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

Women are almost completely responsible for Pinterest’s success—according to Inside Network’s AppData. In fact, 97 percent of the site’s users are women.

Women trust recommendations from Pinterest more than any other platform, per BlogHer’s annual study on women and social media. Eighty-one trust Pinterest versus Facebook (67 percent) and Twitter (73 percent).

Why? Because women trust other women in their circles more than anyone else. As a result, 47 percent of women bought something based off a recommendation from Pinterest where as only 33 percent bought because of a recommendation on Facebook.

It’s no surprise that brands have been jumping on the Pinterest bandwagon in troves and have seen their followers grow over night. Many products are getting more exposure than they ever could on Facebook and Twitter, and it’s relatively easy to see why.

To sum it up, here are four reasons why Pinterest is superior to Facebook when targeting women:

1. It is simple, clean and fuss free. This makes browsing delightful and easy: two main components to marketing success. Because of Pinterest’s visually appealing layout, consumers just see a picture with very little text. Facebook on the other hand is very word heavy and can turn off potential consumers.

2. Marketers have an open window into consumers’ interests. They can easily see a gold mine of information on potential customers. For example, an interior design marketing team can see who is influential in the ‘home decor’ section. They can then start following and see what trends people are repining and liking.

3. It’s relaxing. Pinterest creates a curated experience for its users in a fairly anonymous way. No constant updating of feeds, no overload of people’s lives. On Pinterest it’s about enjoying your hobbies—not having to like someone’s status or wish anyone a Happy Birthday. It lets users share experiences in a negative-free zone, briefly comment and move on without the weight of Facebook etiquette.

4. Brands have found cool ways to use it. Martha Stewart Living and Kate Spade are pinning like crazy with overwhelming response by adding more than 19,000 and 34,000 followers respectively. Kotex even has bragging rights for hosting one of the first Pinterest campaigns. The brand found 50 “inspiring” women in Israel and looked at what they were pinning on Pinterest. Then, Kotex sent the women a virtual gift. If she pinned the gift, she then got a real one in the mail that was based on something she had pinned. The result: success—nearly 100% of the women pinned and commented on their gifts.

All told, Pinterest has brought women together online in a way never seen before and tapped into an extremely influential consumer market without even trying. In many ways, this makes Pinterest genuinely more appealing than Facebook and far more trendy among women consumers who get the picture.

Melissa Pitts is a marketing intern at gyro. She blogs regularly at Newstaco.com, FlamingTortillas.com and Americas Quarterly.
Follow her at @mpittsm

Originally published at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network

1. It’s all about the packaging. In his unveiling of Katniss and Peeta to the world, Cinna took a negative and turned it into a positive. Given that they were from District 12 (the poor mining district), Katniss wondered if they were to be dressed as miners or stripped naked and covered in coal dust. Instead, he made Katniss “the girl who was on fire,” right down to the synthetic flame of the headdress. Yes, when you’re competing against 11 other products on the global stage, it helps to be the one that’s on fire.

2. Don’t be afraid to flaunt your talents. Within a company, marketing can get lost in the mix if it isn’t communicated properly to everyone (the CEO, the CFO, IT, everyone). That’s why it’s good to remember that if you’ve got the skills and your peers are ignoring you, make them notice. Or shoot right at their heads just like Katniss, who unleashed an arrow straight at the Gamemakers’ table, skewering an apple that sat before them in a pig’s mouth and pinned it to the wall. Your message needs to be communicated loud and clear, just like hers.

3. Don’t be afraid to make your own rules. Today it’s Pinterest. Yesterday it was Facebook. Who knows what the next hot marketing channel will be. Marketers have more opportunity than ever to share their brand with the world. This means taking risks, experimenting and making up new rules as they go. (SPOILER ALERT) Like Katniss and Peeta, who threatened the Gamemakers with their poison berries, marketers need to consider drastic measures as the media mix continues to evolve daily.

4. You’ll never survive without your sponsors. Let’s call this one the homage to Rush Limbaugh. It’s one thing to be edgy and a challenger brand, but you still need to be likable enough to have supporters (or, in his case, sponsors). Otherwise, you will end up like Rush or Belvedere vodka—left trying to explain and coping with lost revenue. Katniss and Peeta received several gifts from their sponsors just in the nick of time. None was more important than the medicine Katniss received to save Peeta and herself.

5. Make sure your message is humanly relevant. Katniss deliberated with Haymitch as to how she should handle her debut interview. How would she portray herself to the world? She opted to tell the truth about her family and her sister Prim, whom she loved dearly. Today more than ever, it’s important to be humanly relevant. It’s too easy to be numb with all of the messaging thrown our way. Consumers want to feel emotion. They also want someone or something to root for— make that your brand.

