With the study, we sought to answer several questions…

How much resource is invested into digital by B2B marketers? Which digital activities are viewed most positively? In other words, what works where in B2B digital marketing?

But the marketing industry, and digital activity in particular, is ever-evolving and 12 months is a long time in the world of B2B digital marketing. We want to know what has changed and we want you to help us find this out. Last year we set the bar very high with a truly authoritative survey and we want to repeat that, but we can’t do it alone – we need your input from your experiences. We appreciate that time is precious and as a gesture of thanks for taking 10 minutes to complete this survey, you will be entered into a prize draw to win 1 of 4 Amazon vouchers worth £200 and will also receive a free copy of the survey’s findings.

Please click here to complete the survey, we’ll be collecting responses until February 28th so please make sure you complete before then to be in with a chance of winning a voucher.

Many thanks in advance for your support.

It was 1977 and I was 11. I was there on a family holiday with two other families, one of whom had an older boy. We sneaked away from our parents over the sand dunes at Rhosneigr where he produced a cassette player and said ‘Listen to this’. He pressed Play and ‘God Save the Queen’ came snarling and whining out of it in Johnny Rotten’s brilliant nasal delivery. 

I had never heard anything like it before. I never knew music was allowed to be like that having been brought up on Country & Western and The New Seekers. It was (one of) the moments the scales fell from my eyes.

The cultural commentator and writer Paul Morley said recently that punk wasn’t the music, it was the context. A convergence of political polarisation, the three day week, the disillusion and hopelessness of the working class created the context. The music was merely one expression of it. There were many others – fashion, art (like the famous Jamie Reid image above), writing, comedy and politics.

Although Paul Morley won’t thank me for saying it, brands should work in the same way.

They’re not about the advertising, the social media, the visual identity or the tone of voice. At the core of it all, they’re about the context. You should be able to plot a straight line through from the social context, to the sector context, to the brand context. If the brand is reflecting the issues of the wider world, it’s both relevant and current.

Take BMW as an example. By the mid 80s, people were more wealthy with more disposable income. After the austerity of the 70s, being seen to have money was a desirable thing, not gauche like it’s seen today. The social context was that people with money wanted to show it through possessions that were more exclusive, not run of the mill.

The sector context was that, in the UK, the big automotive players were the only game in town. Ford, Vauxhall and British Leyland (or Rover as it became in 1986) dominated the market. If you wanted to flaunt your wealth with something exclusive, none of these would do.

BMW was something of a foreign curiosity. It was known for quality but not much else, mainly because you saw so few. The brand context of The Ultimate Driving machine was a perfect positioning. It played to the strength of the engineering and also to the desires of a market looking for ways of showing their wealth and taste.

Brands have to remember that contexts change though. 80s attitudes to wealth were very different to those today as Stephen Hestor will testify. And it’s also possible to be a victim of your own success. A couple of years ago, the BMW 3 Series outsold the Ford Mondeo by some distance. Not what you’d call exclusive anymore.

Context isn’t the only thing that brands can learn from punk.

I’ve seen so many brands ‘built’ on a visual identity with nothing at the core. Or else desperately trying to appeal to the audience by buddying up to them in a sycophantic attempt to appear like they care. Barclays in-branch signage is one of my least favourites – the cash machine is ‘The Hole in the Wall’, the queue tapes proclaim ‘Not long to go now’. I half expected the assistants to shout ‘Wotcher, mate’ in a chirpy Dick Van Dyke accent as you got to the front of the queue.

It would be great if brands had a bit more punk ethos. A bit more ‘F*** you, this is what I stand for’. You never know, others who feel the same way might just line up beside you.

The postscript to the story is that my attempts to embrace punk in Anglesey were rapidly curtailed. At the T-shirt shop in Beaumaris I wanted ‘The Punk Panther’ shirt – a picture of the Pink Panther dressed in bondage trousers and covered in safety pins. I wasn’t allowed. Mum bought me a Yamaha t-shirt with a picture of a motorbike instead.

Even punk has to bow to a greater authority sometimes.

Essential skills

• SharePoint 2003/2007/2010
• .Net
• SQL
• C#
• HTML/CSS/XML

Desirable skills

• Understanding of hosting environments, both Linux and Windows
• Ability to configure secure web servers, either LAMP or Windows with MS SQL
• Understanding of Ecommerce systems implementation.

