Communication is no longer about just businesses talking to anyone; it’s about people talking to people. Forget who’s on the end of the conversation. This is about where it all starts. The future of communications is C2C, or consumer2consumer or people2people.

Individuals, whether buying for business or themselves, are talking to and listening to other consumers. They are setting the agenda, leading the conversation, sharing their views, recommending the best products and deciding whether brands are successful or not.

No longer are consumers just taking in information corporations and brands are spewing at them. Now they question and make brands earn their loyalty. Because of social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, consumers are now quick to ask brands: What can you do for me?

Case in point: Take the fatal example of Netflix. When Netflix raised prices last summer, customers became infuriated, took to their blogs and Twitter accounts, and raised hell. Netflix was humiliated and has yet to fully recover from the CRM crisis that has plagued it ever since. Instead of being accountable to its customers, Netflix let Facebook comments go unanswered, and the company’s president responded with an answer about profits rather than speak to its customers directly in a level manner. Millions of customers felt betrayed and gave Netflix quite a scare by cutting service, resulting in its stock prices taking a 60 percent nosedive.

So, our challenge is getting people talking about brands in a positive way, not getting brands to talk to people. With so many touch points, brands must move away from the traditional 1960s formula of one-sided information and start having conversations with consumers. Consumers want brands to be authentic and have a real human voice they can speak with when something goes wrong (or right).

Advertisers are in complete denial if they think they can continue with the same tired, one-sided formula. Brands need to have authentic conversations with consumers if they want to survive. Consumers are talking to each other, so why aren’t brands following?

Fiona Menzies is managing director at gyro Dubai.

Originally published at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network

As every b2b agency will know, the Internet’s innate sharabilility is returning us to a community-focused society that cherishes “we” over “me”. This networked economy affects contemporary marketing hugely. With people more open to building closer connections with brands than ever before, brands must be more human and open to co-creation of the marketing messaging and the product simultaneously with their customers to put the aforementioned honesty into practice. Tapping into the collective experiences, skills and ingenuity of hundreds of millions of people around the world is a complete departure from the inward looking, producer- versus-consumer innovation model so common to corporations around the world. And there are many a b2b agency out there still following in this vein.

Brands need to go beyond loyalty to establish mutually beneficial networks to give customers what they want; otherwise the Internet will allow them to find another route to get what they want. After all, customers are becoming competitors and brands are better off “employing” them by pulling them into their network. Brands are sitting on a bed of emotional human beings eager to be a part of brand creation.

In the summer of 2010, gyro, a global B2C and B2B ideas shop, assembled a group at Hyper Island, the world-famous digital training center in Karlskrone, Sweden, for what we call the gyro Academy, an intense professional development program for our up-and-comer colleagues. We exposed these students to our techniques and tools for ideation and collaboration. The group was asked to select a challenge against which they could practice these tools. They chose “work-life balance.”

Alas, I am not among our youngest colleagues. So, when I came to the session as a mentor, I was gruff and dismissive. “Quit whining! People have been complaining to me for 30 years about the long and daunting hours of the ad agency business. Do you want a job, or do you want a career? This is no business for clock-watchers. It’s a fact of life in the agency business. There’s nothing new about this work-life balance issue,” I said.

Then one of them said, “Oh, yes, there is,” and she reached in her jeans pocket and set her iPhone on the table. “This has changed. It’s attached to me. I cannot disconnect from it.”

It was for us a moment of epiphany; of sudden revelation and insight. It was not as if we had been oblivious to the spread of networked communications and handheld devices, or even how important it was to deliver new forms of communication to reach people with these media. But as people engaged in perfecting marketing communications, it struck us like a lightning bolt.

Work has changed—and people at work have changed profoundly.

Oh, we had understood for many years that it was technically easier than ever to identify targets, locate them, reach them, engage them and transact with them; even to spur them to exchange messages among themselves. We understood clearly how technology had changed, but we confess we neglected just how much it had changed them: the people to whom we were marketing.

Being at work is a state of mind; no longer a place or even a fixed period of the day.