Kenneth Hein is director of North American marketing for gyro, the global ideas shop

Follow him @KennethHein

Originally published at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network

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

He gives plenty of texture around the comment (how agencies overcompensate for various deficiencies by stressing digital, etc.), but one can take the comment at face value and still glean plenty, especially in the wake of Steve Jobs’ recent passing.

From day one, Jobs understood how much technology depended on the human touch, figuratively and literally. And that if there were a one-word catch-all, it wouldn’t be “digital” but rather “design.” And design, Jobs said, was not merely how good something looked but how well it worked.

To him (and for us), digital was more than just tools but extensions of our limbs and imaginations. Not hardware and software. Lifeware! Sight, feel and now voice are the operating principles that drive Apple. Not “technology solutions,” a phrase, like the word digital, that couldn’t sound more inhuman if it tried.

Oh, the irony! For the last decade or longer, we marketing geniuses have gone great guns trying to bolster our digital creds, doing everything in our power to look savvy, often at the expense of working savvy. We learned the hard way that flashy microsites were likely meaningless to our clients’ businesses. And hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube often meant winning a popularity contest without any prize. We realized that brands aren’t social just because they’re on Facebook and Twitter. And so on …

The costs have been tremendous—to us and to our clients. But make no mistake, because clients are as culpable as we are. The clamoring for digital came from all corners. I’d argue that social media (another techie term) has exploded the myth of digital, reminding us tweet by tweet that people are and always will be living, breathing human beings; in other words: analog.

However painful the learning curve, this is good news for those of us toiling in Ad Land. Agencies are at their best when we put ideas before clients and, dare I say, technology.

Steffan Postaer is Executive Creative Director of gyro San Francisco

Follow him @Steffan1

He blogs regularly at Gods of Advertising.

Originally published at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network

No wonder we have a reputation of being entitled. We have more than we could ever want and need thrown at our feet, 24/7.

As both a member of Generation Y and an ad man, I have some insider tips to pass your way—some do’s and don’ts—that can help you reach our ever-stimulated, ever-distracted group.

Five Ways to Gain Our Attention

1. Make it participatory: I still see TV, print and even online campaigns that simply shout a message without inviting participation. In this hands-on world, you can’t afford to miss that opportunity, especially not with the active and tech-savvy Generation Y.

2. Make it easy: We have media ADD. If we don’t get it right away, or at least see how to get it, we’ll lose interest and move on to something we do know how to use.

3. Make it shareable: And not just for Facebook and Twitter, but anywhere and everywhere, especially new trending sites like Pinterest. If you don’t know what that site is yet, Generation Y does, and they are there waiting for you.

4. Take a risk: Gen Y likes daring brands. We’re looking for something that stands out from the crowd in a real way, which rarely happens when you play it safe. Find a great idea, and instead of testing it to death, go with your gut, take a risk, and see how we respond to it in a real-world “test.”

5. Give it meaning: With a reputation for being entitled and spoiled, it’s easy to think we care only about ourselves. Nothing could be further from the truth. We’re altruistic, optimistic, passionate, and want to be part of something bigger than ourselves. Give your message a relevant, meaningful focus, and we could become your most loyal evangelists. Levi’s Go Forth campaign did a pretty good job of capturing that feeling, and Tom’s Shoes wrote it into their business model. You can too.

Five Ways to Lose Our Attention

1. Take yourself too seriously: The power of funny is incredible, especially with Generation Y. We love to laugh. It makes us feel closer to each other and closer to your brand. And your brand doesn’t have to be an Old Spice or Burger King to make a joke. Serious brands can still use humor to illustrate a more serious point. I’d recommend keeping a comedian or two on staff for just such an occasion.

2. Be vague: Mission statements and brand platforms sound great in the boardroom, they but mean next to nothing to a 20-something who will skip your ad after about 0.7 seconds.

3. Give us a product instead of an experience: If you’re VW, you don’t sell cars. You sell a transportation experience. From the moment we consider buying a new car, to the moment years later when we trade it in for a new one, we want to be engaged. Give us an experience, not a product. Kodak thought they sold pictures. Now their business will be the butt of every what-not-to-do marketing case study for years to come.

4. Make fun of us: Take a look at this Samsung Super Bowl ad and tell me there isn’t an army of offended tech geeks—who love waiting in line for the latest iWhatever—eager to bash you online. Making fun of us isn’t the way to convert us.

5. Talk down to us: I’ve heard various decision-makers say things like, “I get it, but our customers won’t,” and “We need to dumb down the language for our customers.” If you think your target market is dumb, it will come across not just in your ads but also in your entire company culture. Try it with Generation Y, and we’ll go hang out with someone who thinks everything we do is brilliant (like Doritos).

