The internet has bought about a fundamental shift in the way consumers want to interact with brands and organizations. And this really requires organizations to change everything about how they interact. They need to move from a push methodology, sending out direct mail or whatever to people they think they might be interested in, into much more of an interactive conversation.

They need to do that across all of the channels they can, and across all the departments that the consumer interacts with. Because the consumer doesn’t think about interacting through a particular channel with a particular part of the organization. They think about the whole organization through every channel. And that’s the societal change that’s going on that organizations need to respond to.

I think fundamentally the first thing is a recognition that this change is taking place. Right from the top of the organization through every department it needs to be understood that the old techniques of communication aren’t going to work for much longer, in fact, they’re not working today.

The second thing is an understanding of how consumers now want to interact with the organization, and interact is the important word there. It’s not react, it’s not receive information, it’s interact with the organization – learn, make their preferences known, and hear relevant information. And obviously to unpin that, you need technology, you need processes, and you need the people that can operate in that kind of way.