Experience & education

• Minimum of 5 years experience working as part of a strong development team
• Degree educated is preferred although all candidates would be considered
• Must have strong understanding of programming principles
• Excellent communication skills.

If you think you’ve got some or all of the skills we would love to hear from you and see some examples of your work. Please email developer@omobono.com.

We can promise variety – apps, sites, video, animation, print, brand development, ad campaigns, marketing strategy – we never know what we’ll be turning our hand to next. So we need someone who can think through clients’ problems and create compelling integrated communication concepts.

You’ll be fluent in the CS Design suite and if you have an understanding of web technologies, Flash and/or After Effects skills, even better.

You’ll have a design degree and preferably have had experience of working in a deadline-driven agency environment. You’ll also appreciate the creativity and discipline that working on big brands requires.

We’re offering the chance to work on some of the world’s biggest brands as part of a friendly team – one that’s committed to producing great work and sharing the rewards.

Salary is negotiable depending on experience.

To apply for this job, click here to send your CV and work samples.

You’ll have a marketing background and be confident talking in particular about digital marketing with experience of delivering web, mobile, e-mail and social media marketing campaigns.

It’s critical that you can:

• Help clients shape their brief and draw out the information needed to deliver against their objectives and expectations
• Manage a busy, often conflicting workload, without dropping any balls
• Run a cross agency project team, maintaining an overview of tasks and ensuring that everything is delivered on time and to budget
• Understand the potential of new technology and translate it into meaningful opportunities for clients

You will be highly organised with a keen eye for detail, flexible and able to prioritise a busy workload. Your communication skills, both written and verbal, will be first class. Ideally you will have experience of working to clients – whether internal or external – and of scoping and delivering high quality digital projects to aggressive timeframes.

If you think you’ve got the skills to deliver in this role then we’d love to hear from you. Send your CV and a covering letter, explaining why you think your perfect for the job, to helen@omobono.co.uk.

Sarah Pettinger – Managing Director

If last year was the year for mobile then I think this year will be the year for mobile in B2B – I predict that our annual What Works Where in B2B survey will show a hike in budget allocated to mobile activity and more businesses thinking about how they use mobile sites and apps for both internal and external engagement. I also predict an email backlash – I spoke to three people at different, big, companies and organisations over the Christmas break who are all being asked to send less internal email and use tools like IM. It will certainly be interesting to see what coverage the activity continues to get and whether is has an impact on email marketing. My wish would be that, despite budget pressures, clients would invest time and money in really understanding what their customers are looking for. Understanding that money spent doing that is money wisely invested.

Chris Butterworth – Creative Director

In 1964 the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase ‘the medium is the message’. He meant that content was affected and perceived differently according to the delivery technique used.

In the last five years, his words have become more prophetic that perhaps even he realised. With the explosion of social media, the world has spent a huge amount of time discussing how to reach people and what techniques work. What seems to have been placed on the back burner is the content.

I hope that in 2012, marketers re-engage with the need for engaging and differentiating content. Surely, by now, everyone who needs a YouTube channel must have one? Let’s spend some time getting what’s on it to cut through the quagmire of mediocrity.

If ever there was a time for being brave with ideas, the middle of a recession is it. If you want economy, buy ideas that punch above their weight. If you’re going to put your head above the parapet, stick your torso and most of your arse over too. There is no business as usual any more, so you might as well stake more on the roll of your marketing dice.

So I hope 2012 is the year when we see a resurgence of creativity in brand building and story telling. Let me know – I’m quite happy to kick it off on your behalf.

Fran Brosan – Director

My prediction is that companies will continue to put pressure on marketing budgets, and on marketers to find ways to communicate more effectively with the end audience. So on the positive side, there will be increased understanding that digital technologies have the power to do this. Our 2011 ‘WWW’ survey showed that on average B2B marketers were spending less than 40% of their budget on digital, so I think this will increase as a result. On the down side I think that the danger is that they’ll do the wrong things. For instance:

• Looking for short term results, the model built up in B2C, is not the way that most business relationships work.

• Continuing the search for the the Holy Grail of ‘ROI in social media’ – when it’s arguably most powerful in relationship development.

• Pigeon-holing digital as communications ‘stuff’ instead of establishing how it can contribute to people’s experience of the brand.

