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Every week, Ban­ner brings you more cool campaigns/ideas/articles found whilst sniff­ing round the inter­web.

• Don’t Shoot the Bear! – You­Tube made inter­est­ing by Tipp-Ex. Great cam­paign for driv­ing user input. Be cre­at­ive with your ideas. Try: fishes, dances, rap, tickles, picks up, shoots and eats to get you going… (It will all make sense when you are there, trust me.)
• Another You­Tube cre­ation, this time with Sly and some friends…
• If you missed the Apple spe­cial announce­ment yes­ter­day, then you won’t want to miss this. Finally, a place where Apple “fan­boys” can go and com­mu­nic­ate with the like-minded.
• Last week we looked at how Voda­fone is using Lewis Hamilton. This week, we are look­ing at another “Gil­lette boy”. Roger Federer goes viral with over 5 mil­lion hits last week. Real or Fake? No-one’s telling…
• Nel­son Man­dela, Barack Obama, Mother Teresa, the Inter­net… They (may soon) all have one thing in com­mon.  Click here to find out.
• Plan­ning to build your own Star­tup Com­pany? Need a service/site idea? Try this gen­er­ator and strike digital gold.
• Is it Christ­mas? Some­times it’s the simplest sites that give you the best answers.
• I saved the best for last. Here is a really great example of HTML5 when brought together with some cre­at­ive think­ing and a lot of pro­cessor power. It’s still just an idea and a first stab at that, but it really high­lights the power of open source solu­tions. Great track too.

From using Twit­ter as a social paint­brush, to tar­get­ing the under­dogs of great­ness, here are some of the best campaigns/virals/ideas/social media drivers we’ve found down the back of the digital couch in the last week:

• Can Chat­roul­ette actu­ally be used for some­thing use­ful? One agency thought so. Does it go too far? You be the judge.
• Twit­ter becomes a social paint­brush to con­vince Amer­ica that Canada is great!
• What hap­pens when you mix glit­tery vam­pires and product place­ment with a social media strategy? Great idea or cringe worthy cash-in?
• With bet­ter mobile pro­cessors, oper­at­ing sys­tems and down­load­able con­tent, aug­men­ted real­ity takes another bold step in shiny Google boots. Review & Down­load here!
• Slack­ers deserve credit too. Puma agrees. A great spot for the non-athlete athlete.
• Old Spice may have set a pre­ced­ent for the groom­ing industry, but who’s this claw­ing their way to the top of the pile?
• Some­times, a great idea doesn’t need to sell any­thing at all. Here’s a great flash­mob just to make one guy have the best birth­day ever.
• Exe­cu­tion by Schweppes. A little remote and under­played, but think of the pos­sib­il­it­ies? Any­one else think­ing; “Yellowstone!”
• Every­body loves Gary, the Walk­ers Crisps man, right? So what hap­pens when you ask Lionel Richie (yes, him) to do a Walk­ers crisp ad?
• Even Hugh needs to get in on the act. Read about Mr. Hefner’s hunt for a Social Media mis­tress.
• Do you think Voda­fone was run­ning out of ideas on how to use Lewis Hamilton for their cam­paigns, what with the NOT win­ning races? Any­one else thinks this is a little… lame?

Land­ing pages would seem to be a fairly tedi­ous topic of con­ver­sa­tion; how­ever they can often make or break cam­paigns. And all too often, it’s the lat­ter. Many cli­ents have sep­ar­ated mar­ket­ing and web teams, leav­ing the IT-driven web team to pro­duce the land­ing page. This can cause issues with the link­age between the cre­at­ive and land­ing page con­tent, less than ideal land­ing page struc­tures with call-to-actions hid­den below the fold and nav­ig­a­tion bars divert­ing the users from the key action com­pan­ies want them to take. Altern­at­ively, it could be that the cli­ent has out­sourced their land­ing page con­struc­tion to an external agency that like to build pretty Flash-driven sites that are a night­mare from an SEO per­spect­ive and addi­tion­ally, external host­ing exposes the site to poten­tial secur­ity attacks. It seems that due to the rel­at­ively short shelf-life of cam­paigns and thus cam­paign land­ing pages, the think­ing and atten­tion needed is not being given to the primary way of con­vert­ing poten­tial customers.

Changes are afoot though, driven by social media. Coke has announced that they will stop cre­at­ing cam­paign sites in favour of driv­ing people to their social media com­munit­ies on Face­book and You­Tube instead.

