From startups to windups, the B2B space has never been more active. Here are the top 5 stories you need to know about going into the week: 1. Motorola is Lenovo. Motonovo? It’s already displaced Xiaomi as the 3rd largest mobile manufacturer (after 24 hours). From Motorola Mobility’s President, Rick Osterloh: Congrats to @Xiaomi for […]
The Bitcoin rush is underway. From the the inexplicable to the blatantly commercial, cottage industries and derivatives are springing up everywhere. Who is innovating fastest and who is selling pickaxes to the miners? Here are 5 companies to watch: 1) Our pick: Ethereum, headed by Vitalik Buterin, a Torontonian, cousin of Wild Apricot co-founder Dmitry […]
In a sea of concrete, Google Tokyo’s offices needed that traditional koi pond feel. Winnipeg-based triple threat (hardware, software, event services) Pomotion Inc. came up with an ingenious, interactive, and low maintenance way to deliver it:
Lego cures all. One of the consequences of our device-obsessed world is RSI, or repetitive stress injury. But for artisan small business owners who are often performing the same tasks repeatedly this can be a career-killing injury. When Lynn Wyminga of Lynn’s Lids fell victim to a shoulder injury right before a big show, she […]
Rule #1: don’t put them to sleep. Content marketing is effective, but it’s not easy to plan. If it isn’t aligned to corporate priorities, it won’t get the right results. Without a focus on relevancy and customer needs, it might cause drowsiness. A recent study showed that nearly 50 percent percent of the 88 percent […]
Management consultant Peter Drucker said: “There are only two things in a business that make money – innovation and marketing, everything else is cost.” Is business actually starting to believe this and what are the implications for marketing vendors? Social business is far from dead. Business is experimenting with customer engagement in areas like content, […]
Page views? Time on page? Video views? Are these real content marketing performance indicators? No. Why not? If you know how much time was spent on a page, and that more time was spent on one page of content than another page, is that actionable information? Does it give you any insight into content ROI? […]
Measuring from awareness to action online is not simple. It’s an ecosystem, it’s a path, it’s a narrative. Whatever the new buying process is, it’s clear that a funnel is no longer what we’re working with … or is it? Data shows there are two customer trajectories for all but the most rote or impulse […]
Launching a new B2B presence on social networks with zero budget and no existing web presence on a Friday night? Requires tons of patience and you won’t really see results for months, right? Not necessarily. On September 19 2014 we launched the @b2bnewsnetwork Twitter account. We kicked off (somewhat unintentionally) at the worst time […]
You wouldn’t serve wagyu to vegans or request formal attire at your Burning Man meditation meetup. So why do marketers deliver untargeted content? Yes, bad content is everywhere, and any way to create more relevant, useful marketing content works for us. But a way to do that AND cut your content marketing production costs dramatically […]
Sometimes when you’re looking for something, you need to take a step back and figure out what you really need it for, and what you need from it. Today this type of context is completely missing from product information in the rush to sale. But let’s re-imagine how this happens online … You arrive at […]
1000 is critical mass in B2B. It’s the magic number where things will start to happen organically if you get a group together. But acquiring 1000 real meaningful Twitter followers is hard. We almost did it in 30 days (870 and counting!) Here are some things that worked for us that might also work for […]
In an on-demand B2B universe, content marketing becomes information, useful experiences that are useful to the marketer too. It’s measurable, delivered however the information seeker prefers, from 140-character tweets with answers to the most popular questions asked by customers to triggered emails, catalogs, whitepapers, and more. For content to really develop relationships, however, marketers must […]
Henry Ford once famously remarked that if he’d asked his customers what they wanted, they would have said “a faster horse.” Had you asked B2B marketers a decade ago what they needed to market more successfully, their response might have tread the same path: more data, more information—faster and better. Well, marketers, your […]
I grew up watching all kinds of sports with my father, and to this day I love baseball. Though my brother, the other sports fan in the family, says baseball is ponderously slow, there’s something about its rhythms to love. I remember as a kid watching the larger-than-life baseball heroes of the ’70s and ’80s, […]
Happy Birthday, Bitcoin. It was on October 31, 2008 that the enigmatic (to put it mildly) Satoshi Nakamoto published the document that made him a billionaire, sired both Dogecoin (ain’t 2014 grand) and blockchains, and changed currency irrevocably. But the most amazing thing about Bitcoin is that that may be the least of its accomplishments. […]
One of those reassuring little white lies we tell ourselves as marketers is this: People make linear decisions. It’s simpler to draw straight lines about people’s behavior, so to date we have typically pushed people through carefully scripted marketing processes. But does that really reflect people’s actions and the ways they find information? Of course […]
The veteran Web player announced a new cross-device ad targeting system aptly called One. AOL is combining its ad platforms such as Adap.TV and AdLearn Open Platform (AOP), by taking programmatic buying of video from Adap.TV and display and banners from AOP, as Ad Week reports. “This is really along that pathway of making life easier for marketers within […]
A great pet store anticipates what their clients want and always delivers (literally and figuratively). Here are 5 simple lessons from great pet stores that all startups should adopt. 1. Be genuinely excited about all of your customers. So let me begin by letting you all know that I live in a large city (Toronto) […]
PayPal is officially entering the world of all-digital money. The payment processing company will start accepting payments from customers that are using Bitcoin. According to CNN, Bitcoin is “an independent, government-less currency,” whereas PayPal is owned by eBay and works with merchants. As of today, PayPal completed a deal with the payment-processing companies inclusive with […]
