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.

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

Keyword Research Tools

Tools to help you understand which SEO/keyword markets to attack…

KGen
A sidebar that scans a web page and gives you a read on its keyword volumes and keyword density. Use it for snooping on competitors. If they’re good at their game, you’ll soon learn why.

Google Adwords Suggest
Type in whatever keywords and/or phrases you’re investigating, hit a button and this tool will tell you how many people have used the same verbage to search Google in an average month, and also how many competitors are out there bidding on the same terms as part of their PPC ad campaigns.

Wordtracker
Like Google Suggest, but provides (independent) data on keywords from a wider variety of search engines. In addition, it gives you a superb competitive index that tells you how many other web pages are optimised for your terms.

Competitive Keyword Tools

Tools to help you understand what your competitors are up to…

Keyword Spy
A very smart widget that shows you which other companies and/or sites are using your keywords for their PPC campaigns.

Keyword Page Comparison Tool
This tool enables you to grab a quick read on the technical composition of a web page by scraping its title, meta description, meta keywords, page copy, and top keyword phrases and presenting it all back to you in one place.

Keyword Density Tool
This is a variant on the Keyword Page comparison tool, but gives you a bit more flexibility to include and exclude certain paratmeters. Great to use to get a rapid view on how well your competitors are thinking about keywords and SEO.

SEO Analysis Tools

Things to help you understand SEO performance…

SEO Quake
A plugin for Firefox that sits as an additional toolbar at the top of your browser window. When you’re on a page, it’ll tell you (immediately) key things like Google PageRank, page index volume, volume of inbound links, volume of external links, and other essential data.

Xinu
A great little service that gives you an instant read on a site’s SEO performance across a wide range of metrics. At the press of a button you’ll see key indicators like social media footprint (how often a site’s been bookmarked), volume of backlinks (and their source), and number of pages indexed in key search engines.

Google Analytics
The daddy of analytics tools. It’s free. So use it!

Opentracker
Much like Google Analytics, but has a cool feature that shows you which companies are browsing your site in real time!

Google Webmaster
Provides lots of great tools to help webmasters understand how often their sites are being indexed by Google and which pages are being accessed.

Blog Research Tools

Things to keep you in the know and amongst the buzz and gossip…

Blogpulse
Kind of like a Google for blogs. Also free. Just type in a search term and it’ll give you back a ream of related (recent) blog posts. You can also do some neat ‘trending’ vs other keywords.

Twitter Search
A Google for Twitter. See who’s talking about you and your keywords.

Online PR Tools

Things to help you spread the word at very little cost…

I’ll make it a list. They basically do the same thing: distribute your press releases around the web at next to no cost.

PitchEngine
FastPitch
ClickPress
Sane PR
PR Log

Got any others? We’d love to know. Just post us a comment….

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

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

Not sure why the word “page” is so prominent… we only use it once in our blog.

Any thoughts?

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….

A great website. Lots of white papers and thought leadership content. Case studies and customer testimonials. Great campaigns and creative. Awards, editorial coverage and analyst attention. They’re all important to every B2B marketer.

But there’s a factor that cuts across all of these and is probably more important than any of them: confidence.

Confidence is the attitude of leaders and winners. Great marketing always has plenty of it and the vast majority of mediocre marketing has little or none.

Used recklessly, confidence turns to arrogance and alienates your audience. But used well, confidence works wonders for any piece of marketing communications you apply it to:

• It gets noticed – jumping out from the background noise.

• It demonstrates your leadership instead of just claiming it.

• It differentiates you from your lacklustre competitors.

• It exposes your passion and your belief in what you do.

• It says you’re having fun – people like that.

• It is fun – turning marketing from a chore into a sport.

• It motivates the company – making people proud to work there.

Confidence really is the secret weapon of B2B marketing (for B2C, it’s not a secret). Even companies locked in commodity markets can leap out of the pack with a little attitude and energy.

As an agency, our best work is our most confident work. It happens when we dare to present something to a client that we know is likely to be rejected. It happens when a client recognises that the option that makes them sweat is probably the one to choose.

Confidence has to come from something real or it transmits false bravado. It has to be rooted in conviction. When we do our consulting process for new clients, we’re always looking for the pockets of passion inside the company. The people having the most fun. The people who believe in what they’re doing and aren’t afraid to tell people why it’s great.