Uni­lever is fol­low­ing suit and the likes of T-mobile with their Life’s for Shar­ing cam­paign last year were already driv­ing people to their You­Tube com­munity as the main call-to-action. And the social media sites are gear­ing up towards the trend: the latest news from Face­book is an Omni­ture part­ner­ship to provide (among oth­ers) cor­por­ate Face­book com­munit­ies the web ana­lyt­ics expec­ted before for cam­paign sites. Why the change? Well, mar­keters have had enough of cre­at­ing dis­pos­able cam­paign sites (which I whole­heartedly agree with) that are dumped after the com­pany has moved to the next quarter or the next big push they are focus­ing on. Secondly they want to drive people to exist­ing com­munit­ies where their audi­ence is already, in a mind­set ready to share and engage. I get that too, how­ever am in a quandary about driv­ing the organic rank­ings of social com­munity site as opposed to the client’s own site. In my mind, only brands that are of cer­tain size and don’t neces­sar­ily sell online would want to do that.

We are test­ing a best of both worlds approach instead with one of our cli­ents (cam­paign due to launch in a couple of months, will keep you updated on the pro­gress!): instead of the usual cor­por­ate land­ing page, we are cre­at­ing a socially super­charged aggreg­ator site. The site com­bines cli­ent and user cre­ated social con­tent from You­Tube, Face­book, Slide­share, Scribd etc with the client’s cor­por­ate con­tent (trial down­load offers, reviews, webinars and tutori­als). This way, the exper­i­ence for the user com­ing to the site is much more valu­able, the social back-links are build­ing the SEO rank­ings for the cli­ent, not for social sites and hope­fully, with the improved exper­i­ence, the con­ver­sion rates are improved as well. I believe the future of cam­paign sites is social and that long-term, “green” think­ing needs to be integ­rated into marketing.

Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been work­ing to pro­duce an at-a-glance map out­lining some of the main options B2B mar­keters face in using social media to engage their audiences.

And now, cue fan­fare, it’s ready. Woo-hoo!

You can down­load a groovy hyper­linked PDF ver­sion here. Feel free to share it too.

And this is where you come in – what have we missed that really should have been on there? We’re look­ing for those forehead-slapping sug­ges­tions that’ll make us go Doh! and then scrabble to pro­duce ver­sion 2. Ideally, we’d like them before 24^th Septem­ber when we’re host­ing a social media huddle at our new offices (BTW if you’re a tech­no­logy mar­keter and inter­ested in attend­ing, email steven@b1.com and you could grab one of the last remain­ing places).

Con­tent mar­ket­ing is one of today’s hot mar­ket­ing top­ics – par­tic­u­larly in B2B. It’s been fuelled by the per­cep­tion that tra­di­tional push mar­ket­ing doesn’t work in a social media driven world – it’s too shal­low, too manip­u­lat­ive, too inauthentic.

While this view is almost cer­tainly over­stated (plenty of push mar­ket­ing cam­paigns are still gen­er­at­ing healthy responses) it has a point. There is a wide­spread desire on the part of cus­tom­ers for more human, less spun com­mu­nic­a­tions that add value to their decisions rather than mud­dy­ing the waters.

The answer for many mar­keters is con­tent. While it is being touted as the bright shiny new thing, there is of course noth­ing really new about con­tent itself (white papers, for example, have been around for as long as the tech­no­lo­gies they talk about). The new news is really in the shift­ing of con­tent to the core of B2B mar­ket­ing strategy and the explo­sion of dis­tri­bu­tion channels.

Cre­at­ing com­pel­ling content

The key to devel­op­ing an effect­ive con­tent mar­ket­ing strategy is, as with all mar­ket­ing, rel­ev­ance. More than ever you need to step into your cus­tom­ers’ shoes. What are they strug­gling with? What do they need to know? How can you help them? (Note: help not sell.)

On top of this, why would your cus­tom­ers send your con­tent on to their col­leagues and fiends? What value are you adding? This brings me on to…

Con­tent shouldn’t be pass­ive or static or a one-off

Going back to the white paper, there is a danger that con­tent is viewed as the Switzer­land of mar­ket­ing – neut­ral, dis­en­gaged, pass­ive. The real­ity is quite dif­fer­ent. While con­tent does not assume the overt sales role of advert­ising or dir­ect mar­ket­ing, it should be any­thing but pass­ive. Good con­tent is a con­ver­sa­tion. It engages the audi­ence. It is part of a pro­cess (not simply the end of one).

