B1BLOG

We’re really excited about an upcom­ing event we’re co-hosting with a bunch of like-minded part­ners. On Novem­ber 4^th we’re launch­ing the European Demand Gen­er­a­tion Sum­mit in part­ner­ship with Google, Elo­qua, Bright­TALK and Mar­ketOne. It’s going to be held in Lon­don at Alti­tude, which is on the very top floor of Mill­bank tower with views across Lon­don. Speak­ers include Amanda Job­bins, Omniture’s Neil Mor­gan, Jeremy Bevan from Nov­ell and Justin Gale, a senior online mar­keter from HP.

So why are we doing this? Well we’re really see­ing a major change in the way demand gen­er­a­tion is mov­ing. More import­antly, the way in which pro­spects and cus­tom­ers are respond­ing to cam­paigns. The frag­ment­a­tion of media chan­nels, increas­ing cyn­icism and res­ist­ance to push ‘mar­ket­ing’, coupled with empowered cus­tom­ers who search for whatever they need and would sooner be talk­ing to each other than vendors. OK, so this doesn’t neces­sar­ily make us mar­ket­ing vis­ion­ar­ies, but at a time when everyone’s begin­ning to feel the pinch (or wait­ing to feel it) — it makes it more of a press­ing issue than it has been for the last year. Best start plan­ning sooner rather than later.

We figured it would be a good start to gather together some experts from across the industry. Not just our fel­low hosts, but some of our cus­tom­ers and their peers who are actu­ally tack­ling some of the chal­lenges we’re all facing… How to develop con­tent that people want to engage with and map it to the buy­ing cycle; how to tar­get timely, rel­ev­ant com­mu­nic­a­tions to someone whose name you don’t neces­sar­ily know; how to har­ness emer­ging and social media; and how to turn cus­tom­ers into advoc­ates, either online or face-to-face. Then of course there’s the small mat­ter of meas­ur­ing return on all these mar­ket­ing investments.

Over the next couple of weeks in the run-up to the event I’ll be pick­ing up some of these themes and expand­ing on them. In the mean­time you can visit the event site here. It’s open to mar­keters from tech­no­logy and tele­coms com­pan­ies, B2B and B2C. A bunch of invit­a­tions should be going out in the next day or two so keep an eye on your in-tray and in-box.

So fol­low­ing on from the last post I thought I’d try it out on the recent ad we cre­ated for Nom­inet. Beau­ti­ful, don’t you think?

The Nom­inet www.keepyour.co.uk ad

Word­ling the B1 blog

So Jay’s sug­ges­ted there are 200 words that can improve your writ­ing. Given that he’s writ­ten most of this blog to date, I thought I’d work out exactly what words he’s been using. And thanks to this clever little app at Wordle you can cre­ate a pretty little word cloud from the con­tent within this blog (or indeed any other you choose). You can even paste a pas­sage of copy into it and see it visu­ally. Beware… it’s addictive.

I’m get­ting ready to run one of our in-house train­ing ses­sions (Ban­ner Academies). This time it’s devoted to offer­ing tips, tricks and tech­niques to help our people write better.

Regard­less of what you do in mar­ket­ing, the writ­ten word is pretty fun­da­mental to how effect­ive you’ll be – whether with peers, cus­tom­ers or part­ners. And, if you write in Eng­lish, you’ve got plenty of words to choose from.

Give or take a few thou­sand, there are about 170,000 words in act­ive use on a daily basis. Not bad when you con­sider that the vast major­ity stem from a palette of just 26 letters.

But all too often, the incred­ible flex­ib­il­ity of Eng­lish just goes bad. Take the following:

By tak­ing a stra­tegic, dis­cip­lined, enterprise-wide approach to align­ing, man­aging and meas­ur­ing learn­ing and devel­op­ment ini­ti­at­ives, organ­isa­tions ensure that their people have the right skills and know­ledge to per­form at 
their best.

XPROD* is the most com­pre­hens­ive solu­tion avail­able to address the stra­tegic man­dates of the learn­ing organ­isa­tion – to deliver effect­ive formal and informal learn­ing that is tied to clear busi­ness out­comes and stra­tegic human cap­ital man­age­ment initiatives.

* Com­pany name changed to pro­tect the guilty

I came across this while research­ing a pro­ject for one of our cli­ents. My first thought was: that’s ter­rible. My second: that’s great, it rep­res­ents almost every mis­take in tech­no­logy writ­ing today. Too com­plex. Too much business-speak. Too little mean­ing. Too many words.

The thing is, just because you have 170,000 words, it doesn’t mean you have to use them. In fact, over 80% of all the words most Eng­lish speak­ers use every day come from a list of just 200.

When you con­sider that effect­ive com­mu­nic­a­tion is about what your audi­ence takes out rather than what you put in, keep­ing it simple, clear and com­pel­ling is the only way to guar­an­tee your success.

And for those of you who want to know, the 200 in order of fre­quency are:

the of and a to in he have it that for they I with as not on she at by this we you do but from or which one would all will there say who make when can more if no man out other so what time up go about than into could state only new year some take come these know see use get like then first any work now may such give over think most even find day also after way many must look before great back through long where much should well people down own just because good each those feel seem how high too place little world very still nation hand old life tell write become here show house both between need mean call develop under last right move thing gen­eral school never same another begin while num­ber part turn real leave might want point form off child few small since against ask late home interest large per­son end open pub­lic fol­low dur­ing present without again hold gov­ern around pos­sible head con­sider word pro­gramme prob­lem how­ever lead sys­tem set order eye plan run keep face fact group play stand increase early course change help line