London Ink B2B Marketing Communications Consulting, Strategy, Planning, Lead Gen, Content Marketing

Typically, we only talk to our customers when we are trying to sell something or address some kind of problem.
But try talking to your customers pro-actively–just to check in and see the world from their perspective (not your company’s).
When you do this, a number of things can happen, all of them [...]

Shashi Bellamkonda, the widely respected, DC-based Social Media Swami (his actual job title at his previous employer, Web.com), just made a big job change: He’s now VP of Digital Marketing at The Bozzuto Group, an integrated real estate services organization that is currently celebrating its 25th anniversary.
Shashi (@shashib) was kind enough to join me this [...]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MARKETING WEENIES LAUNCHES LOGO-DRONE TO STOP CORPORATE BRAND ABUSE
Innovative unmanned aerial vehicle designed to automatically search and destroy violations of corporate style guides; Future version will hunt down inconsistent email signatures
New York, NY – May 9, 2013  Due to the rapid proliferation of cubicled, J.Crew-wearing scofflaws who think they can just use, modify [...]

I had a great meeting recently with the CEO of a tech company–a prospective client. To describe what he views as the two basic categories of marketing, he said, “there’s ‘little m’ marketing and ‘capital M’ marketing.”
This is a great expression, and I instantly knew what he meant: Most discussions about B2B [...]

After reading a fascinating Wall Street Journal article titled, The Analogical Animal, I was reminded of something I often tell clients: We should never spend more than 30 seconds deciding what the main nav of our corporate web sites should include.
The gist of the article is that humans depend on analogies (not the literary kind) [...]

Introspective topic today: Have you ever experienced professional jealousy?
With the thousands of accomplishments (horn-tooting?) being posted by our LinkedIn connections and Facebook friends (guilty as charged), it’s easy to start comparing your career status or progress with that of others. Most people have doubts, particularly when they’re facing a challenge or setback.
For me, [...]

After a week of attending and speaking at several events, I’m pleasantly recounting the number of folks who volunteered they’ve seen and enjoyed–even benefitted from–these DRIVETIME MARKETING videos. I’m concluding that the videos seem to be doing a nice job of inexpensively keeping my name in front of the folks in my network and [...]

Henry Ford. Steve Jobs. Howard Schultz. Examples of visionaries who saw the potential of a huge market before there was any “proof” it existed, relying on their gut understanding of opportunities and human behavior.
Ford famously said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would’ve said ‘a faster horse,’” implying that he [...]

Organizations are spending millions of dollars on content marketing–non-sales information that is meant to showcase their knowledge, provide insights and engage prospects. Most often, this includes the “fireworks” approach of shooting content up into the internet in the hopes of getting a small number of new prospects to say “oooh” and “aaah.”

But what about [...]

Most companies still do too much telling and not enough listening. Most often the guilty party: The marketing team.
How about adopting the internal watchdog model that has worked in the journalism business and many governments: the ombudsman. According to Wikipedia, an ombudsman is “an official appointed by an organization with a significant degree of independence [...]