So what exactly is Pinterest? And what makes it unique to compete with the established social networks that we know and love?

To sum it up; it’s an image-sharing led website and app where people can build and maintain ‘image collections’ under themes of interest such as for example, food, fashion, beauty, photography celebrities. Pinterest also claims to connect people professionally through their tastes and business interests for example, a quick search on b2b pulled out a few recommended reads, a host of infographics and surprisingly lots of random business fashion statements and business card designs.

So, what can we conclude? Is Pinterest of any real value right now in the b2b marketing environment? Does it offer anything that b2b marketers can exploit to gain an advantage on the business social stage?

To be honest, the jury seems to be still out on relevancy in b2b at this moment in time here at Marketecture. Yes it’s fun and looks pretty and funky too. But dig beneath the surface and it’s a little lightweight for the b2b audience in terms of content value and really doesn’t add much more that can’t be covered off by Slideshare. But ‘never say never’ – fads come and go, but some stick and quickly gather mass interest, so maybe it’s dangerous to sit on the side-lines on this one? Should we perhaps be focusing on leading the way in intelligently using Pinterest to extend our brand communities?

To understand the benefits Pinterest brings, you have to understand how the site works and more importantly how consumers are using it. Pinterest allows you to organise images and pictures onto ‘boards’ that can be categorized by subject (such as ‘books I love’ ‘favourite recipes’ or ‘great footballers’ or anything else that takes your fancy). Once an image is ‘pinned’, your followers can comment, like or re-pin it to their boards, and because of these features an image has the potential to go viral, just like content posted on Facebook or Twitter.

If your business sells or makes tangible products, Pinterest is potentially a powerful business application; allowing you to post images of your company’s products on your Pinterest boards (with an option of having more than one board, you can separate different areas of a company), with information such as pricing and offering a quick link back to your website – which not only drives conversion, it’s also great for SEO.

Think of Pinterestas a sort of virtual social media catalogue, which people can comment on (good or bad) and interact with other customers to hopefully endorse your brand. However, Pinterest is a social media site first and foremost, and those that simply self-promote will quickly be identified and most likely ignored. Pinterest’s raison d’etre  isn’t to show off your wares per say, it’s about engagement with potential and existing customers – on average, visitors spend 88.3 minutes per visit on the site; that’s a lot of time for you to be actively engaging with consumers by re-pinning their ‘pins’. This can be as important as posting your own images.

So what other features are making Pinterest into the social networking site of the moment? A few of the team at Marketecture have played around with the site and one thing we love is its simplicity. It is not only really easy to use, but also, if you love one product, you don’t have to like the whole brand or page. Instead you can simply re-pin one single item. It’s a much simpler and natural way of sharing and ‘liking’ things.

It also benefits brands from another angle too, as it allows customer service and product development boffins to listen to which products people like and rate, and more importantly understand why. It provides an understanding of consumer behaviour from the coalface – raw – a rare insight often not acquired without investing in extensive research. You could for example, recruit a live Pinterest focus group and share product packaging concepts to gauge instant feedback and opinion. Ok so not entirely scientific, but instinctive can sometimes give you a good steer for more in depth studies, at low or no cost.

While Pinterest is an obvious site for those that produce visual products, those who don’t,  can find it difficult to promote their company, and any images used may not tie directly to your brand. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give it a go though. It might be that you’re able to find products beyond your own offer that help you to become a go-to site on current topics.

Having played around on the site over the last week, I can safely say I love it as a consumer. The benefits to a b2b business will however depend on the service or products offered, and how much time a company is willing to devote to learning how to get the most out of the site as it evolves (as it inevitably will).One thing is clear; images that are funny, beautiful, thought-provoking or unusual will attract most attention, gain followers and re-pins at the speed of light. Pinterst is a visual smorgasbord, with much to offer, but as with all emerging social communication platforms test the water –don’t just run and jump in head first. Stay true to your audience and don’t be fooled by the hype, just yet. Test a specific campaign – something simple with an awareness-raising objective – and see how well the word spreads amongst the people who matter – potential buyers!

Taking this a step further – hang on I’m not going mad – but why not revert to your childhood and create an imaginary friend to represent the people you are writing for. I have to hold my hands up, as I often do this to help me to really get in the ‘empathy zone’ when writing and strategising for the most discerning of b2b audiences. And, I find my make-believe friend can make all the difference between writing general business-ease content, or writing a piece that creates an emotional connection with the audience I’m speaking to.

Sometimes I picture my old CEO boss, or old C-level colleagues, in my mind’s eye when in the C-Suite writing ‘zone’ (all fully clothed of course!). Other times, I may be pitching to a personality type – a Jobs, a Zuckerberg, a Roddick, a Branson. It doesn’t matter so long as you hook up with the right imaginary friend, and often sound research will help you create this friend from an embryonic start point.

It’s likely a b2b marketing campaign will require you to create numerous personas or ‘friends’, due to the more complex DMU structure. This will help you to produce ‘on issue’ empathetic copy, which acknowledges your persona’s view points, uses their language and deals with their biggest concerns and challenges head on. Imaginary friends require honesty to build trust, not fluff and b*llocks as can oft appear in marketing communications.