The Internet, mobile telecom, social networking and a 24/7 global economy have eliminated the boundaries of time and space that once defined the workplace. Technology has caused work to expand to longer hours of the day and has attached work to people wherever they are.

Productivity-enhancing technology has not served to increase the amount of leisure time we enjoy—quite the contrary. It’s caused work to spill over its banks, flooding more hours of the day and more days of the week—curiously, as a matter of people’s own behavior and choices. Work goes home. Home goes to work. People are constantly toggling between working and “home-ing,”making decisions, personal and professional, at all hours of the day. They master time, rather than the other way around.

People in an @Work State of Mind today are exposed to a constant, multi-point flow of communications from not just customers, suppliers and co-workers, but also from family, friends, would-be friends and network members. They are not only engaged in considering brand messages while at work, but also championing them to their social networks. People in the @Work State of Mind represent a powerful theater for brand communications; perhaps the most powerful. They exert double purchasing power on both their own needs and those of their companies.

Their eyes are on screens: small, medium and large.

They are already in engagement mode.

They are considering solutions carefully.

They are making decisions.

And this @Work State of Mind is a shared state of mind. People today are connected to and communicating with others in the same state of mind. This makes them a switching station of enthusiasm and endorsement channeled toward decision makers and influencers, immediately.

Mining opportunity from the rich vein of the @Work State of Mind requires new methods and models. The model must be much more real-time, agile and even uncontrolled.

It is an approach that must be anchored in anthropology and behavioral science, relying more heavily than ever on understanding human-scale motives and at striking responsive chords of emotion—particularly if people are to be compelled to act and advocate spontaneously on a brand’s behalf.

Mastering the @Work State of Mind promises breakthrough success for marketers, exchanging the mediocre performance of conventional methods for the high performance of programs radically reset to the way people really live, work, dream and prosper.

Gyro is delighted to have at its disposal the amazing resources of Forbes Insights in the ongoing investigation of this profoundly important area of inquiry. This report is but the first of several products to emanate from “The @Work State of Mind Project,” a collaborative marketing R&D project led by gyro that includes participants from business, government, the arts, healthcare, NGOs, academia and entertainment. If you have an interest in sharing in this discovery, we hope you will join us.

Follow Rick on Twitter at @MrBtoB

To read more about the @Work State of Mind, here are two related articles: Who Has Control Over Your Time? and The Boardroom has Been Replaced by the Kitchen Table.

A keen understanding from every b2b agency into how these devices are used across the business world will pay dividends in audience engagement and client ROI. We have been researching the effect that such mobilisation of technology has had on the business world in our recent @Work State of Mind report, and the findings highlight an appetite to use mobile tech to its fullest among key business decision makers. 84% of those polled felt better prepared to make decisions because of the freedom it gives them to work anywhere and at anytime.

Every creative agency should look to utilise this willingness to blur the line between personal and professional to develop campaigns solely built for mobile and social communication platforms. Not only will this strategy grow engagement in a world increasingly hostile to brand messaging, but it will help push the boundaries in the global b2b industry and establish each b2b agency as a leading force in the sector.

Advertising was based on a simple funnel concept called the Hierarchy of Effects. The funnel said, push messaging out using these three networks and some print and radio, and people will become aware, form an opinion, make a commitment to buy, and then stay loyal to the brand–the traditional push/pull advertising model. Then the model broke—actually, it shattered into thousands of fragments.

After Al Gore re-invented the Internet (wink), everything changed and the funnel was turned on its head.  Now, people started to form opinions based on well, other people. Networks and communities arose, and some voices were stronger than others. And the others followed.

Social media went from an interesting idea to one of the most powerful tools in the toolbox. Why? Because advocacy started to help form people’s opinions before branding. This is the polar opposite of the shotgun approach of many forms of traditional media.

So where does this leave us? What is media? The answer: It is a series of connections. Today’s media mix is about finding the best ways to connect with the consumer or decision maker.

It is about finding the best ways to connect with the target, with our planning, account and creative peers, and with the ever-increasing world of vendors who bring new ideas to the table every day. Together, we have the opportunity to become an incubator of media firsts via all of the emerging outlets as well as the tried-and-true.

