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

Shashi Bellamkonda has read the Steve Jobs biography! (He was on the library’s waiting list…) He has some interesting takes on how few companies stay customer focused and passionate AFTER they achieve big success.

Listen to Washington, DC area radio stations and you might hear some interesting things. Like a Pro Football Hall of Famer saying something like, “We deliver game changing, best of breed technology solutions for all of your Federal agency needs.” Or “We understand Federal agencies need to do more with less. That’s [...]

There are some great marketing and PR tools out there that are showing the ability to save marketers significant time and money.
Recently I needed to help one of my clients, a Federal cloud computing infrastructure provider, get the word out about a piece of news. Since we already had the messaging strategy and content–and were [...]

Here’s a lesson for small- to medium-size organizations. NFTE DC is considered one of the leading business-related non-profits in the Washington, DC area. They have managed to break through the DC traffic jam of mission statements, value propositions and testimonials by having a clear message and a seemingly ubiquitous presence in the community.
To [...]

Communications and marketing guru Robin Ferrier (@rferrier), whose day job is director of communications and marketing for Johns Hopkins’ Montgomery County campus, talks to @shashib about the upcoming Gaithersburg Book Festival.

Because marketers are marketers, we have to have a catchy name or theme for everything. So while on my way to moderate a panel discussion at the Mid-Atlantic Marketing Summit recently, I came up with (and then promptly discarded) 5 themes that capture the real essence of what’s happening in B2B marketing these days:
Here [...]

Software firm HubSpot is growing in large part by convincing companies that they are going about marketing all wrong–that they should create their own online channels and attract the right buyers by developing and distributing great content and SEO among other tactics–a discipline that has been dubbed “inbound marketing.”
As this recent Twitter dialogue shows, HubSpot’s [...]

Big issues with the recent “Blackberry. Yes, Blackberry” ad campaign:
The tagline implies some sort of “confessional” tone, as in, “We know your expectations of Blackberry are low, so you might be surprised to learn how great our phones really are.”
We’ve seen this “confessional/admission” approach before with Dominos (”We heard you, our pizza stinks.”) and GM [...]

It was a busy MARKETING CONFESSIONAL with @londonink and @shashib this week, with topics ranging from:

Last Friday’s successful Mid-Atlantic Marketing Summit (by the way, big kudos to Paul Sherman of Potomac Techwire and Paul Duning of Capital Communicator);
The trouble with thought leadership and content marketing (courtesy of @deb_lavoy, @gscottshaw, @ErinSlick and @chasgold);
Avon’s marketing woes;
And more.

Also [...]

In this edition of MARKETING CONFESSIONAL with @shashib and @londonink, Shashi Bellamkonda talks about a quote from John Kenneth Galbraith in which the celebrated Harvard economist refers to marketing as one of the “dark arts.”