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.  White papers, blog posts, webinars, videos, eBooks…

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.

The results is an over-emphasis on the recent instead of the relevant.

Most companies have a few pieces of core content that were usually produced early on — the ones that summarise the whole story in one place.  Or the ideal introduction to the market/app/technology/issue.

These powerful pieces often get buried under layers of new content — but the new material may not be the best starting point for every prospect.  Over time, a company’s content tends to get more and more specific.  You cover the broad landscape, then zoom in on issues.  But new prospects that know nothing about you would be much better off starting with the earlier ‘landscape’ pieces.

We like to get our clients thinking about the sales cycle and what content is right for each stage in it.  A first-time web visitor should be led to the big-picture pieces. Subsequent web visits or emails  could help them progress further, ideally based on insight into who they are (job title, industry) and what they’re doing — what pages they visit, what papers they read, what links they click on in an email.

We’re starting to work with a powerful tool that does automated lead nurturing based on demographic and behavioural scoring.  This makes it easy to target the right content at the right prospects as they progress through the sales pipeline.

As a result, clients can serve up  the most relevant content to each prospect, instead of just the most recent.

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).

The newsletter does a lot right:

• It’s clear, colourful and inviting – three colour-coded sections; design in the service of content
• It’s about the reader’s concerns not just the company’s –only one short bit is about VNL at all — and they’ve earned the right to smuggle that in
• It’s packed with content – incuding recent industry news items (pre-digested) and links to two videos and two white papers.
• It starts with a nice, personal note from the CEO – giving it a human face
• It’s as long as your arm – nothing wrong with scrolling if there’s a lot to say — and it’s better than reducing the content to a series of cryptic lines.
• It’s a link-fest – driving people to the VNL website; with proper analytics to track the click-throughs

We even like the way the housekeeping is handled at the bottom:

Newsletters are an important string to the B2B marketing bow.  We could all do worse than following this one.

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.  Hitting the lowlights:

• It’s needlessly defensive – Microsoft owns the PC market.  Why the hell are they stooping down to swat at a niche player? Real leaders should never look back, down or to the side.  They only look ahead.

• It’s over-produced – This one spot cost more than fifteen of the Mac commercials. Which kind of proves Apple’s point. Guerrilla marketing will always be cooler than Madison Avenue marketing (or wherever Big Agency lives these days).

• It backfires – Microsoft is not content with market share, mega-profits and virtual ubiquity.  It desperately craves the one thing it can’t have: coolness.  So instead of letting go of cool (the only cool thing to do), they concoct this shrill howl. It isn’t just not cool.  It’s watching your Dad dance.

• It proves the opposition’s case – They want to say, “We’re creative and interesting too!”.  But by assembling this cast of PC-people (in both senses), Microsoft sends the message, ‘We are everyperson.’ And everyone is no one. Bland. Boring. Even though some have beards and some scuba dive and some don’t even comb their hair.

The whole exercise reminds me of an embarrassing bit of greenwashing that Ford did a few years ago.  The CEO barked, “Make us look green!” and the hapless marketing department was caught without a plan.  They cranked out a glossy insert packed with every mini-credential they could muster. One was, “The roof on this factory is covered in grass!” (neglecting to mention that the factory belched out 200,000 F150 trucks at about 18 miles per gallon each).  Another said, “our design team has four vegetarians.” (I’m not joking).

I’m sure Microsofties are enjoying their foray into “I know you are but what am I?” marketing.  Turning the other cheek can be excruciating when you know you could kill your enemy with one blow.  But internal morale-boosting and good marketing are two very different things.  And Microsoft now looks like the kid who discovered bell-bottoms about three parties after they went out of fashion.  Blush.

A friend of ours who also happens to be a God of Branding just 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 is called Corporate Branding is Dead and its central metaphor is… well I’ll let Axel say it:

 ”Most CEOs don’t recognise that the way their company is visually represented is in fact the company’s body language.”

Any presentation coach will tell you that your body language speaks louder than your words.  But for most B2B companies, the visual side of their communications is the last thing they think about (if they think about it at all).

As a result, the typical B2B brand slumps into the room, mumbles under its breath, looks down at the floor, picks its nose and scratches its genitalia.

No self-respecting company would hire a salesperson who gave this kind of impression, but thousands are happy to have logos, websites, brochures, data sheets and business cards that do.

Design and visual communication is moving up the agenda at Velocity as we see the value it brings to our clients — especially in an increasingly digital landscape.  As we help our clients present themselves to the world, it would be remiss not to work on the body language, too.

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.

