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!

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!

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.

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.

Whilst blogs are no longer the sexiest subject on the block, the ‘why blog?’ question still rages in B2B - and nowhere more so than here at Velocity.

Like many of our clients, our marketing is not exactly rocket surgery. It involves encouraging a few firms to enter into a rather lengthy (but very interesting) discussion about their brand and their communications (as opposed to experimenting with wacky tactics to convince a zillion consumers to try out our new fizzy drink).

As such, the most effective way for us to engage with more new prospects would probably be to hire another great sales guy and get him out there walking and talking. So why not scratch the marketing efforts and stop with all the blogging?

I’ve already written about reasons to blog this elsewhere. Conclusions have been as follows: its great for your SEO; wonderful for reputation management; a good way to polish sales messages and seed marketing collateral; and a nice way of engaging people in product feedback. All good, compelling stuff. But really these are fringe benefits.

The biggest and best reason to blog in the B2B space is because - if it’s done properly - it’s a relationship winner.

Let me explain…

Stan, Doug and I had lunch on Friday and talked about our first six months as an agency proper and our first few months as an online outfit. What about the blog?

In many ways, it’s a little too random - check out the tag cloud on the blog home page. No real thread. Shouldn’t we be thinking harder about editorialising our subject matter?

For sure, this can only help to make us even more relevant and interesting, but in our discussion we needed to take a step back. Why bother in the first place?

As mentioned, our sales are generated via relationships - and through Stan mainly. Surely a better way for marketing to bolster this effort would be to provide Stan with a brochure, or perhaps divert the time and money into a telesales agency?

Well, whilst both would undoubtably help, we think this approach misses the point.

As a sales guy, what Stan needs is differentiation. There’s plenty of agencies out there vying for our prospect’s attention. And they have a wealth of brochures to throw around.

In addition, they all have equally compelling web sites - stuffed to the brim with pages that describe their services, their people, their portfolio and their history. Ours does this very well too.

They also issue a press release every time something interesting happens to them.

So, we’re dubious that throwing more resource at this kind of thing would really help Stan.

Instead, what matters for us (and 99.9% of our clients) is the relationship that our prospects have with Stan (and our client’s Stans). Once they feel happy with our brand, then people buy from him, not our brochure.

So, investing time and money in differentiating the Velocity relationship seems to us to be a more sensible exercise.

Now, of course, we encourage Stan to wear impressive shirts and wear his hair in nice ways - and of course, he’s also a bit of a looker…. But our blog can really help him too.

Because aside from Stan the man, and a few meetings with Doug and I, where else can a prospect (or a new hire, or an investor) get a feel of who we are? Where can they get a nugget or two that adds value to their relationship with Stan?

Is it in a brochure? Nope - that’s just a hygiene thing. We have to have one of those because everyone else does. (By the way, we do it differently so that it IS memorable and loveable.)

Is it via a super-cool ‘Services’ section on our site? Nope - not entirely. Again, that’s something we’re obliged to do… but do well, and better than the other guys.

No… where we can really shine is in our blog.

This is the channel where we can best communicate our thinking, our experiments, our failures and our successes …ie, describe all of the things that make us the people that you’d like to have a relationship with.

It’s obvious though, right? Where else would you put this kind of stuff? Send a press release? Create a brochure? No way. A blog is your showcase for all the brilliant thinking that’s contained in your people (as opposed to your marketing material).

In other words, a blog is an extension of a Stan - it’s the showcase for your company’s soul when he’s up and left the sales meeting.

That might sound mushy, but its true and it’s very important to your success as a B2B outfit. How else are you going to get prospects to really engage with you other than through your people and their ideas?

So, after lunch had finished we decided that we’re going to devote a lot more focus to this blog in 2008. It’s going to become tighter and it’s going to possess better content on a more regular basis.

As a result, you should expect us to talk about it more and point you to it a lot.

Because it’s the home for Velocity thinking.

It’s what will differentiate us from the rest of the pack.

And we really think you should follow our lead….

Recently we’ve been talking a lot at Velocity about the importance of social media to our client heartland, B2B tech. In tandem, as we build our new company, I’ve been re-visiting old contacts and trying to create new ones as part of the process of finding Velocity-shaped holes. What’s been amazing is how many people still use LinkedIn (once described to me as the site for people not cool enough to be on Facebook…).

A few years ago, as an experiment, I joined LinkedIn because lots of the people we worked with seemed to have. But I stopped receiving invitations about three years ago. Now, suddenly, I’m being deluged by them again.

And as part of that process an old friend, Tony Morris, popped up (we first worked with him at one of our oldest clients, Argogroup). Tony’s a serial entrepreneur, strategy consultant, and private investor working exclusively with technology-based growth companies. Serendipitously while we were all musing on social media, he pointed out Guy Kawasaki’s pretty compelling list of 10 ways to use LinkedIn to increase its value. It’s a good list, but for B2B firms, improving your Google page rank and enhancing your search engine results feel the most important. Over eight-and-a-half million business people use LinkedIn, including people from each of the Fortune 500 (and 499 of them are represented by director-level managers).

That’s a pretty good resource. Albeit one that only works today one-to-one. It’s when you start to think about what B2B firms (as opposed to individuals) should be doing with social media that it starts to get confusing. On the face(book) of it, social media should already be really important: experts everywhere from Seth Godin to Richard Branson tell us that future winning brands will be the ones that can build innovative or novel online relationships with customers. No doubt there are real attractions and benefits in communicating with a prospect group online in ways that competitors haven’t tried yet. Particularly when most B2B buyer segments run to a few thousand companies at most and many are no more than a few hundred (think about companies selling into mobile operators…).

But before we all run off and start building widget utilities that allow clients to relay time sensitive, high value information to business customers via Facebook or iGoogle (see Roger’s recent blog on that), consider how most tech companies communicate with customers today.

Most times I yearn to eat my own spleen rather than read another sentence from the press release announcing a company’s latest piece of highfalutin’ middleware or the product brochure about the sexiest wireless gizmo on the planet. Imagine the impact on a company’s reputation if they were to take this type of deathless prose onto Facebook?

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

Check it out:  the Flickr Tag Browser.  (Bet you can’t stop clicking!)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Play safe: be a Sven Goran Ericsson (again)

Go maverick: be a Juergen Klinsmann

Just win: like Jose Morinho

Let me explain with (another) handy diagram:

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

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

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

So, who you gonna be?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Stickers’

or

‘Utilities’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here it is:

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

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

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

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

So…

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

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

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

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

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

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