We call these the ‘crown jewels’ of any company and our work is all about discovering them and pushing them to the front of the story… with oodles of confidence.

I’ve been doing a stack of content optimisation for client web sites lately, so I thought I’d share some of my ‘how to’ notes with the interweb.

As I do this stuff I’m usually working side by side with a marketing manager/director/etc in order to make decisions about SEO strategies, and how to best plan for the future. Content can be a messy business at times, particularly if there are more than a couple of people producing it for a site… anarchy often rules in the shape of strange formating and styling and irregular usage of language.

So I find it helps to give people some guidelines to keep them on the straight and narrow. And in doing so, it’s usually best to strip out the blather and get them focused on just the handful of things they *have* to remember when creating a new web page (so that they can continue to build on a good SEO foundation without our help!)

So, here goes…. notes from my content optimisation scrap book:

Technical Page Content Tips

Here at Velocity, we always use a CMS for our client sites. We choose these apps carefully, and always ensure that they let us do some essential SEO-related things from a technical and functional page perspective… Because, for good SEO, there are a bunch of things you really have to do at a technical page level:

* Edit each of your page titles independently. Your page title is the thing that will be printed at the top of a browser window (in the centre of the grey horizontal bar, next to your minimise/maximise buttons). You should try and make this title brief - around 70 characters or so, relevant to the page and peppered with a few important keywords or phrases. This is because, like us humans, crawlers tend to use ‘titles’ as a good indication of what the page is about. (NB: don’t go crazy on the keywords! The page title MUST be readable and easy on the eye to humankind as well!)

* Edit each page’s metadata descriptions. This is the stuff that Google uses to describe you when it displays its results (ie, it gets used as the blurb that sits underneath the page title link in Google’s listing for you). As such, this field should describe the page, include a few keywords, and also *a call to action* like ‘read more’, or ‘find out more’ or ‘get your free offer here…’ etc. (Think about it - this globbet of content is really, really important - this is your ’sales pitch’ on a Google results page…. so a call to action is a good thing to draw people into the click.) This text should be around 160 characters or less. Anything more will get cut off at the knees.

* Edit each page’s metadata keywords/tags. Whilst this used to be important, it’s not any more…. but you ought to do it as a matter of good practice. Here you should list all your relevant key phrases, separated by a comma. This could be a big list, or it could be small…. whatever you think appropriate. You should note however, that this metadata field isn’t really used by search engines as a measure of importance or relevancy any more. It does, however, give them a clue about who you are and what you’re about.

* Use keywords in your navigation schemes wherever possible. Also use them (sensibly) in important on-page functional items like buttons, pull quotes, maps, and other such eye candy.

On-Page Content Tips

So much for the functional and technical stuff. What about the writing? Here’s my ultra-condensed guide to producing good, SEO-friendly page content….

* Make your content chunky - use header tags to split it into bite-sized paragraphs that are easy for crawlers and humans alike to read and understand. (ie, header, para, space; header, para, space, etc.)

* Use keywords in them there headers wherever possible, and wherever it adds value to the process of scanning or skimming the page.

* Create as many internal links in the page as possible, whilst still retaining a (human) reader’s focus. Use keywords in the descriptive link anchor text (if you’re using a half decent CMS, then you ought to get prompted for this). This anchor text is basically a descriptive label. It tells a crawler what your link is about. Hence, if you’re in the business of CRM systems, then your internal link from your home page to your products page ought to include an anchor text that goes something like this: ‘XYZ Corp’s CRM Software helps mere mortals sell ice to eskimos.’ In other words, use a bunch of sensible internal links to help a crawler find its way around your site and learn about what you do in the process.

* Create as many external links as possible. Use the same approach to anchor text as described above. Whilst internal links are important to help a crawler scoot around your site, external links will help them understand what kind of other web sites you associate yourself with. So, if you’re in the business of selling small handheld computing devices, make sure you link out to popular media sites that cover this topic and also other vendor sites that compliment you (and even compete with you). The more popular these sites the better - your goal is the bask in their sunlight.

