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.

For any business, its website is a business asset with value that accrues over time and should be treated as such. Here are five timeless “worst practices” to avoid:

1) Link buying – Attempting to make your site more authoritative by paying for links (see J.C. Penney). 

A major element of most search engines’ ranking algorithm (especially Google’s) is “link popularity.”  Simply put, link popularity is a measure of the authority, trustworthiness and number of links pointing to a domain. Authoritative and trustworthy websites (Forbes, The New York Times, PBS, etc.) are able to pass along a significant amount of their authority and trust if they link to a company’s website. Not surprisingly, these links tend to be very difficult to get. However, there are also cases where sheer “tonnage” of links suffice to boost rankings and organic search traffic.

Unfortunately, it’s very common for sites to try to cheat the system. Instead of creating a remarkable website, stellar services and content, unethical Web marketers try to buy their way to the top by purchasing links. There is no shortage of site owners who would link to a site for a fee. Buying links should be avoided at all costs. It is a violation of any search engine’s Terms of Service, and it can get a site banned from the index.

J.C. Penney famously got caught in 2011 for buying large amounts of links. The company was banned from Google’s index for 90 days. While losing a full fiscal quarter’s worth of profit from organic search traffic is certainly nothing to take lightly, that’s not the worst-case scenario. Plenty of sites without the brand clout of J.C. Penney have been banned for much longer periods of time for the same infraction.

If “building links” is a service that an agency or vendor offers to you, have them explain to you exactly how they’re building links, and how their methods are within the engines’ Terms of Service.

2) Cloaking – Serving different content to a search engine versus a human visitor. 

The term “cloaking” certainly sounds dark and mysterious, but the concept is relatively simple. It means that a Web server will deliver different content based on whether the request is coming from a search engine or a Web browser.

Some “black hat” Web marketers use cloaking for very nefarious purposes, serving pages that are radically different to engines and humans. Usually the cloaked version served to the search engines is very text heavy (which engines understand well) and often targets off-topic, popular phrases just for the traffic it might pull in. The version served to humans is typically a conversion-centric page with very little content, trying to lure some fraction of visitors to pull out their credit cards and spend some money.

Not all cloaking is done with malicious intent. A few years ago, I worked with a very large comparison-shopping site, helping the international versions of its sites generate more traffic. One of the interesting things I noticed immediately was that it was cloaking its own home pages! Instead of the version that humans saw with products, photos and marketing copy, the cloaked version was a simple list of links to most of the categories for which the sites had products.

When I brought this issue to light, it turned out that the engineer responsible had knowingly done this. He thought it would be more helpful to search engines to present a simple list of links to enable them to discover the content on the site. He didn’t even know that cloaking was against the rules and could get the sites banned!

This kind of oversight, while not done maliciously, could have gotten the site into a penalty situation. Any agency you hire should be checking for cloaking on all of your Web properties as part of a standard technical SEO audit.

3) Keyword stuffing – Cramming page content full of a keyword to make the page appear more relevant for that keyword.

Keyword stuffing is a very old-fashioned tactic that stopped working well a long time ago—around 2005. The rationale was based on the notion that the more times a particular keyword appeared on the page, the more “relevant” an engine would consider that page to be for that keyword. Text on the page would be “stuffed” with the keyword, and it would read terribly.

Search engines have long since moved past basing relevance calculations on simple keyword repetition. While good keyword research is still central to publishing content that performs well in engines, your writers should be writing for the visitors that they have to inform and persuade, not a search engine spider.

4) Hidden text – Using tricks to make different content visible to humans than engines (see BMW Germany).

Hidden text and keyword stuffing often travel hand in hand. Because keyword-stuffed text reads so awfully to visitors, the idea is to hide it from them while still having it as machine-readable text on the page for engines.

Hidden text comes in many forms, from old-fashioned white text on white background, to positioning text off the visible portion of the page using CSS, to having text that’s visible only when JavaScript is disabled.

BMW Germany was guilty of the aforementioned variety of hidden text in 2006 when it was caught serving pages with pretty pictures and very little text to visitors, but behind the pretty pictures was keyword-stuffed garbage for search engines.