In fact, sometimes the best route is still the traditional route. That aspect of the mix isn’t broken. There is nothing to fix. We just need to connect the old with the new. Awareness building and advocacy are far stronger together than separately.

There is more creativity and excitement around developing media plans than ever before. And the way we connect with our audiences will only continue to become deeper, richer and more engaging. For folks involved in media planning, or better yet, connections planning (such as myself) there has never been a better time to be alive.

Richard Lefkowitz is Connections Planning Director of gyro North America

Originally published at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network

We’re witnessing the explosion of new formats, channels, categories, media, clients, agencies, disciplines, platforms, experiences and it’s accelerating day by day. Combine this with the connected workplace that we call the @work state of mind and you have what is emphatically the most exciting time to work in our business.

But what business is that exactly? To us, it’s one that germinates and directs humanly relevant ideas.

However, here’s the thing: Ideas aren’t linear. And neither is the process of developing or igniting them through a connected experience.

This reality puts demands on account handlers and is causing wide-ranging industry debate about “future-proof suits.” Here in Stockholm we’ve taken this debate to the highest level and have begun lecturing at one of the best communication schools in the world: Berghs. At the school, the intersection of creativity, technology and new thinking converges and feels like a perfect storm.

This new energy is fueling our ideas shop, and it’s exciting.

In an environment where the idea is king, there can be no hierarchies. Digital doesn’t sit in a department. Neither does creativity. Modern account handlers must run an iterative process that is collaborative, inclusive and multidisciplinary so that our clients have the chance to connect in a world that is always on.

So, what is the most important thing in today’s landscape?

It always has been and it always will be the work.

But great work is risky. Great work needs a brave client. And that means that a strong client relationship is more important than ever.

This is where the remastered account handler comes into play. The remastered account handler understands how to make it happen but understands that the nature of it has changed.

I still remember my first day in a large London agency and being told by the CEO that the account handler is like the quarterback. Today this picture is more complex: There is no playbook to develop a great idea.

The modern account handler has to be entrepreneurial, tenacious, creative and digitally native. It’s about creating the conditions that make a difference.

However, the very nature of making a difference has changed too. So many things can kill an idea early.

Ideas often come from the unknown, and this can be scary for clients. Managing expectations through the ideation process is key. We have to help our clients understand that a leap into the unknown can be exhilarating.

Developing a PR idea, branded content for a Web TV show, inventing new types of social interaction, creating ongoing conversations with emotional content—none of these ideas has preprogrammed steps.

It’s incumbent on the remastered account handler to build confidence with clients and inspire them into action. Dare to show your client why it’s called the great unknown. It’s about much, much more than managing the relationship.

When you are base jumping in the dark, it’s about much more than trust too.

Problems are bound to occur, but having problems means you are pushing things. Problems are good. The modern account handler needs to remember that problem solving is our currency. It creates value to your colleagues and to your client. More important, it creates a culture where good ideas can germinate and grow into truly great ones.

Martin Johnson is an account director at gyro, the global ideas shop.

Follow him @mjsverige

He also blogs regularly here

Here is the slideshare presentation on the future-proof suits given to Berghs.

Originally published at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network

Whether their focus is online or offline, any savvy public relations person understands the benefits from being presented on page one. This makes it pretty ironic that PR pros continuously make the same mistake: Failing to use press releases, blogs, and other tools at their disposal to improve organic search visibility.

After all, they hold the unique position of pushing out messages to create pull for their clients. The copy must start being strategically used to hit key messaging AND to drive search authority and traffic to your client’s Web site.
So, for all of you PR folks that are currently writing your final drafts and are ready to hit send, stop and consider the four points below. Each will help you increase your SEO visibility:

1: Employ the one link per 50 words rule. Excessive linking is frowned upon by search engines and may be considered a manipulative linking spam. The general rule-of-thumb is to include one unique link per 50 words, so that linking is viewed as “natural” which carries increased keyword rankings. This is true for all online communications.

2: Be unique with your anchor text. Do not hyperlink your company name 10 times in a three-paragraph press release or in a blog post. Not only does it tend to bother the reader, it is going to have the opposite effect with the search engines than you intended. (Namely, they may penalize the page).

