There is No B2B or B2C

It's Human to Human #H2H

Bryan Kramer

• Publisher: Substantium
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781629210933
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

As marketers, we’ve been trained to speak “business to business” (B2B) or “business to consumer” (B2C). But instead of this creating a simple framework for dialogue between humans, it set forth an unnatural language for marketers, using words like “synergy” and “speeds and feeds” to tell the stories of products and services to their buyers and partners. The fact is that businesses do not have emotion. Products do not have emotion. Humans do. Humans want to feel something. And humans make mistakes. In Human to Human #H2H, Bryan explores the many facets of why and how communication today needs to be adjusted to keep up with our ever-evolving and fast moving social and digital world. Through anecdotes from his own experiences as president of a Silicon Valley marketing firm, he both inspires new ways of finding commonality in our humanity, but also practical tools to think like a human marketer again. Specifically, you’ll learn: • The Four Rules of Social Context • How Human Sensory Building will make you a better Marketer • The Secrets to Making Ideas Crowd Worthy, with real world examples • How to be “Delightfully Disruptive” • Insights into building a Social Business • What it means to have a “Focker Moment” and why they should be celebrated Embedded are short intimate video conversations with some of today’s most forward-thinking humans; Jonathan Becher, CMO at SAP, Charlene Li, author and co-founder of The Altimeter Group, and Kare´Anderson, Emmy Award-winning journalist and founder of the Say It Better Center. If you're looking to bring back the human side of communication, in all its imperfection, empathy, and simplicity, Human to Human #H2H is for you.

Chapter 1: The Unnatural Language of Business

Consumers are confused. With a whopping 93% of communication based on nonverbal body language, that leaves just 7% left to explain verbally what we really mean.

So why can’t we make it simple for people to understand what we’re selling, so they can more easily share their experiences and the value they felt with others? More importantly, why is it that what we’re marketing most often does not align to actual consumer experiences?

I don’t care what language you speak, who your brand is or what message you’re trying to send, we all need to speak more human. Too often we complicate what we’re trying to say. Ironically, as our world becomes more customer-owned and socially enabled, we continue to see complicated, redundant, over-technical, and over-thought mass messages getting pushed out – and lost – in the ether. Is it really getting harder to stand out, with so much data and information out there… or is the answer just to clearly say what you mean, in understandable human words?

The fact is that the lines are so far blurred now between the “B2C” (Business to Consumer) and “B2B” (Business to Business) marketing segments that it’s hard to differentiate between the two anymore. Why do business marketers think they need to speak differently to their audience? I can’t tell you how many meetings I’ve been in where acronyms are used so often that my brain ends up spending so much time trying to decipher what they mean instead of focusing on the actual thoughts trying to be conveyed. Acronyms have their place, but not when they replace communicating information to someone else who might not understand your world full of capital letters. We all need to think like the consumers we are, putting ourselves in the mind set of the buyer instead of trying to speak such an intensely sophisticated language full of acronyms and big words, in order to sound smarter.

The same is true for social. We have new acronyms like LOL. OMG. TY. BRB. New words like Selfie, Hashtag, Wiki and Tag. These terms have their own new “assigned” meaning, and have helped us gain a new way of conversing with each other. In quick statements, letters, sometimes pictures and memes, we’re learning to speak a new language. Full proper sentences are becoming a thing of the past when it comes to short engagement, like on Twitter and text, because technology demands a way for us to communicate in a new way. Is it really making us more efficient? Or maybe it’s evidence of our need as humans to continually evolve? It could be that each “network” has it’s own nuance of sharing – whether a social network, or the human network – colliding worlds in our short and long-form conversations and requiring us to relearn how to share with each other in a greater context than ever before.

Context: The Killer of Confusion

Words are just words. Stories are just stories. But with context, concepts come alive. According to Dictionary.com, Context is “the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement or idea, in terms by which it can be fully understood.” In other words, it’s not just about the message, it’s almost more importantly about everything happening around the message that gives it meaning. Humans understand and process information in context. For marketers, this means understanding where your audience will consume the information they receive (Mobile? Tablet? Laptop?), as well as the mindset they’re likely in when they receive it, so they’ll pay attention. For instance, do you know what their top business pains are? And how is what you’re offering a “pain killer” to these business pains?

In social, content is important, but context is HUGE. If your content is not in the right context for both your specific social media platform and for the audience you want to engage, it’s a social gunshot – throwing a bunch of words in the air and hoping that, somehow, somewhere, they land on a few people in a way that makes sense and captures their attention.

Providing the right context in social sharing is an art form. The words that you Tweet, post or write are planting the seed for the experience. When your audience takes your message, and relates it to their life in a new way, that’s when the experience blossoms. The Socialsphere is a place where we present our thoughts and ideas to the world, where the challenge lies in making those thoughts and ideas connect with our audience. What do I share and how do I share it? What will resonate? Will I lose likes or followers? It’s tough, right? I do believe this—the more authentic you are, the more you will get out of your share. But you have to be mindful of context when you share, always.

Here are four ways I try to do that before deploying any social effort.

The Four Rules of Social Context

1.Think it through. (or, as Courtney Smith, our company co-founder and Executive Creative Director likes to say, “TITS: Think it Through, SERIOUSLY.”) In order to do this, whether it’s a blog or a Tweet, you need to visualize how what you share will play out, and whether it meets your objectives. Everything you share should be true to your brand – personal and company – to support your goals and have a purpose. This is where many social sharers have witnessed their demise, in Tweeting something snarky or inappropriate, either from their own handle or a corporate handle by mistake. I hear almost weekly of someone getting fired for tweeting something inappropriate. This can be avoided by simply thinking it through (seriously.)

2.Skip to the last page first. In other words, know the end as well as the beginning when you plan your strategy. This is the difference b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• What is H2H?
• Forward
• Chapter 1: The Unnatural Language of Business
• Chapter 2: How to Speak Human: Tapping into our Needs and Senses
• Chapter 3: Humans Just Want to be Heard
• Chapter 4: The Human Need to be Disruptive
• Chapter 5: Where Do Marketers Go From Here?
• Chapter 6: Being Human Marketers
• About Bryan Kramer
• Resources
• Author Q&A
• Notes