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

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

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

The explosion of social media provides another interesting opportunity to test the “six degrees of separation” hypothesis. Yahoo and Facebook recently teamed up to launch an experiment that harnesses Facebook’s 750 million users to determine how they are connected.

While the results of the Facebook experiment are still pending, whether or not we are all linked by six (or five or three) degrees isn’t the point. What is exciting for marketers, and what this Facebook experiment highlights, is that social media reveals links that otherwise might not be visible. And more important for marketers, social media provides the tools to create new connections from “invisible” relationships.

Case in point: LinkedIn maps members’ connections to the third degree. A quick search reveals that I am connected to Michael Dell, Sarah Palin and, fittingly, Kevin Bacon. LinkedIn then gives me the ability to network with these individuals through an invitation or request an introduction from a mutual acquaintance.

Social media outlets like LinkedIn provide opportunities to cut through the digital noise and connect on a personal level. For example, you might try (and possibly fail) to reach a decision-maker at Company “A” through targeted email blasts, but LinkedIn reveals that you attended college with the decision-maker’s former boss, who is happy to make an introduction.

For marketers, the power of social media isn’t in proving that we are all connected, but revealing the right connections that expand our networks and create opportunities.

By Haley DeGrella
Public Relations Consultant

Cross posted at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network

Follow Haley on Twitter @haley_degrella.

gyro ceo+cco Christoph Becker recently took time to talk about how marketing is changing and what brands can do to reach customers through the modern flood of information. The following discussion appeared in the print edition of Forbes.

Sit down with Christoph Becker, CEO and CCO of global advertising agency gyro, and one gets the impression this is no ordinary agency boss. With unruly hair, an international accent and attire that goes beyond casual, Becker looks every bit the unconventional start-up CEO.

Surprisingly, the conversation quickly turns to why the world needs another advertising agency. Becker certainly believes that “advertising has fallen victim to its own success and digital has been the great catalyst for change.”

Becker cites the constant bombardment of digital noise as the reason consumers are switching off from what brands are saying: “We’re militantly protecting ourselves by filtering and curating our experiences.”

So the big question is, in these post-privacy times, what, if anything, can gyro do to make its clients heard again,  and why should anyone care? The immediate answer is simple and direct: “Human relevance. This is the bridge to intimacy, and intimacy will be the gold of the future in this post-privacy era. Agencies that recognize this now are agencies that have a bright future ahead of them,” reveals Becker.

It’s certainly a belief that resonates across gyro’s B2B world. “B2B marketing as we know it is dead. If you really want to influence business decisions, from now on you have to reach and persuade the real seat of power: the individual. Your new customer is not a corporate entity. It’s an independent-minded, highly connected, always-emotional human being.”

When approached by Scotsman, the inventor of The Original Chewable Ice™, to enhance the brand’s reputation as the premier ice machine manufacturer, gyro uncovered a groundswell of passion for Scotsman’s unique nugget ice. Becker explains: “We recognized there was a huge community of chewable-ice fans who were fragmented across social media platforms. To unite this community, Luv the Nug was born, an online social experience where ice lovers could celebrate something that was relevant and personal to them: chewable ice. We created a movement that saw American consumers call on their favorite restaurant to install Scotsman chewable-ice machines.”

Ultimately, Becker believes that the digital revolution is not about advancing technology but about the power of individuals to decide what they want and don’t want. After all, according to Becker, “Digital is one of the most humanly relevant and powerful tools society has.”

Cross-posted at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network

To our collective thinking, PR was the only remaining bastion of moral marketing intelligence; the purveyor of true behavioural change and primary artillery of any self-respecting CMO or indeed CEO.

They were wrong; I was wrong. Yet it wasn’t until I left PR did I recognize that so many other agencies – across all the disciplines – are obsessively driven by the same channel tribalism. Something gyro calls creative apartheid.

This blinkered vision doesn’t just fail the execution of an idea. It impacts on the idea itself, and ideas are essentially the crux of all marketing activity. The single most dangerous thing in the world is an idea. An idea can achieve, improve and change anything – for any number of people. This is fact, and as marketers, we are all seeking the idea that will transform our client’s/brand’s world. But something is missing; marketers and agencies the world over are creating selfish ideas, thereby betraying the core idea of, well, an idea.

Ideas with “me” in mind.