Instead, be unique with anchor text. This means hyperlinking different terms to create diversity for your keyword portfolio. Select the right mix of terms that describe your service offerings and capabilities, which will have the effect of generating better visibility for the terms that your prospects and customers are searching for. (In short, make sure you pick the words that people are most likely to key in when they are looking for your company or client.)

3: Don’t just point to your client’s homepage. Now that you are using a variety of terms, make sure they aren’t all pointing to same place. Consider linking to pages that are deeper than just the home page to increase relevancy.

4. Remember: Not all external sites are created equal. A word about where your content lives – a few authoritative links are far more valuable than a large number of spam links. In other words, a link on the Forbes CMO Network has stronger domain authority than 100 tiny blog posts. Ultimately, you want your articles linked from the sites with the highest authority.

The moral of the story: Link unique, diversified keywords to deeper pages (beyond the home page) from external sources with the highest authority.

Do this and you up your chances of making page one of Google.

Don Ball is a marketing strategist at gyro, the global ideas shop.

Follow him @DonaldJBall

Originally published at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network

It’s not just nostalgia or cinematic pastiche that has critics and audiences talking worldwide. “The Artist” is particularly special because, in stripping down the conventional film to its most basic elements, it’s showing that the magic of cinema isn’t lost. If anything, it makes the experience much more captivating than its modern-day counterparts. The very absence of both sound and colour has sparked the imagination of audiences.

It’s a valuable reminder to all of us in marketing that effective, creative communication should always be as simple as possible. The age-old adage “less is more” certainly rings true here.

Of course, people don’t consciously decode advertising into simple audible or factual messages. The imagery, music, sound and writing connected to the creative idea are all designed to draw attention and make an advert memorable. The key is that the techniques used in the piece are relevant – both for the ad and for the audience.
Boiled-down, distilled ideas are the ones that stand out and ignite emotion in audiences – which is our mission at gyro.

Emotion is the key to intimacy between businesses, brands and people. It’s there in every choice humans make, whether they’re buying a conference-calling service like Powwownow, or in the case of George Valentin in “The Artist,” finding out how best to cope with the arrival of “the talkies.”

For marketers, it is really about getting to the essence of things that make businesses and brands matter to people again. “The Artist” reinforced this essence and reminded us: The simpler the concept, the more it can breathe.

Peter Davis is executive creative director at gyro Manchester.
Follow Peter on Twitter @digitaldavis.

Originally published at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network

Hawk Partners completed research on hotel channel usage and found that 65 percent of travelers who booked a recent stay used online review sites, such as TripAdvisor, to select their hotel rather than rely on those idyllic, picturesque ads of beach scenes. Note that 74 percent of the 1,200 travelers surveyed said that advertising (defined as TV and print) had no impact on their selection.

When asked to comment about which channels had the most influence on hotel selection, travelers responded with promotions (Groupon, Living Social, reward sites) and social media ranking highest, with advertising coming in a distant fourth.

Has the struggling economy and the rise of daily-deal sites like Groupon and Living Social given rise to a new breed of consumers who put a premium on price over brand? Bryan Gernert, CEO of Resonate Networks, states, “It depends on what consumer segments you’re looking to target [however] … and as this is an election year, you may even want to think about their party affiliation.

“For example: Consumers who identify themselves as Republicans in the age range of 35 to 44 are 41 percent less likely to buy based on brand, and 38 percent more likely to buy on price, compared to boomers. Boomers, on the other hand, still value brands regardless of political affiliation. Consumers aged 55 to 64 years are 35 percent more likely to buy on brand than any other consumer segment.” The trend was mirrored in the Hawk Partners research, which found travelers under 45 to be more influenced by promotions.

Brand does still matter and so does price. As channels continue to expand and evolve, marketers need to have deeper insights into audience behaviors and influencers in order to understand which segment to target with an offer. As a result, the Digital Advertising Alliance has just launched a new campaign promoting the benefits of “interest-based advertising” and companies such as Resonate Networks are providing deeper insights into buyers’ psyche based on their attitudes, beliefs and values.