Wouldn’t it be nice to surprise them once in a while?

To actually have fun in producing something so people will enjoy reading it?

To take a deep breath (or a deep draught), let your B2B inhibitions slide away and just talk?

Your prospects are begging you: “Do anything you like but please stop BORING me.”

Re-think that email. Pulp that brochure. Reject that ad idea. Aim higher.

It’s funny, but oftentimes 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 press briefings and writing some deadly dull ‘opinion’ pieces in the name of trying to grab people’s attention.

The fault usually lies in believing our own hype:  in assuming that the things that get us all lathered up are the same things that get customers, web searchers and reporters excited too.  More often than not this is simply not the case.  The fact that your widget has successfully passed a beta test phase for version 11.5.2 is probably of interest to only five people in this world - and four of them are likely to be sat in the same cubicle as you.

And even if you do know you’re on to a hot thing, how often are we wise enough to factor market forces into the planning process?  We might be selling very hot cakes indeed, but if everyone else is too then it’ll be extremely hard to make ourselves seen and heard.

In practice, it takes a great mind to fathom this stuff.  The skills for getting it right aren’t really marketing skills per se, they’re more about being a good salesperson.

The trick is to get inside the heads of the people you’re trying to reach, and to understand the competition for their mindshare… and only then to figure out what it is that you’re going to write or produce and how you’re going to distribute it.

Good salespeople do this all the time.  They have a keen appreciation of things like ‘pitch angles’, ‘buying cycles’, ‘competitors’ and ‘budgets’ (or someone’s ability to cough up cash)…. all of which requires a great handle on the pulse of the marketplace.  Conversely in marketing, when it comes to generating new ideas for content, we’re more likely to organise a 30 minute brainstorm meeting, then neck a Diet Coke (or three) and start hammering away at the keyboard.

This approach is not good.  It can result in a bunch of boring, irrelevant deliverables or things that are destined never to be heard amongst a sea of white noise (and sometimes both!).  Worst of all, doing things this way nearly always represents a gamble in terms of time, money and resources - since we have no idea if there will ever be a realistic market out there for our new-fangled stuff.

The salesperson’s trick is to know the pitch thoroughly and to have researched the market well enough to know whether she will be wasting her time - before setting off.   Now whilst it isn’t always possible for us marketers to do an in-depth analysis of our customers - reporters, web site visitors, etc - there are some great new tools that we can use to make our work more scientific.

Over the summer months Google released a stack  of (FREE!) new search marketing research tools to help us understand what the web is interested in.  Their Keyword Suggest tool is primarily designed to help people make better decisions about keywords for Google Adwords (Pay Per Click / PPC) campaigns, but it’s also an very valuable app for researching the popularity of our content offers and the language that we use to describe them, as well as understanding our competition.

For example, I’m thinking of creating a new white paper on ‘mobile marketing’ to help me go and sell to mobile marketing-type people.  What Google Suggest tells me is that there’s a healthy number of people searching for this term - approximately 31,000 per month right now.  But if I run a normal Google search on the phrase I also find that I’m up against approximately 33 million other web pages who are also interested in marketing ideas, products or services in the same area.

Alternatively, a bit of research on the phrase ‘mobile promotions’ gives me 1,600 searchers per month and just over 1 million competing web pages; and ‘mcommerce’ gives me an audience of around 900 per month and only a million or so competing pages.

Now assuming that my budget is limited, I have some valuable new information to play with.  I know that it’s going to be far more cost-effective to create content offers around ideas and phrases such as ‘mcommerce’ than ‘mobile marketing’: and, whilst the general thread of my piece may not be radically different from what I’d originally planned, if I optimise the content around these new ideas I stand a far higher chance of engaging with people through search (because my corresponding web page will be fighting it out for the top spots on Google with only one million other pages, as opposed to 33 million.)

In addition, I might just find I have a bunch of new angles to play with.  Let’s say I decide that ‘mcommerce’ is a different kettle of fish to plain old ‘mobile marketing’ - as mcommerce speaks to buying and selling over a phone, whilst ‘marketing’ may be more about finding and influencing people.  Hey presto!  Another rich - and marketable - seam of content ideas is opened up.  Further, this angle might just ring a few new and meaningful bells for the piece, as it’s the importance of the transactional capabilities of the mobile web that my sales guys have been banging on about for the past six months……

With Google to play with there’s really no excuse for inventing our content plays in a vacuum.  Pulling useful research data from the interweb has never been easier, and it ought to make our work more effective.  So buff your pitch up.  A 30 second stint of research might make your content efforts go a whole lot further than you thought….