Some methods of detecting hidden text are easy for search engines (e.g., white-on-white text), whereas others are more difficult (e.g., hiding content with JavaScript). However, you can rest assured that the first time a company catches its competitor with hidden text on the page, that company will likely be filing a spam report with the search engines.

Content should be central to your website. It’s how you communicate value to prospective customers. There are plenty of legitimate ways to balance content with aesthetics and conversion, and hidden content isn’t worth the risk.

5) Being a seed for spam – If visitors are allowed to create profiles or leave comments on your site, and they create links to “bad neighborhoods” on the Web, your site can suffer as a result.

Social media and community involvement continue to develop as important aspects of a fully realized Web marketing campaign. But while interaction with your customers and peers is undeniably good, it can also hurt your website if implemented and managed incorrectly.

Especially on blogs, a central part of fostering an interactive and healthy ecosystem is to involve your readers. Commenting and discussion should be encouraged, both as a way to strengthen bonds with existing customers, acquire new ones and even address news that may be particularly challenging for your organization.

The flip side of this coin is that the more active and successful your community is, the more it can attract bad actors just looking to exploit your site’s popularity and authority by creating profiles and comments that exist only to drive links back to the bad actors’ sites.

Ensure that your blog comments are being actively filtered (by software, using “nofollow” on outbound links, and by employee curation) to remove manipulative, promotional posts and the users involved.

Search engines are particularly sensitive to sites that feature links to “bad neighborhoods.” These sites are seen as the seeds for Web spam and can be penalized as a result. Engines don’t want bad sites in their indexes. Keep your community clean, and you’ll reap rewards. If you allow your site to be a seed for spam, you can suffer for it.

With the Web becoming an increasingly important marketing channel for most companies, it’s more critical than ever that you ensure your Web marketing tactics are focused on the long-term health and success of your website. The risks associated with outlawed SEO tactics are not worth the reward.

Ethan Hays is Search Director at gyro
Follow him @ethanhays

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

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

During such climates, marketers have historically bolted on service offerings to help differentiate themselves. Intense price competition spurs such tactics.

So what’s new about that? Market leaders have been doing that for decades. My client DAF built its entire marketing platform around service in the nineties, for example. It has worked tremendously for DAF, and with good reason: Its service is industry leading.

Still much has changed during the past 20 years. While DAF was able to own service, many competitors viewed it as added value. Today, uber-competitive markets are forcing others to lead with service.

This approach is even true of exceptional market leaders like Marshalls. Marshalls dominates the United Kingdom hard landscape market. (The company manufactures paving and other products.) It is often the first to innovate and its ethics are above reproach, which has been a successful formula.

Still, Marshalls is continually undercut by “me-too” competitors selling what they claim to be like-for-like concrete products.

To compete with such pricing pressure, Marshalls has also bundled in technical services including expertise such as market-leading specification, technical and regulatory advice. Marshalls has always offered these benefits to clients, but it is now a larger focus.

Leading with such value-added services has affected a positive mind shift among customers. It has successfully headed off the price-driven, short-term conversations that the market is driving.

This needs-based approach is separating the superior from those who have only price to offer.

Ultimately, it is enabling strong brands such as DAF and Marshalls to win based not only on product, but also the expertise that they can bring to the table. While this tactic is helping these two companies win in the short term, it has lasting benefits as well.

Customers recognize that it’s not just a commodity they are buying. Instead, they are being educated about their suppliers’ depth of expertise.

By Danny Turnbull

Follow Danny on Twitter @turnbulldanny

Originally published at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network

It is pretty clear that the initial appeal to Facebook for advertisers was the sheer volume of “eyeballs” or in other words its reach, scale, and frequency. However, a shift is occurring due to a recent and small, yet important new feature: Users now have the ability to create “lists” and to select what story on their newsfeed is “important”. We can quite literally segment our friends and elevate the prominent stories that captivate our interest. With each click, the algorithm gets smarter, so the net effect is increased relevancy of future content published by your “150”.

The ability to segment your friends was included in the initial launch of Google+ as a point of differentiation, and portrayed in the recent Samsung Circles commercial, which highlights digital intimacy. Digital intimacy is the idea that we desire to share a limited set of information to a select and small group of people online. That theory aligns well with Google+’s positioning and may give it an edge on Facebook.