* If you’re blogging, or using a CMS that uses blog-style principles (and of your front end design houses them) then use categories and tags for your posts/pages wherever possible, and try to infuse some keywords in there whenever you can. As per the points above, these navigational elements help crawlers to understand how to navigate your site and understand who you are in equal measure…. just like they help us humans.

* Put your most important content at the top of the page. By important I mean the stuff that’s full of useful keywords, headings, and links. Save the waffle for later in the page. (Like us, crawlers get bored easily.)

* Think of your page as a hierarchy of content. In fact, think like a robot in a hurry. Big, important words go at the top in big important heading styles. Weave linkage into this important stuff wherever you can, and try to ensure that this linkage reinforces the big keywords in its anchor text. In other words, keywords get kind of scored in order of descending importance, depending on where they feature in your content: from page titles down through primary navigation, headers, body text links, bold text and boring old plain text.

All you really need to remember….

In sum, all of the above illustrates that crawlers basically read the way that we humans do – they scan the page and pick out key elements to get a sense of meaning. As such, good SEO content is good to read…. and to write be able to write it is to have a good level of empathy with readers and crawlers alike.

If you’d like to know more about a bit of the science, check out our best practice SEO white paper ‘How to be a Google Guru in 30 Minutes’….

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.

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

Other highlights include new papers on how to make your web site ultra-usable and how to make your PPC campaigns sing. Plus a roundup of our latest blogs and information on a hot new web marketing service we’re offering called ‘web motion.’

Go get it now!

We’ve been working on a number of ‘web engagement’ programs lately, where we’ve been helping clients to increase their web ‘footprint’ in order to improve their general SEO and awareness levels.

Now I’ve blogged and blabbed about this before, so I won’t go into the thinking - but if you’d like to get a sense of why social media and web engagement is so important then check out some recent posts such as ‘Your First (Free) Baby Steps in B2B Web Marketing,’ ‘Pico Branding‘ and our ‘web marketing trends for 2008‘.

This post, however, is all about the mechanics and how to do it.

In truth, it’s not hard. All you need is the following:

1. A dedication to publishing a regular stream of gold top content to your site (note: it needs to be good and valuable to the folks you’ll reach out to in #2)
2. A variety of web outlets in which to cost-effectively publish this stuff (note: per above, the idea here is not to abuse these places but to selectively publish your best stuff on them ….think sensibly about this as many of them are happy to ban content ’spammers’)

For help with #1, call us.

For #2, the mind map below gives you everything you need to do web / social media engagement by yourself. It’s easy. Just pin it on your wall and - once you’ve published a great piece of content to your site - follow the map clockwise and post it to the relevant destinations.

Let us know your thoughts (and results).

Note: your key to success here is to BE SOCIAL. Don’t just use these ‘outlets’ as a window for your own content. When you see other pages that you like, Stumbleupon/Digg/Reddit them - because this is their inherent value ….they exist to raise awareness of good, valuable web content. So, consider it your duty to promote everything that you really like, and not just the stuff you grow at home.

Here’s an experment for you to try.

Open your web stats app and check out which pieces of content are your top performers over the past month. (By top performers, I mean on key ‘attention measurements’ such as time on page - these are the things that tell you if people are really interested and engaged.)

What comes out top?

If you have a blog, or if you’re in the habit of publishing white papers or opinion pieces then my money’s on them. Am I right?

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

More to the point, having done detailed analyses of a mass of B2B technology web sites, I can tell you that this rule holds firm for our entire industry, without exception (and, I’d hazard a guess, it does so in any information-hungry B2B market).

To give you a feel for it, here’s our top content stats for the year to date… (Note: we measure our content performance by establishing an ‘Attention Index’ - average time on page x number of page views…. and we only include those pages that have held people’s attention for more than two minutes.)

(Click to open!)

You’ll see that the most engaging pages are a bunch of white papers and blog posts.

Putting the blog aside for a moment, this is interesting because unlike most of the B2B technology industry, we make a point of giving our most interesting content away for free. Most firms take a strategic decision to lock prime content such as white papers away below a subscription line, and often within secure ‘walled gardens’ that render it almost completely inaccessible to all but the most motivated of site visitors.

The consequences are obvious. If you lock your most valuable, compelling content away beneath a subscription line, then you’re missing a proven opportunity to help your prospects select you.