It is crit­ic­ally import­ant to take the long view of your con­tent mar­ket­ing pro­gramme – how does one piece of con­tent lead to another? How and where are you invit­ing cus­tomer par­ti­cip­a­tion? What tools are you build­ing in to help cus­tom­ers achieve their aims (and which will give your con­tent a viral aspect)?

Think once, cre­ate many

As I men­tioned above, there are now a wider vari­ety of ways to deliver con­tent. So when cre­at­ing your con­tent, don’t simply stop at the usual sus­pects (eg vari­ations on a PDF doc­u­ment). Not every­one wants to read off screen.

So in addi­tion to ebooks, cre­ate vari­ations of the con­tent as a pod­cast, present­a­tion, video, an edit­able wiki, blog post, dead tree book, a news­let­ter, a webinar, an applic­a­tion or wid­get – and that’s just for starters. Of course, you don’t have to do the lot but by widen­ing out the media you use you will widen the reach and increase the effect­ive­ness of search.

And dis­trib­ute everywhere

There are so many dis­tri­bu­tion options for con­tent it’s stag­ger­ing. For PDF-like mater­ial (docs and present­a­tions) – check out Slide­share, Scribd, HubPages, Author­stream and Slide­boom. For video there is, of course, You­Tube (where you can cre­ate a branded chan­nel quickly and eas­ily) but also Vimeo, Daily­mo­tion and a bunch of oth­ers. For pod­cast­ing, there are iTunes, Pod­cast Alley and many more. And for com­munity there are LinkedIn, Biznik, Face­book or, if you want to cre­ate your own, Ning.

Then there’s pro­mo­tion which can cover everything from tra­di­tional media through to rich online media hous­ing your con­tent and on to Twit­ter, blogs, RSS, Deli­cious, Digg, StumbleUpon – the list goes on and on.

The trick, once again, is to take a hol­istic view of your entire pro­gramme. Although, import­antly, to also relin­quish con­trol allow­ing your audi­ences to share and dis­trib­ute your con­tent too.

Isn’t all this just thought lead­er­ship in new clothes?

Well yes and no. Thought lead­er­ship is a legit­im­ate and laud­able aim of a con­tent mar­ket­ing pro­gramme. But it is not the only aim. The end res­ult of pretty much any con­tent mar­ket­ing pro­gramme should be the per­cep­tion that you are the go-to people to talk to. How­ever, pure play thought lead­er­ship is not the only game in town.

If we have all learned any­thing in the last couple of years, it’s that com­munity mat­ters. Con­sumer gen­er­ated con­tent has already gained adop­tion in B2C. And B2B itself has a long his­tory of round tables and testi­mo­nial case stud­ies. What this means is that it is not always neces­sary to be the thought leader as long as you know the people who are and can get access to their heads and opinions.

5 approaches to try for starters

There are numer­ous approaches you can take to begin devel­op­ing a con­tent mar­ket­ing pro­gramme. Here are 5 to get you going:

1. Grow your own expert – every busi­ness has a few experts (in B2B they tend to have more than a few). Find yours and use their brain(s) mer­ci­lessly. If they are artic­u­late and present­able, use the rest of them too. Just make sure you remem­ber this is about help­ing cus­tom­ers (not show­ing off).
2. Rent someone else’s expert – short on experts? Need greater impar­ti­al­ity? Speak to an ana­lyst house to help you cre­ate high value con­tent without it being tain­ted by the sus­pi­cion of spin.
3. Make a stand – what do you hate in the mar­ket? More import­antly, what do your cus­tom­ers hate? Take a stand, rail against it, begin a movement.
4. Research – tra­di­tional or social research can arm you with invalu­able con­tent and an excuse to engage cus­tom­ers and pro­spects. Make it really good and it could get you on Radio 4.
5. Com­munity of gurus – bring cus­tom­ers and part­ners together to cre­ate a thought lead­er­ship com­munity. Run invitation-only sum­mits and round tables. Cre­ate a home for them online. Hang a forum off it for every­one else to get involved. Poll for opin­ion and incor­por­ate it into the discussions.

There are of course many, many other options.

I’ll leave you with a final round up:

• Con­tent is an import­ant tool for today’s B2B marketers
• It is fun­da­ment­ally about help­ing cus­tom­ers achieve more
• You need to take a hol­istic view
• Think once, cre­ate many
• Dis­trib­ute everywhere