Don’t know about you, but it’s Friday evening and we’re offski. Peroni awaits. We’re celebrating the launch of a brand new web site for Kennet.

This is our latest and greatest project on Wordpress. Those super smart investment guys at Kennet - whose funds assist great tech firms such as Clearswift (also a Velocity client), Kapow and Daptiv - asked us earlier this year to help them revamp their corporate positioning and give their web site a lick of paint.

Well, here she is: a totally new web presence for a totally different technology Venture Capital fund. We like to think we nailed this one - in fact we’re super proud. Although it’s a small site, it’s deeply layered with some luscious design and content touches that set it apart from the competition as a thinking man’s investment firm.

In fact, we can vouch for this first hand. We’ve worked real close with Kennet’s senior team over the past few months to get it off the ground. So, big thanks to Max Bleyleben (check his blog on the European VC scene here) and the crew for being so clued up and game for trying something a little different.

Credits:

Strategy, words, direction and project management: Velocity
Design: Tourist
Development and implementation: Two Thirty

Warm glows all round.

…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.)

We’re so proud about this one that we’ve issued a hard-hitting press release that explains what it’s all about in full.

The short story: it’s the first part of a new Velocity campaign for dotMobi, which is designed to help make “.mobi” the domain of choice for all mobile web sites.

It’s a great brief, working with a really great organisation. Watch this space…

Project credits: design and content - Velocity; development and implementation - dotMobi.

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.

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.

UPDATE: this post has been kindly featured on BtoB Magazine’s ‘Blogs of the Week’. (Thanks guys!)

I’ve been mulling on this one for a while: 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?

Well, an aborted journey around the M25 in the rain today provided a little thinking time. Here’s my conclusion…

Firstly, a Disclaimer - Reports of Death are Usually Exaggerated

I’m not a doomsayer. The internet does not spell the end for traditional marketing. In fact, the best of it seems to be getting more and more engaging and creative. In fact it has to be by virtue of the environment I’m about to describe…

Fact: The Media/Marketing Environment has Changed for Good

We have all this new Facebook-ish stuff which didn’t exist yesterday - and most of it is great entertainment. Predominantly, it’s all ‘me-media’ - the services themselves don’t provide content, but their users do.

This in itself is exciting: as a publisher I can create whatever I want to, whatever my interest is; as a consumer I can read/view/access an infinitely richer set of content than I could a few years ago. I can also now connect with folks and share stuff in easy, fun and exciting new ways (Facebook, Flickr, etc).

An Introduction to Pico-Branding

These new things are both a threat and an opportunity for marketers…

Threat: unless everyone’s playing hooky at work on Facebook, then we have fewer opportunities to engage with them in traditional ways because less and less time and attention is devoted to things like TV, newspapers, email or web sites. (Proof: yesterday I was really dedicated to being a couch potato; today - whilst a Sopranos binge on the couch will continue to be highly desirable - I also tend to devote a bit of time to reading blogs in the evenings.)

Opportunity: we have a mass of new ways of connecting with people.

So if you’re a marketing agency, you need to think about acquiring some new skill sets to compliment your standard work (and to safeguard your fees). And, if you have a brand to manage, it’s time to think about how to capitalize on all of these new-fangled destinations.

When thinking about how to engage with the market, we need to bring two different strategies into play:

Mega-branding: press, posters, big web sites, mass email campaigns, TV, etc.

Pico-branding: Facebook, YouTube, blogs, Google AdWords, Twitter, Flickr.

Mega-branding is an exercise in ‘gorilla marketing’ - it has a large footprint; it reaches many people; lives a long life; and it can be (hairily) expensive.

Pico-branding is an exercise in ‘guerilla marketing’ - it has a small footprint; it’s opportunistic and targeted; it’s fleeting; and it’s (relatively) cheap. Importantly, because it’s delivered via the web, Pico-branding is also extremely measurable in a way that Mega-branding can’t always be - and so ‘cheap’ can also be very cost-effective.

How to Get With the Pico-Program

Most importantly, Pico-branding requires us to think in new ways…

Pico-branding is not about building grand audience destinations (like the mega-bucks web site of yesteryear), because if you spend lots of time and money building it there’s no longer a guarantee that they’ll come (there’s every chance they’ll be polishing their Facebook profile instead).

No, Pico-branding is all about building smaller, more discrete stopping points across all of these new online outlets, with the aim of capturing your audience’s attention and either complimenting (and informing) what they’re doing or diverting their interest towards a destination that you do own (ie, something from your Mega-brand bucket of work).