The rationale for ‘content locking’ is straight forward. You hold out the promise of access to an interesting piece of content in exchange for a visitor’s personal information - usually a name and an email address. This is the concept on which ‘web-to-lead’ forms are built to support the growth of CRM ‘lead’ databases.

I think this approach is fundamentally flawed, and also detrimental to driving quality sales leads.

Why? Because if you lock your content below a subscription line, it’s not just sales prospects that you’re hiding from: you’re also hiding from Google.

Put simply, if your content is sat behind a firewall, then Google’s spiders can’t reach it. This means a big loss of SEO traction, since your ‘thought leader’ content is likely to be your most valuable in SEO terms - it’s going to be stuffed with all the key phrases and concepts that you want search engines to associate your site with. Also, if it’s sat beneath the subscription line then you’re discouraging other sites from linking to it - which is illogical from an SEO point of view (good SEO practice means helping sites to link to you).

Furthermore, what of the people that you lose along the way? To me, a commitment to form-filling is no great measurement of the quality of a sales lead. A far better tactic is to set your thought leadership content free and give people more ‘opportunities to engage‘ with who you are and what you stand for. In this way (and this is the flip side of ‘web-to-lead’ thinking) you give yourself more opportunities to convince the skeptics - the people who until this point believe in your competitors not you, or those who have chanced upon your site during some desk research. Let’s face it, most of us are commitment-phobes when it comes to the web anyway. Why not just accept this fact and move on?

Instead, we ought to be finding better, more intelligent and subtle ways of establishing leads. There are better deals to offer our prospects than ‘give me your names and I’ll give you some content’…. deals that don’t carry an SEO penalty. We can divide our content in different ways, and base a ‘lead generating’ offer on a really big ticket content item, after we’ve provided people with the opportunity to see all our other great stuff. For example, an offer for a piece of industry research can be embedded in a free white paper. Isn’t this a better place to pop the question? Wouldn’t the quality of resulting leads be better?

Whatever - my point is that a bog standard web-to-lead form slapped on as a firewall to the content that people (and Google) really care about is clumsy and negligent.

Here’s some questions to ask yourself:

• What’s your most valuable and engaging content?
• Do you make you accessible enough?
• What’s the upside of providing more opportunities to engage with it?
• What’s the downside of removing a subscription line?
• How scientific is your answer to the previous question? (Gut feeling, conventional wisdom, or based on small side-show experiment and validated by stats?)

I’d encourage you to play around with these thoughts and, if you’re not a fully paid up member of the free content brigade, to tweak the presentation of some of your content and see what it gives you…

OK, Listen Up

Your web site is not your field of dreams. Build it and most likely they will not come.

Nope, once it’s built your goal is to make it work as a sales sweat house – and this takes real effort and a bunch of web marketing smarts.

Your first order of business is to attract engaged and interested traffic to your site… with the ultimate goal of turning these people into qualified leads.

In order to do this effectively (and to filter out the tyre-kickers) you need to pull out your Web Marketing 101 Kit Bag. We’re talking SEO, social media, online PR and blogging.

Sound OK?

Don’t worry. It’s simple (and largely free to do). The key rule is ‘give to get’: you’ve just created a category-killing web site with a beautifully designed and executed value proposition…. now all you need to do is work hard to engage with the right kind of people and bring them to your door.

The idea is to increase your web ‘reach’ and improve your performance in search engines (ie, your SEO) so that you can engage with and drive high-value, motivated traffic to your web site.

Here are the techniques you need…

Step 1: Content Generation

Step 2: Backlinking

Step 3: ‘Rest of the Web’ engagement (via Social Media, Online PR and blogging)

And here’s how you can do it….

1) Content Generation

Put simply, you need to generate some content bait. Quality content is what will ultimately drive traffic to your site. You need to be publishing good content- and keyword-rich articles, papers, podcasts, and video regularly to your site. This will encourage those search spiders to return more often and, over time, it will give you a compelling body of work that you can publish off-site with the aim of steering people away from other web destinations and onto your site.