So we of Generation Y are a pretty strange bunch, and we like it that way. Learning to reach us isn’t just good business, but it’s also a way to prepare for the future of advertising and marketing. Because we’re going to get older, technology will get only more complex, and the next generation … well, they are even weirder than we are.

Brian Havig is a copywriter at gyro

Originally published at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network

On Feb. 27, I received a handwritten thank you note from the Tiffany’s sales associates who assisted me with my purchase. It’s not uncommon to receive a thank you from Tiffany’s given its reputation for service, but in the same pile of mail was a handwritten thank you from my florist. The florist’s note was the first I’d received after years of doing business with them.

Minutes later, I received a phone call from Pete, the manager of the Lorien Hotel and Spa, inviting my wife and me for a return trip—free of charge—as a result of some service issues we had experienced during our stay. Pete realized that those misfires disrupted an important customer experience (see my note above about “continual travel” and “well deserved”) and offered to make it right.

Significantly impressed with the three simultaneous acts of kindness, I thought to myself that maybe there is a silver lining to the recession. Maybe companies have been reminded that customers are, in fact, important to their success.

A customer is defined as an individual, not a segment that scores the highest on a propensity model or an occupation with a “desirable socioeconomic profile.” A person with feelings and beliefs who has had an experience with a brand, a company representative, a product or service, might be most likely to decide to buy it again, or tell a friend, or both, if that experience was a good one.

In a new study published by Accenture titled The New Realties of “Dating” in the Digital Age, 85 percent of consumers who posted a comment about a negative online experience switched providers. And these consumers are getting harder to please. Customer service expectations have been increasing consistently over the last four years, with 44 percent of consumers saying their expectations are slightly or much higher than the previous year, compared to only 31 percent in 2008.

The study also identifies five potential blind spots over the course of the provider-customer relationship that could predispose customers to switch providers:

*Nice to Meet You – Missing the chance to set the right expectations at the onset of the relationship.
*You Don’t Know Me Anymore – Missing subtler changes that matter in customers’ need for special treatment or reward.
*Cheating Heart – Overlooking signs customers are itching to switch.
*Are You Listening – Failure to offer consumers opportunities to engage with a provider.
*Trinkets Won’t Save Me – Relying on point solutions to satisfy and keep customers.

The “cheating heart” effect points to companies over emphasis on retention, which may cause them to miss important shifts in buying behavior that could signal a future switch in vendors. Thankfully, my florist carefully monitors my purchase patterns and reminds me of purchases I make at certain times of the year (birthdays, anniversaries, etc.), creating a win-win for both of us.

As the researchers note, failure to notice these subtle changes in behavior puts the company at risk for eventually losing the customer. For example, 27 percent of respondents mentioned that they had stayed with their bank/financial services provider but have added another provider (a partial switch), a foot out the door that eventually leads to customer attrition.

So remember to treat your customer as you would a loved one, with respect, kindness and an occasional gift to smooth over any misgivings. If you don’t, that cheating heart might just leave you.

Mark Johnson, CEO of Loyalty 360, in an interview identifying the top loyalty trends for 2011 stated, “Loyalty will focus more on emotions than on rational, incentive-based initiatives. Behavioral economists tell us that economic decision-making is 70 percent emotional and 30 percent rational, which is why incentive-based loyalty programs that tend to be rational do not work well. It’s the emotional side of the decision-making process that creates connected, passionate, engaged customers.“

The thank you cards and the phone call I received were specific to me and my experience. They weren’t form letters generated by a transactional or CRM system, based on my purchase. The notes were handwritten by the people who assisted me and mentioned the specific purchases I made with them.

They were relevant to me, left an impression and got me talking about the experience. I didn’t receive bonus points or special discounts. Instead, I got a response from someone who appreciated my business and cared enough about my experience to reach out to me on a personal and emotional level, which is how you can create connected, engaged customers and prevent “a cheating heart.”

Scott Gillum leads gyro’s Channel Marketing practice and is president of gyro Washington, D.C.

Follow Scott on Twitter @SGillum.

Originally published at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network

Millions of people around the world have been talking about brand Ireland over the course of this Saint Patrick’s Day weekend. This year, for the first time, Tourism Ireland can assess the value of that engagement and compare it to the investment we have made in creating branded messaging.

Tourism Ireland is currently ranked the third largest national tourist board on Facebook, with approximately 700,000 fans across 20 markets in eight languages. In the absence of an accepted industry standard to assess the value of this beyond simply counting fan numbers, we developed the concept of Social Equivalent Advertising Value (SEAV).