A good analogy is with the board game Monopoly. Everyone knows it’s a bad strategy to invest in only one area of the board. Too random and not enough traffic. A better way to generate cash is to buy lots of smaller properties at all of the places that people visit regularly, as well as investing in the big stuff: so, collectively, a bunch of houses on Whitechapel and the Old Kent Road can add a great deal of strategic, money-making value to those expensive hotels on Park Lane.

In Pico-branding terms, this translates as:

Reaching out to the blogs that your audiences read and engaging in valuable discussions with them

Publishing your own blog in a focused way that adds value to (and interacts with) the discussions surrounding your marketplace

Using tools like Twitter to broadcast snippets of information that you own and other people care about

Posting engaging videos on YouTube that show you and your wares in a new light

Creating Facebook (et al) groups or applications that either provide users with content services that they couldn’t get elsewhere or add value to their experience of your brand by helping them connect with like-minded people

…and so on.

Conclusion: Go Small

Pico-branding is all about accepting that your audiences spend as much time on a varied bunch of web-based media, forums and services as they do in their armchair in front of their TV…. and making whole hearted attempts to engage with them in new ways that add value to these online experiences.

So here’s the new rules for marketing…

1. Go ‘Pico.’ Build more small things than big things
2. Do this in all the places that your audiences are to be found
3. Don’t spend less or more - just spread budgets across a wider variety of stuff

Footnote: next up from Velocity….a ‘how to’ guide for finding your audiences online.

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.

See the ad to the right there? OK, so I’m flattered, my opinions are important.

Great, but to whom and to what? Participate in a survey? About what? Click here? Why!?

This firm could use some serious copywriting, salesmanship and usability advice.

(Watch this space, we’re writing a new white paper on just this kind of thing!)

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!’

‘Feel sharp!? Like a knife?’

‘No, like Motorola!’

….Ahh - sharp like Motorola. Of course. (Mutters ‘What the !!!***##@!! ????????’)

When it comes to web site design, much of our intent and language falls halfway between the creative and the prosaic. In your early discussions about how your new site should look you may have a technical guy in the room, a boss, a writer and a designer….but no common language with which to communicate other than half-baked hunches about what’s hot and what’s not. It’s a common problem.

To ‘feel sharp like Motorola’ might mean to have a sparse, corporate, but strikingly modern design packed full of crisp simple content nuggets for users. Or, it might mean to have a subtle use of the corporate logo, with more time and space given over to campaign led microsites (like ‘Hello Moto’). Or it might mean both. The first thought is a design thought. The latter is a functionality and branding thought.

Back to your meeting….

If you don’t nail design your vision in the five minutes before lunch, your site will fail. Without absolute clarity you are doomed to create a soupy mess of compromise between design and function. What started out as a language issue - Motorola, lost in translation - will very soon end up as a big fat usability issue.

Here’s the facts:

• Once it’s built, your web site needs to perform like an olympic athlete to grab your users’ attention. You will be competing against Manchester United and Scarlett Johannsen for their attention, not the competition next door.
• It’s likely that at least 50% of users will arrive via your back door rather than your home page as a result of search activity. (Google has a lot to answer for!)
• When they arrive, the vast majority of users won’t know you, trust you, or care for you. Their only assumption is that there’s a slim chance that you’re relevant to their needs… because Google told them so - but you’re just one click away from the ‘other’ 1,678,963 sites related to their search term.
• Contrary to popular wisdom, they won’t scan your page in any logical sequence (folks like to assume that they eye zig-zags down a page). Nope, the pupil does a crazy dance in a nanosecond and your first impression will be made.
• In addition, they’ll see your site like Mr Magoo. No sweeping panoramic views here (after all, they’re late for a meeting and their phone’s ringing). Just a squint. Then the mind’s made up.
• If they stick around then they’ll probably just wade in and muddle on through. No clean click paths, just a muddle. Whatever works to get them from A to B - usually via Z, F and M (in that order). If they make a purchase or sign up for stuff at the end of this process then it’s all credit to them, not you.
• Further, they may be drunk. Their mouse may have two years of fluff preventing them from scrolling right. They may be on a GPRS connection and they may be on a train where the line drops every two minutes as they pass under a bridge. Or they may even have disabilities which means they’ll be using a range of assistive technologies to view your site - screen readers, text-only browsers, that kind of thing.

The point is that, setting aside your functional and design ambitions, you absolutely do not have a common user to create a beautiful web site for. Instead, you have a schizoid, multi-limbed, technologically-challenged mythical creature who’s only consistent attribute is that’s she’s in a darn big hurry.