Some of you may think this all sounds a little crazy – people can get locked up for speaking to themselves I hear you say (no doubt out loud to yourself!). Others of you may even be sat there thinking that invented friends are strictly for the playroom only. But, with the distance imposed by marketing campaign communications, and the constraints of the context you are writing in, it means you have to work harder than ever to sound well….human. As this is all we’re aiming to be after all – human, honest and relevant, to show we are in tune. Isn’t the whole purpose of our marketing campaigns to make sure that we resonate, and to ultimately help us to start to build those all-important initial relationships?

Creating imaginary friends gives you the ability to measure your b2b marketing concepts too. If you truly believe, having considered and reread your communication, that your ‘persona’ is unlikely to respond to your crafted verse, then you’ve most likely got it wrong. Go with your human instinct and be honest with yourself and your imaginary friend. Try relating to your own personal experiences, your own wants and needs as a consumer and you may just be surprised at what develops – a real connection with your new ‘friend’, which lifts your written communications to a whole new level.

After all, good marketing content should have aspects of you, as the communicator, firmly imbedded in it, with each different ‘story’ having its own unique flow. But don’t confuse creating a persona with considering yourself a subject matter expert, or you’ll end up stuffing your content with every reference possible. If you’re not careful it could end up being more about the researcher in you, than the reader - a total no-no.

Personas should be about enhancing focus, communication and collaboration on any project you undertake. Here at Marketecture, this concept helps us, as b2b marketers, to create a vivid, tangible, picture of our best prospects and sculpt our marketing messages around them. Give it a try; otherwise you might just be missing that final link which could take your campaigns from good to great.

The CEO of technology giant, Atos recently announced that he was banning internal emails. His reason being that Atos needed to “Adapt itself to the new generation of which will become the business colleagues of tomorrow”. The majority of the young people it seems Atos in increasingly hiring do not use email, and instead use instant messaging and social networking in their day-to-day work lives. To further add weight to his argument, Atos conducted an in-depth study which found that the average employee received over 100 internal emails and yet only 15% of these had any real business value. However, one things to note here is that Atos have no plans to ban external email. In fact, CEO Thierry Breton is quoted as saying that “External email is a fantastic tool – it’s a fantastic way to communicate between organisations”.

While some statistics are pointing to the decline of emails, and in particular email marketing; opening rates of emails have been in steady decline since 2007 and currently stand at just 11%. Others predict that email accounts worldwide will grow from 3.1billion in 2011, to over 4.1billion by 2015 (Source: Radicati) so what exactly is going on out there?

Nobody can deny the impact social media is having on communication as a whole, its strength being that it allows b2b marketers to communicate with customised groups of people in a more personalised and direct way. But in doing so, it is a lot more open than a one-to-one email, allowing those not even in the conversation to have an ambient awareness. Whether this is a good or bad thing is open to debate.

In truth, the role of email marketing is just simply changing and evolving. Social media has created a selection of different communication channels and as such, is stripping back email to the function it was designed for – one-to-one communication. Email’s ability to attach things and to provide a tool for secure conversation is still critical for many businesses operating today. So what can us mere b2b marketers do to keep our audiences from suffering from email fatigue? Here at Marketecture we’ve realised that we have to work smarter not necessarily harder. Generic emails are over; instead we need to get personal using targeted, relevant andrelevantly tailored emails. Personalised subject lines are key to increasing opening rates,  engaging with the recipient from the moment the email drops into their email box.  And more segmented email communication allows a much deeper granular level of relevancy in a communication or promotional email.

Yes, both channels have pros and cons but if email and social media communication is integratedyou have the ability to create a b2b marketing campaign that is significantly more powerful than using either channel alone. Should the two communication channels fail to work together, there is every chance that each channel could start cannibalising the other; the trick is for b2b marketers to realise everything has its place and which tool is the right one for the job at hand.

And these people receive a veritable winter wonderland of cards every year…so how do you make one that will stand out? You have to do something really different when it comes to Santa, baby!

This year, the brief landed on mine and Craig’s desks. We knocked a few ideas around and came up with the concept of The Twelve Metrics of Christmas. Rather than sticking with the traditional card, we thought we’d make a festive online book, based on some fun facts about the twelve days of Christmas. We figured it was a great fit for Marketecture’s ethos of Serious Fun and would make for some interesting Christmas reading.

So off we set, looking for exciting nuggets to include. Let me tell you, this little drummer boy soon learnt the true meaning of the phrase “making a rod for your own back”. A few Google searches later, we discovered facts around the theme of the twelve days of Christmas may be harder to find than we thought.

Some serious research was required.

Our first email went to The British Christmas Tree Growers Association (naturally), to get some facts about Christmas tree sales figures. This was swiftly followed by a look at the British Turkey Information Service website.

So far, so glamorous.  But the really tough work came when we were looking for birth and marriage rates and information from the Office of National Statistics. After a few back and forths and a few days of sending them on wild goose (or should that be turkey) chases, we got all the data we wanted. However, rather than dreaming of a white Christmas during the silent night, I was left dreaming of excel spreadsheets.

