Once again, ShipServ has ‘scooped’ a marketing award (why are awards always scooped?) — this time the 2009 CRM Market Awards run by CRM Magazine.  ShipServ, piloted by CMO John Watton, won a CRM Elite Award given to customer implementations that push new boundaries.

The judges recognised ShipServ “for its holistic use of Marketo, Salesforce.com, and social media” — including viral video, eBooks, Twitter and a LinkedIn group (we’re kind of proud of our work on all these).

We don’t know of any other B2B marketer who uses the Marketo/Salesforce integration so effectively. Add in the content marketing and social media aspect and ShipServ does pretty amazing things on very little budget.  This is how B2B marketing should work. It maximises the power of digital marketing to create a real marketing funnel that nurtures and scores leads before turning them over to the sales team.

The result is a completely different relationship between marketing and sales. Instead of mutual recrimination, the two teams at ShipServ work closely together to drive revenues.  And it’s working.  Well scooped, John.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, B2B social media, B2B technology marketing, Content Marketing, Demand Generation, digital marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, LinkedIn, technology marketing agency, Thought Leadership, Web Marketing

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The eBook is available to download now from the Velocity website: www.velocitypartners.co.uk.

“In the era of information overload, Content Marketing is probably the single most important thing a B2B marketer can do,” says Stan Woods, Velocity MD, ” You can have lousy brochures. You can be a social media luddite. But if you get content marketing right, the world will beat a path to your door — and your sales guys will throw rose petals in your path (it’s embarrassing but feels kind of nice, too.).”

The Content Marketing Workbook covers topics like these:

• What Content Marketing and Thought Leadership are
• Why you need to get good at them (and fast)
• Why you’re perfectly placed to do it really, really well
• How to pick a topic prospects care about
• How to go beyond the dry, stale white paper
• What we think ‘good’ looks like — lots of examples

It’s free, it’s fun and it’s as fresh as new-baked bread plucked from a hot oven.

“This is the single best overview I’ve yet seen on strategic B2B content marketing”, says David Fideler, B2B marketing strategist and founder of the B2B Lead Nurturing group on Linked In, ” I can’t imagine anyone being disappointed by the ideas and value delivered.”

Download the B2B Content Marketing Workbook here.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B agency, B2B content marketing, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency, B2B social media, Content, Content Marketing, Copywriting, Lead Generation, Online PR, technology marketing agency, Thought Leadership, Web Marketing

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But the excitement is tempered with dread of the same old arguments.

Major web projects have huge internal visibility.  Good web tools deliver bonuses and people, unsurprisingly, demand them but, more surprisingly, want to help build them.

It’s bizarre.  We don’t feel qualified to build cars just because we drive them.  We rely on Ferrari to do fast, reliable and beautiful cars.

Opinions can cause havoc with project scope, timescales and budgets.  That’s why the Top Ten Mistakes of Web Management, despite being over a decade old, remains relevant.  Readers can learn why strong project management is as important to web usability as cutting-edge design.

Two of the ten points stand out.

Never design for your executives.  Internally-focused sites brim with mission statements, photos of the CEO, and corporate history.  You are not the centre of your customers’ universe.  Top executives grow to love a customer-focused site because it delivers.

Never design for your org chart.  Users should not be able to deduce your organisational structure from your website.  Build sites according to tasks users want to perform on your site.  Nothing else matters.

B2B marketing agencies work best with clients who bring a strong, autonomous project management structure with tunnel vision on their users.

That’s why we loved building Psion Teklogix’s new site.  Todd, Marcos, Maria and Roman channelled every ounce of our energy into research, mapping, design and testing based only on user personas.

If you want to know how to get the best from your agency you could do worse than talk to them.  They did such a good job of shielding us, we still don’t know how they did it.  But we know they did.

© neilstoneman for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B agency, B2B consulting, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency, B2B marketing communications, B2B marketing strategies, B2B sales, B2B web marketing agency, Content Marketing, Corporate Positioning, digital communications, Online PR, technology marketing agency

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The principles of good B2B marketing apply in clean tech too, but there are some other things to think about on top.  Including one idea we call ‘Parapet Risk’ — the added risk you take when you stick your head above the parapet and say, “We’re green!”.

As Anita Roddick found out, companies that claim to be green are subject to much more scrutiny than those who never even make an effort.  The Body Shop got more abuse on green issues than WalMart.

Hope you like the slides.  Let us know what you think.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency, B2B social media, Clean tech, Digital Markeitng, Green tech, technology marketing agency

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This recession is no different.  The financial industry’s plunge was abrupt and violent.   The rest of us are still spinning in the vortex of change.

So what’s out?  Relativism.  Soft opinions. Subjectivity.  Emotion.  Man is no longer the measure of all things.

And what’s in?  Absolutism.  Hard facts.  Objectivity.  Statistics.  Marketing is the measure of all things.

New order marketing firms need to put a data fist into their creative gloves.  Here’s our verdict on how the contenders are shaping up.

WPP and Omniture
WPP is a vast empire.  An empire under threat.

Its tie up with Omniture acknowledges demand for “analysis, measurability and focus on return on investment.”  It’s a positive admission of an historical failure to turn data into action: a failure that can no longer be tolerated.

Verdict: The Empire Strikes Back

Salesforce.com’ unleashes Service Cloud
Salesforce.com made a fortune in sales force automation.  It wants to make another one by turning loose web data into structured actionable information.