…So, talk of building a ‘sharp’ site like Motorola isn’t really going to help at the planning stage.

What you need is a sound grasp of web usability principles.

More on this later….we’re putting a paper together on the subject, because good usability is critical to the success of any public web site.

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.)

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?

…Most votes are probably in the last camp, which is why we at Velocity are fascinated by attempts to cure the ills of Powerpoint….like Pecha Kucha - an approach to ppts that, as described by Wired, combines business meeting and poetry to transform corporate cliché into surprisingly compelling beat-the-clock performance art.

Powerpoint as performance art?  What’s the point?

Well, something needs to be done.  Too many 30 minute stand up sessions are drivel, fuelled by bullets and dodgy clip art.  Doug’s already writtern about PK here.  It’s a worthy pursuit.  Think about it.  You’re presenting at a conference / meeting / social thang.  You have a few minutes to take people on your journey - get buy in, that sort of thing.

Now, how you gonna do it?  More bullets!?

No way!!

Perhaps ppt is a necessary evil.  After all, ranting in front of an audience isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.

The key to being good at it is, however, in doing it differently.  So, if nothing else, make sure they remember just a bit of you.  Say or do something different - focus on the message that REALLY matters and do a great job of delivering it….. and just forget all the other conventional crap.

The other thought is how you put it all together.  Here’s a great post from the folks at 37signals (one of our fave development firms, the guys behind Basecamp).  Check it out - their advice is to ‘talk first, write second.’  It’s simple, but powerful.  Rather than focusing on the tool (the app, the bullets, the clip art), why not first think about what needs to be said…. then say it and write it all down later?  Bet your slide content would look a little different if you took this path.

Anyways, the best advice we can offer on the subject is a good old cliche:  less is more.  20 seconds a slide and a spot of Pecha Kucha is a good discipline.

We’re actively doing this for our clients now.  So talk to us if you’d like some help with that troublesome Corporate or Sales presentation.

To celebrate the launch of a whole new Velocity, Doug (our Creative Director) has put pen to paper to get a bunch of important stuff off his chest… (more…)

Download this B2B Technology Marketing White Paper in pdf Format

Answering the Three Questions that will earn you the right to sell…

Technology marketers (especially the ones who live in agencies) love to make marketing more complex than it really is.

While there’s a lot of craft in the practice of technology marketing - and some of it does start to resemble rocket science - the core of the discipline is very, very simple: you have to be able to answer three questions quickly, clearly and compellingly.

The Three Questions

Again, nothing that would trouble Einstein:

1. Who the hell are you?

2. Why should I care?

3. Why should I believe you?

That’s it. The whole enchilada of technology marketing (some would say all marketing, but I actually believe the soap, cigarette and beer peddlers are doing something very different).

If you can answer these three questions well, you’ll have done the hardest and most important part of your job. You will also have made the other parts of your job a lot easier.

The questions are sequential. You can’t answer them out of order. In fact, answering the first question well earns you the right to ask the second and answering the second well earns you the right to ask the third. Answering all three earn you the right to sell something. There is no other way through this obstacle course.

Fail along the way and you haven’t just lost the battle, you’ve lost the war.

Let’s take them one at a time:

1. Who the hell are you?

This question tests your ability to break out from an unspeakably noisy world, stand out from a very specific kind of competition and win passage to the second question.

The question is phrased in colloquial Yank-speak for a reason. ‘Who are you?’ presumes the questioner wants to know the answer. ‘Who the hell are you?’ assumes the opposite: that the questioner not only doesn’t want to know, but is openly hostile - annoyed that you’ve interrupted their train of thought and tried to impose your agenda on to theirs.

This reflects the real world of the marketer/prospect relationship. Most technology marketing commits the fatal error of assuming the audience welcomes the communication and is highly motivated to sift it for its meaning.

In the real world, the opposite is true. Your prospects don’t give a damn about you. They want you out of their face. They hope that you fail so that they don’t have to give you any more of their precious time and attention.

‘Who the hell are you?’ more accurately reflects the psychological context of your attempted communication. It also raises the bar. A lot of marketing can pass the easier test of intriguing an interested, motivated audience. But you’re not marketing to your mother. You’re marketing to someone who considers you the enemy.

To make the challenge even more accurate (and raise the bar still further) you have to consider your Question 1 competition: the other people and things who are also trying to get the same person’s attention at the same time.

Your direct commercial competitors are only one cluster of competitors for the attention of your prospect. Some of these may be formidable competition in their own right. Some may outspend you. Others may execute better. But they’re still not your main competition for Question 1.