2) Backlinking

The links that are made back to your site are the number one influencing factor in Google’s PageRank algorithm. And the higher quality they are, they more influential they will be in boosting your ranking (for a full explanation of what ‘quality’ means in this respect, see our paper on SEO). To this end, you need to encourage as many of them as possible. How? By submitting your site to relevant, quality listings directories (such as the technology section in Yahoo’s business pages), creating reciprocal links with important partner sites and getting hip to…

3) ‘Rest of the Web’ enagagement via Social Media, Online PR and blogging

Here’s where you put that battery of superior content to use. You should be out there creating a variety of social media application profiles - YouTube, Squidoo, Flickr, Slideshare, etc - so that each time you create a new piece of content you can publish it on them, along with a healthy dose of linkage back to your site. Elsewhere we’ve described this effort as ‘Pico Branding’ - using top-flight content to engage with audiences elsewhere on the web with the intention of inviting everyone back to your place. It’s a fantastic way of driving interested traffic.

In addition, you should be taking a leaf out of the new book of PR and publishing all of your newsworthy content via online news distribution hubs. This is another means of backlinking - the hubs will take your content and distribute it far and wide across the web to ‘newsy’ destinations like Google and Yahoo News and others. Note - the aim here is not to convince a human being to write up your news story, but to have a web site somewhere deep in the interweb publish it, along with a link or two back to your key web pages.

Last but not least, you should start blogging your market-related ideas every time you hit on something of interest. Why? Well, we’ve already written on what we feel the value of blogging to be in B2B, but in short, blogging can be:

• Another reason for Google to pay you frequent visits
• A direct continuation of your sales discussions
• The place where your prospects head to to get a handle on the real people behind the product/service
• A great way of engaging with the fabric of the web and generating high quality backlinks

A word about measurement

Aside from all this content generation and ‘engagement’ activity, we’d also recommend that you measure what you do on a regular (monthly?) basis. Otherwise it’ll be hard to track the effectiveness of what you’re doing, and hard to convince other important people (like bosses!) that you ought to be dedicating more resources to the work.

Using a stats package like Google Analytics (which is free!), here’s a few simple yardsticks you can use to validate your work…

• Average page views per month
• Average time on site
• Average bounce rates
• Average number and cost of acquisitions per month (sign ups to newsletters, white papers, etc)

If you follow the above advice, I can guarantee you’ll soon have people beating a path to your door.

Alternatively, contact us and we can help you on your way!

I just returned from a great week away in the Inner Hebrides - the small cluster of islands to the west of Glasgow. The single malts were stunning, the weather bracing and the walks heartening. I’m missing it already.

None of this, of course, has anything to do with B2B lead generation, but I did have one holiday experience that made me realise how wide of the mark we are when it comes to using ‘web-to-lead-forms.’

Convention has it that you build up an arsenal of banner content - white papers, research reports, etc - and then hide them away unless visitors supply you with their names, email addresses and inside leg measurements.

But how does this play out in practice? I think I have an answer for you by way of a rambling analogy…

At the end of my stay, on the way back to Glasgow airport, my rental car wobbled to a halt alongside the mighty Castle Minard on the A83. A callout to the RAC breakdown service was in order.

Castle Minard is a stunning place on the banks of Loch Fyne, half a mile off the main road at the end of a dirt track. It’s a hotel. A three star establishment, apparently - a bit rusty and crumbling around the edges. If you weren’t looking for it, or if you hadn’t broken down in the area, then you’d probably miss it.

Anyway, I parked up. The castle lights were off, so I knocked. No answer. I made my call to the RAC and sat down to admire the view. 45 minutes later (and bang on estimate), a big orange and white van trundled into view. ‘Och-Aye’ said Steve the mechanic.

‘Och-Aye indeed!’ bellowed a voice from nowhere.

Like a troll, the castle’s owner had pounced upon us from his impressive lair. A mutated cross between The Simpsons’ Mr Burns and a miniature Bobby Charlton, he hit us with the following barrage:

WHO ARE YOU?
WHAT’S YOUR NAME?
THIS IS PRIVATE PROPERTY!
YOU NEED MY PERMISSION TO BE HERE!
WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE UP TO?
…ETC, ETC

Golly - I jumped!

Composure regained, I reassured him that we meant no harm, we came in peace and that we were really quite happy (and lucky) to have broken down in such magnificent surroundings.