The “me” is the media budget, the digital budget, the events budget. It’s the imagined “clash” with PR activity, the news agenda, internal communications. We are too often creating ideas that sit far too close to these negative influences.

The true measure of an idea is its ability to exist everywhere. What good is a PR idea pushed into advertising or a digital idea molded into events? A truly big idea doesn’t need to change its shape in the name of a 360-degree approach. It should flow wherever we as people see it and, most important, where we can feel it.

Consider this: Hold your agencies to account not for their executional excellence but of the expansive power of their ideas. You will see change occur. Executional excellence is expected but ultimately forgettable; consumers remember the idea and the effect it had on them. What an idea starts should never stop.

Ideally, agencies of all sizes, working across all disciplines, in different locations, can pitch ideas against each other. The idea is what matters, not how it is delivered. Ignore anybody’s protestations that the reverse is true.

by Patrick Danaher
Director of Marketing
Cross posted at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network

I attended a great, informative session presented by Cincinnati Social Media with Jory Des Jardins, cofounder of BlogHer, as the featured speaker, who reminded the audience how important it is to understand your audience.

She provided helpful insights about the blogosphere overall and how brands can successfully and ethically work with bloggers. But what I found most engaging was her breakdown of blogger types based on their specific motivations.

Check out the white paper Best Practices for Marketing to Women Online . While written specifically about marketing to women bloggers, the paper is one of the best I have read with regard to understanding blogger motivations and best practices in reaching bloggers. I think many of these insights can be applied more broadly.

Marketing is most successful when you understand the motivations of your audience. Let’s not forget this rule applies to bloggers as well.

Pattie Kushner
Senior Vice President
Director of Public Relations, North America

Excerpted from an FTC press release (http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2009/08/news2009.shtm):

“The workshops will bring competition, consumer protection, and First Amendment perspectives to bear on the financial, technological, and other challenges facing the news industry as consumers increasingly turn to the Internet for free news and information, advertisers increasingly move their ads onto online sites and reduce advertising buys as a result of the recession, and news organizations struggle with large debt that was taken on when times were better.”

“The workshops will consider a wide range of issues, including: the economics of journalism and how those economics are playing out on the Internet and in print; the wide variety of new business and non-profit models for journalism online; factors relevant to the new economic realities for news organizations, such as behavioral and other targeted online advertising, online news aggregators, and bloggers; and the variety of governmental policies – including antitrust, copyright, and tax policy – that have been raised as possible means of finding new ways for journalism to thrive.”

The Digital Age has changed how we consume information and who is delivering that information. News organization are obviously feeling the impact and having to consider new business models. With the FTC wading into discussions around the Fourth Estate and with it the role of user-generated content and new technologies, we should all pay close attention. These conversations and their outcomes could have significant ramifications across our business and that of our clients. Stay tuned.

Pattie Kushner
Senior Vice President
Director of Public Relations, North America

Crises happen. Interestingly, how communicators handle a crisis now garners bigger headlines than the crisis itself. What used to be the stuff of case studies and water-cooler gossip among marketers now makes national headlines.

Perhaps reality TV has made us more interested in the exchanges that happen behind the scenes versus the actual performance. Or maybe it’s the voracious, instantaneous news cycle. The why doesn’t really matter much. How organizations fail to respond to a crisis affecting them is news, and it can be critically damaging to revenues, reputations and brands.

The pork industry’s traditional response to the swine flu outbreak (Forbes article) and the missteps in how Domino’s Pizza reacted to the YouTube video posted by two of its former employees (BusinessWeek article) are two very recent examples of this phenomenon. People began Twittering about how the organizations were handling, or not handling, the situations as the drama was literally unfolding.

What is so frustrating to observe is that solid crisis communications planning could have helped these organizations avoid such obvious pitfalls. Done correctly, crisis communications planning lays the foundation for a thoughtful, rapid-response approach. Effective crisis planning must help you quickly engage the right channels to deliver your message, mobilize your advocates and build dialogue with important stakeholders.

Too often communicators and marketers indefinitely postpone crisis communications planning, considering it a marketing luxury separate from their integrated marketing plans. What they fail to bear in mind when making that decision is that the time and cost associated with lost confidence is far greater than the cost of planning.

Pattie Kushner
Senior Vice President
Director of Public Relations, North America