Your Question 1 competitors are legion and they include such formidable foes as:

• Manchester United
• Global Warming
• Scarlet Johannsen
• A leaking toilet
• A highly-strung boss
• Your prospect’s wayward teenage daughter who didn’t get home until 3am and refuses to talk about it.

You get the idea.

In the no-man’s land before the Question 1 hurdle, that pesky company who makes better widgets than you is not the problem. Scarlet Johannsen is the problem.

Here’s an exercise: go and get the last ad, brochure, mailing or web page you approved. Now go to your browser and type in this URL:
http://www.spystyle.com/3617022_ede4b65bfc-thumb.jpg

Hold your work up next to the browser. Look at one, then the other. Repeat.

The bar is not just higher than you thought, the bar is out of sight.

Your challenge is to use words and pictures to stop your target audience for a millisecond, then plant a tiny suspicion that the thing in front of them just might be worth another five seconds of their time.

This is the art of the headline.

Some headlines tell the prospect who you are in a direct, literal way (”Learn Italian in three weeks or your money back.”). Others tell people who you are in a more oblique way. They may communicate what kind of company you are, your attitude to your work or the general world you operate in.

The art of the headline is the subject of another article. For now, it’s enough to say that a good headline stops the prospect in their tracks and moves them closer to your answer to Question 1.

Who the hell did you say you were?

2. Why should I care?

You’ve elbowed Scarlet aside for a few seconds. You’ve emerged from the Question 1 scrum with a small scrap of your prospect’s attention.

Now you have a tiny, fleeting opportunity to answer question 2, ‘Why should I care?’.

The key here is speed. Successfully negotiating Question 1 does not mean the prospect’s door swings open; that you’re ushered into the office, given a cappuccino, and begged to tell your tale.

Despite the effort you put in to getting this far, you have less than a minute to clear the next hurdle. And it’s harder than the first. Maybe exponentially so.

‘Why should I care?’ can only be answered with statements that establish direct, personal relevance for the prospect.

You’ve woken her up. This had better be good. Maybe something like:

• ‘There is a train coming and you’re on the tracks and we know how to untie you.’
• ‘There is a pot of gold hidden underneath a bush and we have a map.’
• ‘We will keep you out of jail.’
• ‘We will make you rich and famous.’
• ‘We will save you so much money you can do that thing your boss keeps striking out of the budget.’
• ‘We will get you out of your crap company and into a great company that appreciates and rewards your talents.’

If it weren’t for one thing, answering this question effectively wouldn’t be so hard. That one thing is the next Question.

If it weren’t for the next Question, you could simply lie. You could make any of the statements listed above, sit back and wait for the web hits to come pouring in.

But Question 3 awaits. And it’s no good blagging your way through this one if you have zero chance of clearing that one.

Your answer to Question 2 has to be:

• Relevant - something the prospect actively thinks about, cares about, worries about.

• Available - something that isn’t being said by everyone else.

• Attainable - something you can deliver on; something you can prove you can deliver on. Something true.

Now you can see the challenge.

Most technology marketers try to clear Question 2 by making the grandest claim they can make. They think about the benefits their solution confers, then think about why this benefit is good, and why this good thing is important and why this important thing is essential.

Then they say the ‘essential’ thing. And it comes out like this:

• ‘Increase your profitability with our spell-checker.’
• ‘Boost your share price with our middleware.’
• ‘Double your revenue with our test software.’

White noise. Static.

Answering Question 2 is about finding some clear space in the market, then balancing relevance and credibility into something intriguing. Not something that closes the deal right here and now; something that moves the prospect to the next question.

Your job here is to raise an eyebrow. To earn a few more minutes to give you a fighting chance to answer Question 3.

3. Why should I believe you?

You’ve passed two very tough tests. Your prospect knows who you are and why you think they should care. Now you’ve got a chance to make them do something about it.

But first, you need to make them believe that what you said in Question 2 just might be half true.

This is the struggle for credibility. No single fact can win it for you. You need to amass enough evidence to tip things in your favour.

There are many ways to bolster credibility:

• Statistics - ideally independently generated
• Awards
• Accreditations
• Analyst attention and endorsement
• Media attention and endorsement
• Lists of customers
• Testimonials
• Case studies
• Your reputation
• The way you speak
• The way you look
• The way you behave
• Your resources and assets
• The credentials of your team
• Other successful products
• Your company’s commercial success

You don’t just need one or two of these if you want to clear Question 3. You need as many of them as you can get.

Notice that ‘simply making a claim’ is not on the list of credibility-builders. A claim is an empty thing. Prove it. Demonstrate why it’s true. Show how you deliver on it. Make me see the light.