Privately, however, I’d decided that I really, really hated him. I was a long way from home in the middle of nowhere, I had a baby on the back seat wailing, a wife with a busted arm (seriously) and a car that patently didn’t work. I was really in need of some help.

At the same time, the accusation of trespassing seemed ludicrous against the backdrop of a once magnificent, but now empty and crumbling hotel. What was with this guy? As the proprietor, shouldn’t he be welcoming us?!

At this point, he turned and made a dash for the door. Steve the mechanic and I were expecting a musket in our noses. Instead, he reappeared brandishing business cards and a reassurance that “we have great guests rooms” and that “you can look us up on the web!”

We decided not to stick around. We fixed the car at the top of the track and shared a joke between us. This man was a sham, worse than Basil Fawlty. He seemed to revel in our twisted little exchange. But it all seemed so misguided and back to front. A grilling to greet us and a business card to say goodbye? No wonder his place was empty! My wife and I (and Steve) vowed never, ever to return.

Which, by the way, is what the majority of your web site users do when they’re presented with a web-to-lead form.

Think about it…. When you squirrel your content away and ask people to give you their email address before you’ve even said hello, you’re behaving exactly like Mr Burns. Is this any way to treat a valued prospect?

Here’s the context… I’ve worked so hard to find you: I have a problem to address; I Googled for ‘widgets’; I searched you out amongst a thicket of competitive pages; I see you might just have a white paper that interests me. Great! But then….

WHO ARE YOU?
WHAT’S YOUR NAME?
THIS IS PRIVATE PROPERTY!
YOU NEED MY PERMISSION TO BE HERE!
…ETC, ETC

Well sorry. Screw you! My life’s too short and I’m off to check out another site instead. Shouldn’t you be welcoming me on to your site? Isn’t life hard enough selling widgets without giving me the third degree?

It’s kind of insane really. Unless you’re giving a stack of cash away for free, then you’re making the following fatal assumptions with your jazzy ‘web-to-lead’ form:

• I need your stuff more than you need me
• I can’t find similar (or as good) stuff for free elsewhere

Which isn’t going to be true in most cases. So, why do it in the first place?

Here’s some questions to ask yourself…

• When was the last time a web to lead form clinched a sale?
• When was the last time a web to lead form ‘tipped’ a prospect into a customer?
• Can you afford for me to consider - even for a microsecond - that life would be easier (and more hospitable) on some other site?
• Is ‘WHO ARE YOU?’ really an appropriate question to ask me at this early stage of our relationship?
• If you were running a hotel, would you treat me in the same way?

Where content giveaways are concerned, please just ditch your web to lead forms right now - or those valued guests-to-be may decide to never, ever return.

Next up: “The value of free content: why giving it all away is good for your prospects and great for Google…”

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.

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!).

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.

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.

We’ve been experimenting with ‘guerrilla video’ as a promotional tactic for our clients and thought we should taste our own medicine. So here’s a short video case story about a project we did for IntelliQ, an analytics company. See what you think…

The video was made in iMovie, the free consumer app that bundles with any Mac. We just used still images, screen grabs and two tiny, free video clips (see if you can spot them).

It’s rough & ready but it tells a story quickly with some energy. Now we’re looking at this kind of thing for clients — for web streaming, exhibition stands and presentations. Fancy getting into the movie biz?

If you’re marketing fabric softener, beer or perfume, you’re in the business of manipulation. You win if you make someone feel a certain way. If you’re marketing security software or network infrastructure equipment, you’re in the business of persuasion. You win if you manage to convince someone to try a better way… (more…)

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

You built v2 or v3 of your site last year. You have a bunch of corporate content (about us, products, services, etc). You have some interesting content assets - white papers, case studies, etc. You have a CMS to publish stuff. But this year you really want your site to work harder – to generate leads and help speed up purchasing decisions.

To do this your site needs to become more than a calling card or brochure. You need to make it an ancillary sales person that works for you once your sales meetings are over.

(Note: this is a philosophy to be adopted. No cost.)

Here’s what you need to do:

1) Invest (heavily) in banner content

Support the sales process by becoming CONTENT RICH. This means more than just white papers. Think webinars, video, blogs, online PR, screencasting, product demos. Tell compelling stories via your site that address specific product / service / customer issues via digital media. Captivate people’s attention through moving images and audio. Words are great, but not enough.