As Google+ and Facebook battle it out, expect to see this continued tug-of-war between digital openness and digital intimacy. The “lists” feature and “circles” represent a serving up of key advocacy identification – with users defining who and what resonates with them along their personal chain of influence. What this means for advertisers and brands is that Facebook and Google have the opportunity to deliver even more precise data on your target audience because they can measure influence and engagement.

By Donald Ball

Follow Don on Twitter @DonaldJBall

Originally published at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network

And who doesn’t? So let’s stop boring each other.

It’s obvious. Excitement is still often reserved for our play times or our non-work lives. But work and life have blurred together. Everything should be exciting. Being exciting should be a mandate for good marketing, business and advertising. Right?

To paraphrase Ogilvy: “you can’t sell anything by being boring.” The fact of the matter is nobody chooses to be boring. Nobody really knows when they are boring. And we sometimes miss the fact that our marketing, brands or products are indeed … boring.

Look at one of the in-flight magazines the next time you travel. It features page after page of brands spending tons of money delivering embarrassing melba-toast, vanilla, flat experiences. Hundreds of corporations share clichéd and fuzzy brand values. Copycat products pale in comparison to the category leaders. It all reduces down to a collection of things that are not memorable and not relevant. And in our cluttered over-connected world, being like everyone else will not cut through.

Why do we do it?  Boring is safe. It takes less energy to do the conventional than the unconventional. It’s faster to repeat than it is to reinvent. Painless to remain relaxed as opposed to exerting effort. And it is much simpler to copy than to create.

Being relevant and exciting takes time, vision and energy. And it takes courage and bravery.

We need to be mindful of defining what would delight our customers, clients or even ourselves. If we create plans, businesses and advertising that made a bigger difference, connected more intensely and in the end are more memorable, we would all be living better and feeling more.

by Mike Tittel

Executive Creative Director – Cincinnati

Cross-posted at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network

Now I fully understand why business-to-business companies desire the attention of C-level executives, but I have to ask, is this really the right target? Is Jeffrey Immelt, GE’s chairman and CEO, truly going to make the final decision or even influence the decision about a new manufacturing line that will be purchased for a GE Aviation plant? Or for that matter, will David Joyce, president and CEO of GE Aviation, be that involved in the decision? Many exerts would say no.

“C-level executives (CLEs) rarely get up in the morning thinking about interacting with salespeople.” (Selling to the C-Suite). In fact, when asked what keeps them up at night, most CEOs said shareholder value, not what new supply chain processes and equipment they want to explore and purchase for their company.

In addition, the actual numbers of CLEs is quite small. According to Steve Lutz, “As there is no listing for C-level executives in the census, let’s estimate the number of C-level executives in the B2B selling world using the Global 2000 list of companies. If we estimate that the Global 2000 on average has five C-level executives—CEO, CFO, COO, CIO, president—and seven additional ‘close to C-level executives’—EVP sales, SVP marketing, SVP HR, divisional president, etc.—then we arrive at a total of approximately 24,000 senior executives for the entire pool of over 10 million U.S.-based salespeople to call on.”

So, what’s a B-to-B company to do, since most C-suite members are not interested in being marketed or sold to?

“You marketing guys are all alike. You think that because I’m the CIO you have to send everything to me. I get tons of stuff from you and all your competitors. Let me tell you something, this is not how we make decisions. I have talented people responsible for their own areas. You’re using me as an executive mailroom, and I don’t appreciate it.” Excerpted from Marketing to the C-Suite, by Scott Hornstein.

Perhaps a better spend for marketing and sales is to focus dollars and attention on the group-decision gauntlet that is at the core of the B-to-B purchase process. Most B-to-B purchases involve a team of at least five employees from various departments; this team is corralled to find the right supplier/partner/vendor for the company’s need. There is rarely a C-level executive or even an EVP in the group. So, wouldn’t it be a better investment to create marketing communications that address the specific needs and motivations of middle management since CLEs delegate the task of vetting potential solutions to these people?

However, if you do believe it is critical to target the C-suite, make sure you have a compelling message. Remember, the C-suite cares “less about the widget and more about return on investment.” Messaging to the C-suite should be personalized, specific to the issues facing the company, and unique.

by Carolyn Ladd

Vice President, Planning