Credibility is never granted it is always hard-won. This is true because all IT buyers have been badly burned. Most have been badly burned repeatedly over the most sensitive parts of the body. They’ve heard a lot of claims and they aren’t in the mood to take yours at face value.

But because it’s so hard, tech marketers often forget the most powerful credibility-builder of them all: a good story that makes sense.

A good, strong, logical story, well told, can earn as much credibility as three or four of the credibility-builders listed above.

This is especially true for ‘early adopters’ or ‘champions’ who rely less on what others do and more on their own judgement.

You may not have all the proof you need. You may not have all the endorsements you’d like. You may not have any customers at all. But if your stuff works, there’s a reason. And if you can explain why it works while other solutions fall short - and do it in a distinctive, compelling way - you can pass the test established by Question 3.

This doesn’t mean you don’t need any of the credibility-builders. The more the merrier. But if you’ve got a great story to tell, invest in telling it well.

In short: get the best copywriter you can find and shower him in riches.

Using the three questions

Answering the Three Questions is the hardest part of technology marketing. It’s also the most important part.

You can spend a fortune on advertising; have the best search engine optimisation in the market; generate a library of killer white papers — none of it will work if you can’t nail the Big Three first.

As obvious as they sound, the vast majority of technology marketing fails miserably at answering the three questions quickly, credibly and compellingly.

At Velocity, we make the Three Questions the starting point of every engagement. We don’t get stuck into campaigns, websites or brochures until we (and the client) feel we’ve cracked them.

You can map your entire marketing plan to the Three Questions or use them to guide and evaluate any single piece of communication.

In a good piece of marketing, you can see the Questions get answered, in order. In a bad one, you have to hunt for the answers and you’re not satisfied when you find them.

Tech marketing isn’t really much more complex than that.

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 one way to achieve this authenticity: get the retailers, lawyers or candlestick makers on the team. Put one in charge of product marketing. Get others to crawl all over the product, the messages, the language.

Get them in focus groups, interviews, product demos and usability labs.

There is no shortcut. There is no alternative. You can’t fake authenticity.

Download this B2B Technology Marketing White Paper in pdf Format

Velocity on new company names

A friend used to be in a variety of rock bands. None you’ve ever heard of. And there’s a very good reason for that: the members tended to spend twice as much time trying to think up clever band names as they did playing music.

So instead of getting an inside view of the birth of a great band with a stupid name, like The Rolling Stones or The Beatles (‘Beetles’, but with an ‘a’, get it?), we suffered the distorted stylings of never-to-be supergroups such as ‘Please Don’t Shoot My Dog’, ‘The Dinette Set’ and ‘Munchie & the Vegetable Commandos’.

Well, company names are the band names of marketing. If most companies took half the time they spent coming up with the perfect name and put it into actually selling stuff, we might have a few more Microsofts to compete against.

Microsoft is not a great name. It’s a boring name. But if young Bill Gates had spent more time on a better one and less time getting IBM to license his primitive operating system, he’d be a middle manager showing people his ‘IBM Employee of the Month’ certificate instead of a demi-god showing people his 963-room mansion.

The fact is - and we could get banned from the Soho Club for saying this -company names don’t really matter all that much. And in business-to-business markets, they matter even less.

Do you really want to change it?

As marketing consultants, Velocity has often been asked to come up with a new name for a company that’s going through big changes. Our first advice is usually ‘don’t do it’ (what the hell — we never liked the Soho club anyway).

Name changes, we say, cost too much money for too little return. They take months of management time and tens of thousands in design and print. And you end up with a name that’s not really much better, having sent a message to the marketplace that, under the former name, you failed.

But sometimes, a name change is really the right thing to do, to reflect real changes in the company, such as:

• fundamentally changing the business
• distancing from a chequered past
• growing beyond a limiting name
• entering markets where the name is taken

These are all good reasons for a name change.

Aim lower

We always start by giving our potted lecture on naming, in an effort to ‘manage the client’s expectations’. ‘Managing expectations’ may sound like a euphemism for getting people to lower their sights. And that’s exactly what it is. We should lower our sights when it comes to naming.

Because company names, like pretty much everything in life, fall on a bell curve. There are a few fantastic names, a whole bunch of okay names and a few truly awful names.

The problem is, the surest way to end up with an awful name is by aiming for a fantastic one. More to the point, extreme names are polarising - some people love them, others hate them. Fantastic names and awful names are the same names.

For most companies, we don’t think a polarising name makes sense. Better to have one that’s simple, memorable and has an available web address.

