H2H Is In; B2B and B2B Are out

Bryan Kramer is a Social Business Strategist and CEO of PureMattera social media and marketing firm in Silicon Valley (and one of the fastest growing companies in that area). Bryan is also the world’s43rd most talked about marketer, a Global Top CEO Influencer on Social Media, and one of The Top 50 Social CEOs on Twitter in the world (Huffington Post). Bryan came onto my radar recently because of a catchy little meme: H2H.

Though Kramer’s writing and presentations about this “H2H” concept generally pertain to social media and marketing, some of his statements connected with me related to organizations overall. The idea that businesses work with and provide services to other businesses (B2B) or to an entity called “customers” (B2C) is inappropriate and no longer quite accurate. For philosophical AND smart strategic business reasons, Kramer asserts that what we should now be considering is that our work is truly human to human, “H2H.” Despite all the incredible data and technological tools available to us, allowing us the capability to automate marketing even to small target audiences, what everyone still really wants (and deserves) is to be entirely understood and respected as an individual with a unique set of needs, circumstances, buying habits, etc.

He says, “Businesses do not have emotion. People do. People want to be a part of something bigger than themselves. People want to feel something. People want to be included. People want to understand. . . . Communication shouldn’t be complicated. It should just be genuine and simple, with the humility and understanding that we’re all multi-dimensional humans, everyone of which has spent time in both the dark and delightful parts of life.”

There are some nice parallels between the idea of “H2H” and the concept I spend time thinking about . . . “brain-friendliness” in organizations. Brain-friendly organizations recognize that they exist because the people within them exist. They do good work and achieve the results they do because people do good work and achieve results. Each of these people runs on an operating system called, “Brain 1.0” and we would be wise to read the manual. Better understanding this OS would enable us to (further) humanize our workplaces and retain the kind of staff we strive to keep –and not just for the sake of kindness, but for greater business outcomes.