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Digital Marketing Strategy, PR and Messaging

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Is Customer Experience Being Exploited By Brands?

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credit: Modern 8

Customer experience is quite the buzz right now. I have been thinking about this customer experience stuff for quite some time. Everywhere you look a company or brand is attempting to create some extraordinary customer experience.

Just like when the recession hit in 2008 companies heavily discounted everything and consumers became spoiled by deeply discounted products. Coupons were all the rage; still are. JC Penney comes to mind — it had a CEO migration, and the new guy wanted better profit margin so coupons went away. Well, so, too, did the customers! [Read more…]

Authenticity On The Path To Professional Blogging

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By Jayme Soulati–“The Bean”

Authenticity is at risk. There is too much pressure as a professional blogger to monetize, engage, develop a brand, be a leader with unique content, and utilize digital marketing for lead generation and search marketing. When you’re making the climb from newbie blogger to professional, there are many bloggers ahead of you to follow and heed their examples.

It’s not hard to see that all the tools of the trade to create the largest professional brand are right there for the plucking; but, at what expense?

Are you risking your own identity as a professional by changing it up too fast or too much? How do you feel as a blogger when you sit down to write?
These are questions that need asking on your path because there’s one thing about blogging I want to instill with you:

  • Genuine and authentic persona as a blogger are traits that will always be critical to success; always.
  • If or when you become mechanical about the journey, it’s time to take a break.
  • If or when you put more strength on analytics to tell you what to write and determine your success, it’s time to re-visit your original goals.
  • If or when you lose focus of your personality and are writing without verve, think about your core.

I have always written content from my circles of inspiration; rarely if ever have I written content based on analytics or key words. Perhaps that’s short-sighted; perhaps not.

I realize there are solid reasons to write more content based on how people come to visit; however, I also realize that’s not the goal of my writing, either. Even if I was to put up a ton of posts oriented to message mapping, for example, people would probably get tired of seeing the same thing, and I would get pretty bored with it, too.

When you write, be sure to keep your personality in the story. It doesn’t have to be written in the first person to do that; it has to have your spirited delivery.

The thing about analytics I’ve always pondered is whether it would pirate authenticity. We know Google continues to adjust its algorithm to wreak havoc on everyone’s crazy-ometer. If you depend on analytics every day to determine what to write, then you’re risking authenticity. That’s my view, any takers?

Three Things Threatening Authenticity; Do You Agree?

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(This post originally appeared on Spin Sucks August 8, 2011, written by Jayme Soulati). And, the 162 comments (love that!) are worth their weight in gold.

credit: Modern 8

Public relations practitioners strive to develop authentic relationships; we want genuine and sincere romance with our tiered audiences, and we get there with engagement.

The word “authentic” itself begs for definition. It was used in a variety of ways by a variety of practitioners when I launched an effort awhile back to define public relations on my blog. Social media allows for creating real communities with give and take, with nurturing and education, and with growth by engagement. Combined, these contribute to authenticism (I often coin words).

Enter automation.

My growing fear is social media automation is quickly winning over authenticity. If you follow me online, this statement comes as no surprise. I have been lamenting scheduled tweets, the success of Triberr, and the disappearance of Twitter banter (nowadays that’s just about anything without a link!).

  1. Automating Tweets: I freely admit I schedule tweets on occasion; in fact, I was encouraged to do more of it to push attention to the blog. You can’t get traffic if you tweet a new post once. So, I did, and lo – more traffic. I also use Triberr religiously. I automate post distribution in the three tribes I’m in. In fact, I’m kind of jazzed; I recently launched Globe Spotting – a tribe with seven bloggers from seven countries.
  2. Optimizing Writing: I’m struggling with the whole optimization thing; it compromises authenticity! (While optimization is not automation, there are enough automated tools to enhance optimization, so they’re, like, kissing cousins.) A recent blog post over at Live Your Love by Brankica Underwoodhad me stewing. (She’s an expert about writing with keywords and measuring web analytics.) Bran shared how she wrote a keyword rich post and watched the traffic roll in. Then, she increased her traffic by writing a how-to post because keywords and search terms told her the market was seeking that information.
  3. Quantifying Influence: How about Klout? I predicted recently that employers and clients would begin reviewing Klout scores and select candidates with the higher scores. I just read a blog post where that prediction rang true. People on Twitter who schedule unique content, RT consistently, and write about keywords can automatically boost Klout scores – even when the keywords for which peeps are being considered influential mean nothing, such as “cougar,” “heavy metal,” or “sheep.”

All my fears for the future are likely a yearning for the past. As I’ve been pondering this preponderance of push marketing, others have stated, “nothing stays the same…to grow we need to automate.”…OK, but at what expense?