the value of your content is high and your users are (probably) niche but extremely engaged and energized… because your stuff helps them do their jobs/live their life better and they’ll be grateful to get their hands on it and pass it on.

In other words, sticker widgets may work for you if you can establish a ‘cool’ factor. Utility widgets will only work for you if you can establish a real value in your content.

Either way, lazy marketers need not apply because it takes some figuring out. Whatever you do, IBM will never be cool, and I’ll never expect to get ‘utility’ style content from Coca-Cola.

Anyways, that’s my view (thanks to Alex). What do you think?

(Meantime, next up will be a post on what we as marketers need to do in order to make this stuff work effectively… inspired by another slam-dunk pitch from our friend Will McInnes of NixonMcInnes. Watch this space…)

The National Venture Capital Association (US) reports that 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… (more…)

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… (more…)