Just as the PR sector has traditionally measured its impact by the cost of buying advertising to cover the equivalent column inches, so a similar approach can be applied to social media. The more a brand message is shared, the more “column inches” are gained and the value of this can be compared to the cost of equivalent online advertising.

We identified four levels of consumer engagement with brands in social media:

*Post Impressions: viewing a brand post.
*Page Impressions: viewing a brand owner’s social platform.
*Personal Actions: consuming brand content such as photos, videos or links.
*Public Actions: sharing brand content with their network.

We then categorized the actions that consumers can take across the major social platforms into each of these groupings, and attributed a financial value to the cost of delivering a comparable consumer engagement online. This allowed us to quantify the value of our social engagement in Facebook at the end of last year at an annualized level of €1.7 million.

We have adopted SEAV as a corporate KPI and set organization-wide growth targets. These objectives drive our local marketing teams to continue to not We all know that it’s no longer the size of your social media audience that matters but rather how those people engage with you. Finally, we can place a value on the return.

Read more about how the SEAV model works and how you can apply it in your organization at http://www.scribd.com/TourismIreland

Mark Henry is the Central Marketing Director of Tourism Ireland, the agency responsible for promoting tourism to the island of Ireland from across the globe.

Originally published at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network

Pinterest relies on pinboards, or themes for the content. Other Pinners (Pinterest users – stay with me here) can subscribe to one or more of your pinboards.

Pinterest has a passionate user base, which is exploding by the day. It is the third fastest-growing site on the Web per Comscore.

However, many seasoned Pinners — mostly designers, photographers and foodies — resent the influx of newcomers, seeing their contribution to be mostly unoriginal or uninspiring. In order not to breed ill will among these innovators and early adopters, limit your pins to the insightful, original and thought provoking.

Here are some ways Pinterest can fit into your content marketing plan:

1. Thought leadership. Got an interesting chart or infographic in your latest white paper? Pin it! But don’t forget to include a call to action in your pin’s description.

2. Traffic generation. Drive people to your blog by including a strong visual and pinning that.

3. Maximizing existing creative. Got a nice visual campaign going on? Pin those bad boys!

4. Pictures of people. Show off your company’s culture by involving the staff. Include snapshots in and around the office.

5. Pictures of products. If you sell a thing that can be seen with eyeballs, be it books, heavy machinery or label makers, putting it on Pinterest is an option. The travel industry has already firmly embraced it with jealousy-inducing shots.

6. The Pin-it button. You don’t have to do all the pinning yourself. Place the Pin-it button on your site to enable users to share your content on their pinboards.

7. Other people’s stuff. If you share only your own content, you’ll quickly become boring. Pinterest has a lot to do with sharing what you find interesting and insightful from other sources.

Is Pinterest for everyone or every company? No. And only time will tell if Pinterest has the influence of Twitter or the ubiquity of YouTube. But if there’s one thing social media has taught us, it’s this: It’s better to experiment early on. In the case of Pinterest, odds are, you’ll at least see some cute kitty pictures.

Barrett Condy is a senior copywriter at gyro, the global ideas shop.
Follow him @barrettcondy

Originally published at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network

Take a look and try them out:
1. Make your Google+ identity part of your online properties and campaigns. Now that it influences search results, it’s a gift that keeps on giving.

2. Put your +1 button everywhere. It not only enables quick engagement that’s visible through your customers’ social graphs, but it also gives you measurement capability. Perhaps most important, it allows you to “store” user engagement around an event or campaign long after the event itself has ended.

3. Leverage Google Hangouts. Take a look at ChefHangout.com, a company whose entire business model is to use Google Hangouts to sell cooking classes online. A professional chef teaches the classes, and students can even choose the cuisine they want to learn about. It’s a clever idea that leverages Google’s massive infrastructure investment to deliver a great service to a potentially global market at very low cost.

4. Keep your pages fresh with quality content instead of quantity.

5. Social media is social only if people engage. Ask for interactions.

6. Use lots of rich media. Google+ is a good environment for that.

7. Don’t think of social and mobile as a medium, but as a bridge between offline and online. A customer is looking at your billboard. What happens when the customer points his mobile phone at it? When someone sees your product online, that person will want to know what her friends think of it. Are you enabling that feature?

8. Overall, get mobile. It doesn’t have to be fancy. Half of the United States has a smartphone, but 80 percent of businesses don’t have a mobile presence. A custom website or landing page is great, but even something as simple as a listing in Google Maps, or the ability to click a phone number to call you, can be useful and welcome.

For many more insights from the keynote, you can see the full webcast here.

Originally published at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network