Service Cloud allows clients to “enable businesses to join the conversation” on search engines, social networks and web forums.  Firms gather loose product feedback, structure it, and  plan intelligent service responses direct to customers.

Verdict: Empire Building

Facebook and Polls
Facebook sits on a data goldmine.  It knows it.  You know it.  Users knows it.  But can it unlock the cash without fomenting a mass user exodus?

The company needs to find a way, as the Guardian puts it, “to tap the value of all the rich user data that the site gathers”.  The poll idea is interesting, but it doesn’t sound like the latent actionable information that will open well-guarded corporate vaults.  And as for the latest volte-face on personal data…

Verdict: Emperor’s New Clothes

A shift from qualitative to quantitative assessment is here.  It’s no bad thing.  If half our marketing doesn’t work, then let’s stop doing it.

Author Paul Brodeur once said “statistics are human beings with the tears wiped off.”   We need to be tougher now.

© neilstoneman for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B agency, B2B consulting, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency, B2B marketing communications, B2B marketing strategies, B2B sales, B2B web marketing agency, Content Marketing, Corporate Positioning, digital communications, Online PR, technology marketing agency

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Okay, okay.  It’s fair to say that Reagan didn’t threaten Thomas Jefferson’s legacy as the sharpest tool in the White House box.  Fans of the political satirical show Spitting Image will recall the enduring image of Reagan as a rambling oaf with, literally, no brain.

But part of his legacy has been overlooked.  Reagan was, in fact, a pathfinder for the digital age.

Sure, he was heavily criticised, called stupid — even dangerous — but vilification is a visionary’s burden.  He suffered because he adopted a multi-media approach to life and learning way ahead of his time.

Many believe the late Sir Charles Wheeler’s withering criticism of Reagan’s dislike of reading and preference for video briefings created the dimwitted public persona.

If Wheeler was right, we’re in trouble.  The fact is we’re all falling out of love with the printed word.  The latest US statistics reveal TV and the Internet have displaced newspapers as the news sources of choice.

The people want short, sharp text and, increasingly, video and audio.  We’re all following in Reagan’s time-strapped footsteps.

The journalist Nicholas Carr captured the Zeitgeist in Atlantic magazine: “Immersing myself in a book used to be easy…That’s rarely the case anymore.  Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages.  I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do.”

The lesson for B2B marketing departments is to stop worrying about “dumbing down”.  If Jefferson sat down to write the Declaration of Independence today, you just know he’d take a multi-media approach.

You don’t avoid looking stupid by producing 18th century content for 21st century audiences.  Think like Ronald Reagan and you’ll get the message across.

© neilstoneman for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B, B2B marketing, B2B marketing departments, Content Marketing, dumbing down, Marketing, multi-media communication, Nicholas Carr, Ronald Reagan, Sir Charles Wheeler, Spitting Image, Technology Marketing, technology marketing agency, Thought Leadership

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Emusic doesn’t really have standard stuff, offering out-of-the-mainstream tunes from 11.000 or so independent labels, rather than the big four music companies, Universal, Warner Music, EMI and SonyBMG.

Because of that, you have to rely on the recommendations of the community – the other subscribers and the site’s crack team of journalists and commentators – to discover new bands and new music. And the result is an incredible social media site with astonishing liquidity and richness that has helped me discover a range of amazing people that I’d never heard of.

The site has also made some design changes in the last few weeks which have really improved what was already a fabulous site. As you can see from the screen grab, I get recommendations based on previous choices on my home page, links to content emusic thinks I would like (they’re nearly always right), as well as some general editorial and chart-related stuff .

The appeal of emusic has made me think about whether there are any lessons for B2B companies planning to exploit social media. Emusic is an Aladdin’s Cave of comment about all types and genres of music, and the company running the site has designed it to facilitate that. Ultimately it means they get more subscribers who buy more music. There are lots of B2B firms that would love such a passionate community.

Emusic is testament to the truth  that members of a real community self-identify their issues and interests, rather than responding to the organizers’ opinions or strictures. Users are free to provide the content that makes this social network sing. And that attracts more people to the community. And that, in turn, attracts even more people.

Building a site like this requires a different mindset, one that starts with the users’ goals not the site’s. Rather than ‘build it and they will come’, it’s all about listening closely to what the community wants and then providing it. While to succeed, B2B sites don’t need the millions of members that emusic does  – a few hundred of the right sort will do – this example shows that there’s just no point in trying to set the agenda for a community. It has to do it for itself. All you have to do is provide the place and an initial reason for coming. After that, if you get it right, group momentum takes over.

PS My top five discoveries on emusic in the last three years: Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings (sweaty NY noughties funk that amazingly sounds even better than the giants of the 60s); Quantic (salsa, bossa nova, plus soul and 49 other genres mixed into the freshest-tasting electronic soup); Thievery Corporation (acid jazz melded with rancid Indian grooves); Whitefield Brothers aka The Poets of Rhythm (heavy German (that’s right, German) afrofunk that blows your lederhosen out of the room); Orchestra Baobab (unbelievably lissom and deadly music from Senegal).

© stan@velocitypartners.co.uk for Velocity Partners, 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B agency, B2B marketing, BB Marketing agency, best software marketing, competitive advantage marketing, Content Optimisation, Content Optimization, hardware marketing, information technology marketing, marketing agency software, marketing positioning, marketing selling, Online PR, relationship marketing strategy, sales promotion marketing, software product marketing, technology communication, technology marketing agencies, technology marketing agency, technology marketing services

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