My wish? That digital grows up in 2012 (oh, and that Boards stop applying FMCG ROI measures to B2B marketing).

She has done a sky dive over a glacier, driven a Lotus round Silverstone, and surfed through the jungle but is too scared to even attempt to parallel park.

Loves: Fleetwood Mac, forests, Peep Show and Malbec wine.

Hates: Soft fluffy apples, slow walkers (older people and the infirm are fine), spontaneous sing song sessions.

Post-it Notes.

Teflon.

All products that were discovered whilst their inventors were looking for something else. Yet these people had the foresight to realize the importance of serendipity and were able to exploit their accidents to great commercial success.

There’s a similarity to creating communications here. There is an assumed linearity in the creative process – the final work has a direct line to the creative brief which in turn has a direct line to the client brief. And in most cases this works.

But how many great creative ‘accidents’ have failed to be capitalized upon because there isn’t a logical trace back to the client brief? More than once I’ve heard (to paraphrase) “Yes it’s a great idea, but it’s not what we’re trying to achieve at the moment” or “The market’s not ready for it at the moment”.

Just because you have something to say doesn’t mean it’s what the market wants to hear. Even subjects in focus groups give answers in the group that don’t reflect their behaviour in real life.

Just occasionally following the logic isn’t the right thing to do. Sometimes when you’re given the opportunity to choose between something great and something right, the ‘wrong’ choice is the right one (if you see what I mean).

Bill Bernbach said “If your advertising goes unnoticed, everything else is academic”. No matter how ‘right’ your communications are, if they’re uninspiring they’re dead in the water.

So keep your eyes and mind open to the inspired accident. It may just be the making of you.

When we started Omobono 11 years ago we said B2B marketing didn’t need to be dull. You should always consider your audience and how you can engage them. ‘Entertaining’ an audience always used to be the preserve of consumer brands and content providers – but having produced games of all flavours – from the frivolous on Facebook, to the entirely financial for the world’s biggest shipping company Omobono does have some ‘previous’ in this space.

Games (and the simple principle of remembering that ultimately we are simple folk and love to play) offer enormous potential for business brands. eLearning can be fantastically dull; and whether the computer says someone has completed a module you know in your heart they are likely to engage more if there is some kind of gamification or playful dimension to the learning. In fact internal communication will prove rich pickings for those companies who embrace the thinking. Creating behaviours where employees collaborate in an environment like a game can only raise the potential of them doing it in reality.
Externally, the principle of using games as a way to encourage people to engage with a brand is well-established. The principle of making information entertaining goes back even further. Games are a great way to help achieve business objectives – we’ve helped a large French insurance company achieve a 30% behaviour change KPI (moving insurance brokers from paper to electronic based proposals). When considering what will work best it is worth thinking carefully about what the purpose might be:

1. to encourage learning
2. to learn about an audience
3. to engender a sense of community around an organization, brand or initiative

None of these are mutually exclusive but it aids clarity of thinking to consider each.
Perhaps the most recent buzz phrase to have emerged in 2011 is that of social gaming. Don’t worry – it’s nothing new. The best games have always been played by more than one person – social is simply the zeitgeist around which industry is rallying.

To cover the basics:

• Turn-based – A social game is not social unless you are playing with another person. Social games enable users to take turns. Turn-based games are not new but with social channels Like Facebook and Twitter becoming all pervasive, turn-based takes on a new meaning.
• Awareness of others’ actions in games – This is probably the key differentiator in a game being ‘social’. When you have sight of what others are doing there is true community participation – a key behaviour in creating an effective social b2b game.
• Casual gaming – “Social gaming” is not for so-called “hardcore gamers”. We are not talking about World of Warcraft for business (although if someone had the budget we’d certainly consider giving it a go). As it is currently referred to, social gaming is for the average user and not for someone who plans on playing 24 hours a day. To us social gaming in the context we are looking at it is gaming that has some form of ‘relevance’.
• Multi-player – This is a no brainer. You can’t be social without there being other people so whether it’s two or two hundred users, the game has to be multiplayer for it to be social. If the game is to be played internally making it multi-player could be a key success criteria.
• Based on Social Platforms – The final component that we believe identifies a game as “social” is that they utilise social platforms. In the context of gaming, social platforms provide users with an identity and also can provide the backbone for simple forms of communication (such as notifications, etc.). Think Ning, Yammer and ultimately Facebook.