Simple and memorable aren’t that difficult. But finding a simple, memorable name with an available URL is not easy. Since you’re not going to get ‘customer.com’ or ‘profit.com’, you’ve got three choices:

• Combinational names - names formed from two words (like Worldpeace or BigSoft). Can be fun, but even these URLs are getting scarce.

• Coined names - formed from morphing a word or combination (like Technion, Omnia, or Consignia). You’ll get teased for a few months until people get used to it.

• Supplemented names - names that combine a word with a descriptor like ‘software’, ‘solutions’ or technology’, to find an available URL (like Portrait Software or Island Solutions). A creative cop-out but often the most practical solution.

Here are a few guidelines for any approach:

Don’t get hung up on descriptive accuracy - A name doesn’t have to tell people exactly what you do. It just shouldn’t mislead them, implying things you don’t do.

Make the name the URL - Don’t’ make people guess. They should be able to type your name between www. and .com and arrive at your website. If you can’t get the un-hyphenated URL, try something else.

Think internationally - A name like Trillium is as hard for a Japanese speaker as Boehringer Ingelheim is to the English (though we do love that rhythm).

Don’t forget the lawyers - It’s no good getting excited about a name you can’t trademark. Sounds obvious but you’d be surprised.

Avoid cute - Cute sucks.

Avoid trendy - Names come in waves. Motorola probably sounded really futuristic in the fifties. In the eighties, tech names had to have an x in them. During the Internet bubble, ‘groovy’ or cheekily abstract names were in (like ‘Monday’). In the nineties, names were often two words stuck together with no space, so a capital letter stuck out like the tall kid in a team photo. Check out what’s really in… and avoid it.

Try automation - Some URL registration sites (like nameboy.com) have name generators that stick words together and only show you the ones that are available as URLs. Kind of fun.

Embrace the abstract - Your name doesn’t have to imply what you do. Sometimes just a nice name works fine.

Don’t futz with spelling - You’ll get really tired of telling people, ‘It’s like Quest but with a w instead of a u’.

Set a time limit - Naming exercises can take months of senior management time. Don’t let it. Give the job to two or three people and set a deadline. Don’t survey the staff. Just pick one, trademark it, get the URL and move on.

I guess it’s time to come clean. No, we don’t have the URL ‘Velocity.com’. I wish we did. Our legal name is actually Velocity Partners Ltd and we do have velocitypartners.co.uk. Maybe that time limit was a bit too strict…

Names we like

Fair Isaac (a fairy tale character)
Adobe
Apple
Xerox (the last great X name)
Hyperion (fun to yell from the top of a hill)
Ariba (fun to yell at the end of meetings)
Cisco Systems
Peachtree Software

Names we don’t like

Unisys (is it contagious?)
Metastorm (run!)
HandySoft (pass the tissues)
Groovy Gecko (pass the spliff)
UniPlan (shouldn’t you have a backup?)
Egenera (named in the lab)
Avokia (say what?)
ezGov (oxymoron)
Fluke (see ‘Think International’)
Micromuse (tiny little pretty lady)

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 dance’. They understand that people get excited about buying new kit and they don’t want to squander that enthusiasm with hours of frustration. Instead, they turn it into brand evangelism (as exhibited in literally millions of blog posts like this one).

Too many B2B tech products forget about the whole product and just flog the base technology underneath it all. Often, the whole product is there, ready to be marketed, but it’s ignored.

Buyers don’t just want functionality, they want reassurance that it’s going to work.

With it’s tiny market share, Apple has been forced to create the critical parts of the Mac ecosystem itself. This is a massive burden, but turns into an advantage when it comes to delivering whole, integrated products.

Any tech marketer can steal a page from this book. And a bit of the showmanship and flair wouldn’t hurt either (how’s your unveiling dance?).

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 name of the agent that represents any celebrity. Their Web site is www.whorepresents.com

2 . “Experts Exchange” is a knowledge base where programmers can exchange advice and views at www.expertsexchange.com

3. Looking for a pen? Look no further than ” Pen Island” at www.penisland.net

4. Need a therapist? Try “Therapist Finder” at www.therapistfinder.com

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 the stair…”).

I admired their originality and bravery in choosing such a name… until I discovered the company was founded (back in the 50s) by engineer Bill Fair and mathematician Earl Isaac.

Still a great-sounding name. And it beats ‘Bill & Earl’s Software Company’.

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 history of IBM logos.

Good article on Paul Rand.

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 the world suggests *something very unusual*.

See: http://www.graphicsexchange.com.