B1BLOG

Image cour­tesy of http://www.adpulp.com/gamification_se/

There is a grow­ing opin­ion in the dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing com­mu­nity that the con­struc­tion of the social layer of the web is now com­plete, espe­cially with the dom­i­nance of Face­book. The next phase will move from estab­lish­ing social con­nec­tions to the devel­op­ment of game dynam­ics that encour­age long-term brand engage­ment and loyalty.

It’s cer­tainly easy to see how game the­ory has already been applied in con­sumer mar­ket­ing e.g. building-up points on FourSquare to get a free cof­fee at Star­bucks. But, the big ques­tion is how will it work for B2B?

LinkedIn is an unde­ni­able force when it comes to B2B social net­works. Henry Clifford-Jones showed us some fas­ci­nat­ing sta­tis­tics – over 80 mil­lion pro­fes­sion­als view­ing 1.5billion pages per month across 600,000 pro­fes­sional groups.

When you want to build a group on LinkedIn, it’s only going to be a suc­cess if you build it around a com­mon inter­est and pur­pose. An empty LinkedIn group can be a very lonely place…

So, the more focused and well-defined the group is, the higher the level of par­tic­i­pa­tion and engage­ment. Also, don’t get too dis­ap­pointed if most peo­ple aren’t con­tribut­ing. LinkedIn reckon that for every per­son that con­tributes on the site, nine will com­ment and inter­act, whilst 90 will just sit back and con­sume the con­tent.

Read the full post »

The impend­ing Tube Strike didn’t deter a record num­ber of tech­nol­ogy mar­keters com­ing to the Ban­ner offices to take part in this year’s Social Media Hud­dle. And, look­ing at the feed­back, the con­tent of the day was rated at 4.2 out of 5.

So first of all, a big thank you to our speak­ers and work­shop mod­er­a­tor for mak­ing the hud­dle such a suc­cess and pre­sent­ing such com­pelling con­tent — Ioanna Sta­gia (CNN Inter­na­tional), Henry Clifford-Jones (LinkedIn Europe), Jackie Hewitt (Autodesk), Xabier Ormaz­a­bal (Salesforce.com) and Zoe Sands (Juniper).

There were a num­ber of com­mon strands to the day:

Read the full post »

Recently, whilst look­ing through a LinkedIn group on Face­book and Twit­ter for busi­ness, I came across a ques­tion that asked: Is it ok to have mul­ti­ple Face­book and Twit­ter accounts for your business?

It depends…

The answer (at least it seems this way to me) is self-evident: it depends. What I said, was this:

I think it all comes down to defin­ing exactly what you want to achieve and exe­cut­ing the pro­gramme in a way that’s con­sis­tent with the brand.

There are sit­u­a­tions (espe­cially with smaller organ­i­sa­tions) where a sin­gle account would be suf­fi­cient; you need a cer­tain ‘crit­i­cal mass’ to gain enough inter­est­ing con­tent and wouldn’t nec­es­sar­ily want to dilute this.

 In medium and large enter­prises, though, I can see it being ben­e­fi­cial to have mul­ti­ple accounts for var­i­ous rea­sons:

Read the full post »

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.

Read the full post »

With the next Demand Gen­er­a­tion Sum­mit just a cou­ple of days away, one ques­tion to ask is once you’ve got the leads, then what?

For clas­sic B2B sales this often ends up in a con­ver­sa­tion around the hand-off process to sales and closed loop mar­ket­ing. But just as impor­tant a ques­tion is: is your web­site play­ing its part?

Over on Con­ver­sion Rate Experts they have an excel­lent arti­cle of the worst offend­ers when it comes to killing a lead stone dead. These include:

Read the full post »

• The ‘empty cart’ but­ton posi­tioned where you’d expect the ‘sub­mit’ button

From Flickr Cre­ative Commons

There’s a com­ment that gets made about mil­i­tary strat­egy that goes some­thing like: when the war starts the first thing to go out of the win­dow is the plan.

While in mar­ket­ing no one is gen­er­ally in dan­ger of dying (at least not in the kind I do), the prin­ci­ple is a pretty sound one. If, like me, you’ve sat in any num­ber of plan­ning and strat­egy ses­sions, you can quickly get the idea that the future is being mapped in front of your eyes. First this will hap­pen, then that, then that… It’s quite seduc­tive.

Read the full post »

Admit­tedly, I’ve come a bit late to the whole Twit­ter thing (and I’ve always tried to be such an early adopter – well, ok, BMX bikes passed me by too – and don’t tell any­one but I’m not on FaceBook).

As it stands, a whole week in, I can kind of see the attrac­tion of Twit­ter. Essen­tially, it allows me to get a quick thought out with­out writ­ing a whole blog post. Of course there’s also the abil­ity to stay in vic­ar­i­ous touch with other peo­ple — either those I know or those I’ve heard of. But really it’s a time thing.

Read the full post »

It is per­haps stag­ger­ingly unsur­pris­ing that most mar­keters and their agen­cies spend most of their time in search of solu­tions for their brands.

After all, we all want to get to the right answer as soon as humanly pos­si­ble (if not sooner). It also pro­vides the sat­is­fac­tion of actu­ally doing (and be seen to be doing) some­thing, any­thing – quick, unleash the mar­ket­ing nin­jas (if only there really were mar­ket­ing ninjas).

The trou­ble is – this is kind of dumb.

Read the full post »

Unbe­liev­able I know. But check out the video below to get a glimpse of a future where you’ll be able to use a computer-based ‘sys­tem’ to access and read the news (well the future as seen from 1981 anyway).

I love the quote by one of the news­pa­per guys, “We don’t expect to make any money.”

Also, check out the home user’s modem with the rub­ber cups to put the phone hand­set into – the first modem I ever used was almost iden­ti­cal to this.

Those were the days.

Source: NOTCOT