I like the way they’ve acknowledged that viral marketing campaigns have been having a big impact since pre-2000 by recognising The Blair Witch Project as the winner.

I hadn’t realised that this low budget movie made $249m and that the interest in this strange movie about a bunch of young documentary makers was promoted by some clever viral campaign activity.

Today we get excited by the sheer creativity behind campaigns such as Old Spice: Smell Like a Man, Man 

But on the social journey to this we have seen many successful campaigns; one of my personal favourites from Christmas 1996 was the Office Max ‘Elf Yourself’ campaign which comes in at #7. But probably more famous and noteworthy is the wonderful Blendtec: Will it Blend? which sets the bar high in product repositioning.

Let me know your favourites, and any you think Forbes missed.

Whatever happened to total marketing spend, whether it went up, or down or stood still the evidence is that digital has taken a bigger slice of the pie.

This message came across very clearly in an interview based report B2B online: under the spotlight  I produced a few months back with CVL (now Transform) which included the observation from participants that “the job for B2B eMarketing teams is to…maximise the return on investment, continue to innovate and take best practice from wherever it exists in order to deliver on the promise.“

I’ve just been taking another look at what’s happening in B2B digital and I see that Forrester are bullish about the trend; they say B2B digital marketing spend will double to $4.8bn in 2014, as digital grabs a bigger slice of the marketing pie.

They go on to say; “B2B marketers will continue to invest heavily in paid search but will also begin to invest in display advertising and emerging marketing tactics such as social and mobile marketing…B2B marketers should focus on creating online customer interactions – not just driving leads“.

I was with the Heads of eCommerce for two of the UK’s big B2B companies today and sure enough they weren’t talking about struggling to get board attention and funding, they were talking about how best to invest their digital marketing budgets and how to track the return on investment. incidentally we did spend some time talking about how to use social media in the B2B world and I’d like to come back to that in another blog update because it’s very topical and there is some good stuff going on.

How the social media map has changed…

Flowtown have re-created the map for 2010 and update how the world of social media has changed. 

I love that Flowtown created a landmass called ” The rising island of Google buzz“…

With good reason it seems; there are rumblings coming from Google Towers to suggest they may be amassing their social media munitions ready to launch a serious assault on the Facebook dominance and steal some of their marketshare. They are building a seriosuly strong team (Mike Cassidy co-founder of Xfire being one I rate very highly for instance) and making some interesting acquisitions. So if Google’s generals have a solid strategy for the social media wars we could see them kick off a few tasty battles very soon.