Why is that important? Because consumer behaviors are continually changing, often shaped by new technologies and channels. While the study findings apply only to the travel and hospitality industry, the data could be a signal for a broader trend worth following. Specifically, the surprising find is that the promotions’ channels are impacting what have traditionally been considered key brand-advertising-oriented metrics.

Those travelers using promotional channels for selecting hotel brands are more likely to recall that brand top of mind on an unaided basis than guests who used other channels. In addition, they are also more likely to stay at the hotel again and recommend that brand to friends, compared to those who used other channels.

“What we may be seeing is a ‘halo effect’ of the deal,” explains Rob Duboff, CEO of Hawk Partners. “Consumers like the deal and, as a result, the brand.”

And that finding is significant, because personal recommendations (77 percent) and online review sites (65 percent), which are shaped by personal experiences, have the largest impact on influencing hotel selection.

As the authors of the research note, advertising has “significantly more influence than guests give it credit,” which has long been the case. Brand advertising does provide a lift effect that has typically been hard to quantify, but given the importance being placed on ROI, the impact of promotional channels is worth noting and watching as well as the consumers who use them.

By Scott Gillum, President gyro Washington, D.C. and Practice Leader Channel Marketing

Originally published at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network

But why is the idea of a corporation being a person such a horrible thought? The reality is that no one likes to do business with things. We like doing business with people with names, faces, voices and human emotions.

That’s why the more your corporation functions like a person, the better. Here are six tactics to ensure that your corporation acts more like a human:

1. People know when they are talking to a robot.
Ever seen the latest “human robots” to come out of Japan lately? Creepy. Don’t be that company. For your humanizing efforts to be successful, they have to be true and sincere. You can’t fake it or be something you’re not. It has to become a part of your corporate culture, from your ads to the company Christmas party. People will be able to tell right away if you’re fake or not, and they will respond accordingly.

2. People have names and faces.
Flo. Mayhem. The Priceline Negotiator. I’m Mac; this is PC. E-Trade Baby. The Burger King. Ronald McDonald. The Cavemen and recently, Clint Eastwood as Detroit. I could go on and on naming companies that have successfully captured their personality in an actual face. And it works, because we remember people better than we remember headlines or corporate mission statements. Other companies let us in on their “inner workings”: State Farm’s University of Farmers and Samuel Adams documentary-style commercials come to mind. The campaigns make their entire company look human and relatable.

3. People talk to each other.
How healthy is your company’s social networking? Does your advertising and marketing focus on talking at your customers, or are you talking with them? An exchange of ideas is called communication. Jamming your message down others’ throats is called annoying.

4. People apologize to other people.
Your customers are your customers because they saw something in what you provide that they liked. People are surprisingly responsive to a sincere and meaningful apology from another person. So when something goes wrong, reach out. It’s not enough anymore to just have a call center (more on that below). You have to go out and find what they are saying and communicate. In the Northeastern United States, “Snowpocalypse 2011” comes to mind and how some airlines handled it. JetBlue directly responded to 94 percent of its customers’ tweets about the storm. Delta, only 48 percent. US Airways, 0 percent per the Economist. Corporations and companies go out of their way to get customers, so why not work hard to keep them?

5. People are eager to call friends when they have a problem.
Are your customers eager to call you to help them resolve their problem? Or does the thought of calling customer service give them an anxiety attack? You want your customers to want to call you when they have a problem. That means you are given the chance to fix it instead of letting these dissatisfied customers silently slip off your sales sheets.

6. People give thoughtful gifts.
Do you reward your best customers? Good! That’s the first step. Now, did you pick out something special? Was the reward something personal or different? Or do your customers just file the “buy-10-get-1-free” card in their wallets with all the others? It’s one thing to reward your best customers. It’s another to do it in a way that sets you apart. In my opinion, we’re way past due for some innovative thinking on this tactic.

Transforming your corporation into a person isn’t just a nice thought. It’s good business. Corporations need to start behaving more like people, because, quite simply, people like people, and they’ll show their appreciation with their wallets and their loyalty.

By Brian Havig copywriter at gyro New York

Originally published at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network