A successful game has to be creative. It doesn’t have to be expensive. They are definitely a place where you can try things with an audience you might never dream about doing within a more corporate environment like the website.

The principles behind creating a successful game for a business brand are the same principle we have always espoused for creating successful communications. It is no coincidence and it will be a big theme for 2012.

If you are interested in the potential of Social Gaming within your organisation, please give us a call on 01223 307 000 or email Ben, we would be delighted to hear from you.

Google highlights three important areas that characterise the current status of the Web:

1. The number of online users continues to expand exponentially
2. The number of mobile phone subscribers will double in a few years
3. The amount of digital information exchanged worldwide is destined to see a huge growth too.

The UK is in a great position to benefit from this growth. The Internet contributes to 7% of the UK’s GDP, with a growth of over 10% each year. This makes the internet is the third largest industry in the UK. And we continue to be at the forefront of innovation in this industry.

There were a number of specific topics covered over the course of the day and some highlights of these are below.

Google+

Presenters at the event were at pains to point out that Google+ is not a platform. It is a project. Their mission is to organise information and make it more accessible to the end user. Google+’s 40 million users help make this mission more personal, but I couldn’t help thinking that Google avoid any questions concerning  the number of ‘active users’ within this total which I would guess would be significantly less.

Google+ is also aimed at engaging its users with brands, through the set-up of a Google+ profile for business. Once people add your business to their circle, you can then add them to any of your organisations circles and segment your audience in this way. This was shown to be quite powerful; my only concern with this was how managing this segmentation would scale.

One of the best examples given was tech giant, Intel who directly asks which circle you belong to, so as to target the right campaign to the right consumers. This avoids them having to manage their audience as they basically get their audience to do the hard work for them (admittedly the Intel page on Google+ has 718 likes compared with their 4,365,471 likes on Facebook).

There was also confirmation that the 1+ button does affect ranking. The extent of the effect remains unknown as the speakers were careful to dodge direct questions about it.

Mobile Marketing

The Smartphone and mobile markets are growing fast and mobile is transforming the retail market in particular. This is, in part, due to user reviews being so influential on customer decisions and behaviour. Mobile sites and apps are a huge opportunity that most small businesses are currently missing out on.

Google talked through some key statistics which could help shape your mobile marketing strategy;

• Ads with phone numbers get an average 6% to 8% higher CTR.
• More than 1 in 3 searches on mobiles are local.
• Google recommend for mobile campaigns keywords should be shorter.
• Top spots matter even more on mobile than they do on desktops.
• Another good practice is to set location extensions for your mobile ads.
• Site links and CTC (click-to-call) can be a hugely effective addition to your ads
• It’s a good practice to set a mobile-only campaign, as it provides better click-through rates and easier tracking.
• Your audience spends only 5% of their online time on Search. Display is growing a lot and will be growing even faster.

AdWords Express

AdWords Express is a new product from Google and the idea behind this is that many small businesses are not yet ready for AdWords with approximately 40% of small businesses not having a website.AdWords Express was shown to be simple to set-up and easy to manage, even if your company doesn’t have its own website.

The main benefits of AdWords Express are;

• Simple – no need to create and manage campaigns
• Targeted – specific to the area where the business operates
• Measurable – simple analytics provided as part of the service
• Eligibility – no need to have a website

From Google’s point of view this is a great strategy as it targets an entire segment that is currently missing out on the potentials of AdWords and gives them this without the complexity of a full AdWords account. They also have carefully thought it through and I would guess that once people start with AdWords Express it won’t be long before they are looking for more and upgrade to a full AdWords account.

Conclusion

Overall Google put on a great event that was enjoyed by all and gave valuable insight into the direction they are taking. Particularly with Google+ and how it might develop in the future, it is still early days but if anyone can rival Facebook, surely Google can??

Although having thought about this, I wonder if Google will succeed with Google+. Historically the most successful social networks have never come from large organisations with existing user bases. They have come from small start-ups with a great idea. I think part of the reason for their success is the idea that people like being part of something ‘new’. Joining something like Google+ doesn’t feel ‘cool’ it feels like you are just signing up for another Google service. You may use it occasionally but never to the extent you might use something like Facebook or Twitter.

But Google have never been afraid to fail so we will see what happens…