In the end though, all of the to-ing and fro-ing and rocking around the Christmas tree was worth it. We got all the fun facts we wanted and set off on making it look beautiful. We based the idea around the look of an old book; parchment pages, simple pencil illustrations and elaborate gold etchings for the cover.

This is the first Marketecture Christmas project that Craig and I have worked on together, and we’re pretty proud of how it looks. You can take a look at it below.

Merry Christmas!

November saw Google launch a new, improved version of its Analytics platform, after listening to vast amount of feedback it had received on how to enhance this tool even further. So what exactly have they done to help the world of b2b marketing?

There are three significant developments:

• Google Analytics looks prettier – it has been given a facelift which makes the interface more intuitive whilst also giving us better control over our accounts
• The whole platform and its usability has been streamlined – making the information we most want to reach easier to get to in less clicks
•  The report function has been improved to create a faster, more accurate service.

So why has Google decided to make these changes now? The older version of Google Analytics did a fantastic job as it was, analysing data based on past performance but with the ever increasing rate at which things are done, especially on the internet, it required the boffins at Google to create a tool which measured data in real time – enter Google Analytics Real-Time. This new platforms creates reports that show exactly what is happening on your site as it happens – cool huh?

We all know that social media is playing an everincreasing role in our marketing campaigns and with the changes Google has made, it now allows us to measure the immediate impact of our social media  activity. How? By campaign tagging the links we’ve shared on such sites as twitter, we can see how much traffic is been driven by each channel, as it happens. Best of all, from a marketing and PR view point, we can see exactly when traffic drops off which helps us to know when to reengage with our audiences. Brilliant!

These aren’t the only changes a foot at Google either. We now have access to multi-channel funnel reports that show us how previous referrals, searches and exposure channels work together to create sales and conversions. For the first time ever, we also get to see the role blogs and our comments on social media are playing (and whether we can assert sales) to our b2b campaigns.

Pretty interesting stuff and perfect for convincing the powers that be, that the time committed to  social media is worthwhile. Sitting along-side this is, for the first time, is a mobile section. We all know the increasing role Smartphones and tablets are playing in our daily lives, and Google has acknowledged this with this neat new little feature. We can see how much traffic is coming from mobiles and how our sites look on any Smartphone – which we reckon, is a pretty useful feature for our web developers here at Marketecture.

All in all, the changes Google have made to Analytics is a major step forward, and makes proving the ROI of our b2b marketing campaigns a little easier. Why not check it out? We think you’ll be as impressed as we were.

Question is: Do I join the bandwagon of Fiestas, Corsas and Fiats zooming and zipping around, or do I keep on pedalling?

You see, I'm a cyclist through and through and it’s hard to shake off that smug feeling of self superiority, so let me try and explain why:

Upon joining Marketecture, I faced a problem; how do I get into work? I live in Stockport and it cost me a whopping thirty quid to travel in a taxi for my final interview. Public transport links are lacking – there’s no train station nearby, and it would take me two buses, and roughly an hour and thirty minutes by public transport. Luckily I discovered there was the Manchester Cycle path, a disused rail line converted to a path, spanning Debdale park in Reddish, right through to Chorlton. Ideal for a pleasant and scenic route into work…brilliant!

Ever since then, come rain, shine, snow, wind or thunderstorm, from pitch black to sunrise, I've been pedalling, panting, and pushing my bike down this well worn route, and I wouldn't want to change it for anything. I've watched the seasons change before my eyes - I've seen glorious sunrises and spring blooms, misty mornings and crunchy white snowscapes. No, I've not been stuck in a traffic jam, counting the seconds ‘til the next green light, or cursing at the silver BMW that's just cut me up. True, I may not enjoy the luxury of a warm and quiet interior, but there's something intoxicating about being exposed to the elements in all their extremities and glory. I'm probably going to learn to drive anyway - for longer trips, convenience and pure independence, the car is pretty much a necessity, but on a day like today, when the air is crisp, and the journey into work effortless and pleasant, I wouldn't swap my ride into work for anything.

A few facts about my cycle route: It's roughly 10 miles each way. I've been working at Marketecture for 15 months now, so I've travelled approximately 5250miles. That’s the same distance it takes to travel to either Los Angeles or Khatmandu! It costs me roughly £500 per year to service / maintain my bike (that’s about 9% of the cost of running the average car - which RAC reckons now costs a whopping £5,869 per year). It keeps me fit, I don't need to worry about spending countless hours pounding the treadmill, or dancing like a fool at Zumba or aerobics classes. The journey has saved our atmosphere around 1600kg of CO2, and countless other nasty emissions cars and buses give off.

I may give you a glib smirk as I filter past your turbo-charged 4x4 on the inside lane, but what I'm really thinking is "I wish more people would cycle to work, its actually quite fun".

We are currently looking into Marketecture signing up for the cycle to work scheme, you can find more info @ www.cyclescheme.co.uk

See you on the roads (and paths), and stay safe!

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Who says sometimes we do?

Happy Thanksgiving y'all

If you like what you see please consider sponsoring our team. Colin is our team captain this year so you can make a donation from his page: http://uk.movember.com/mospace/670760