(Note: Treat these things as ’sunk’ costs to support specific products/services or campaigns.)

2) Make your site more available to your audience

Become super RELEVANT and TARGETED. Invest (heavily) in search engine optimisation (SEO). Find out how people want to engage with you via Google and rethink your marketing messages accordingly. Use sophisticated tools to do this investigative work.

Embed this new thinking via great implementation of keywords in your web site. This is a messaging exercise (embed keywords in descriptions of who you are and what you do) and a technical exercise (embed keywords correctly at the code level). It’s also a design exercise: you need to tweak your site structure to ensure that landing pages and navigation paths are logical and get people to the content they need, fast.

Then, engage with proactively with search engines and influence the way that they index you so that the next time someone types in ‘widget for SAP optimization’ into Google you have a fighting chance of showing up on the first page of results.

(Note: this is both a philosophy to be adopted (you need to change the way you describe and present your stuff, guided by user searching trends), and a strategic investment. Not especially cheap.)

3) Once you’re content rich, relevant and targeted, you need to engage with the world

You need to become CACHE RICH.

Note: this is a new philosophy. You have a great web site, stuffed with great content in highly targeted areas and improved visibility on Google. But you can’t stop there: the ‘build it and they will come’ approach no longer works on the web.

Firstly, stop thinking of your web site as your only online destination - it’s just the ultimate one.

To engage with new prospects you have to cache your online presence across the web… by following the right crowds, capturing their attention with timely deposits of relevant content and inviting them back to your place.

How?

1. Cache the news sites via Online PR: distribute targeted, keyword-specific press releases announcing company news or the availability of your new content offers via online news hubs. Your goal is to generate automated web pages that point back to strategic points within your site, in order to boost interested traffic and SEO.
2. Cache the content networks via Pay per Click advertising: the Haiku of marketing - tightly focused, personalised and relevant ads that contain offers related to your banner content. Again, the goal is to drive interested, prospective customers, and to ask them to engage with you in some way - sign up for more content, register for an event, etc.
3. Cache your prospect’s inboxes via (permission-based) e-Mail marketing: a series of newsletters or ‘blasts’ that draw your database of contacts towards your content assets and into new sales conversations.
4. Cache the Blogsphere: using words, video and audio to showcase your thinking, your product developments and all of your news via your own blog. Your goal is to engage with key influencer communities and to position yourself within important industry level debates as a thought leader. This will drive new, interested parties to your site and into the sales funnel. At the same time, comment on other people’s blogs and drive their readership to yours.
5. Cache your key content destinations via Affiliate and Display Advertising: use traditional methods to reach new audiences in niche, cost-effective areas - eg, newsletter sponsorship, blog advertising, etc. Again, your goal is to drive engaged traffic and new leads towards your content jewels.
6. Cache your influencer networks via Social Media: engage with prospects via your LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, de.icio.us, by posting valuable content, links, alerts, opinions, etc, that lead back to your site and your (related) content assets. (Note: this needs to be handled smartly - poor content and poor engagement strategies will benefit nobody.) Your goal here is to seed compelling content and ideas into active networks where your audiences already exist, and to encourage them to pass it on.

4) Once you’re executing and engaged, you really need to measure

This is critical - you need to treat your SEO and engagement activity as a perpetual beta program. Experiment quickly and at reasonable cost, see what works, back the winners and ditch the rest. You need to establish one key metric across all your activity - cost per acquisition (of leads).

How? By using tools like Google Analytics, Technorati and other keyword and SEO measurement apps to generate regular reports that provide a clear indication of how your engagement campaigns and web sites are performing (minimum quarterly, recommended monthly).

…and that’s it.

They’ve already bought something from you. You’ve already jumped nine of the ten hurdles on the way to a sale (or however many there are these days). Wouldn’t it make sense to turn these internal ‘champions’ into a stealth sales force? It always surprises us how few marketing departments really take their existing customers seriously as a source of new business. Maybe they think it’s all in the hands of the sales department… (more…)

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.

As a technology vendor, you’ve got two major assets that your customers and prospects value highly. Y