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Is Customer Experience Being Exploited By Brands?

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ALT="Authenticity in customer experience, Soulati.com"

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…]

IDG Uses Brand Ambassadors To Align Culture To Brand

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ALT="brand ambassadors, IDG story, Soulati Media"IDG is a HUUUUGE company; in fact, it states on its website that it is the world’s largest media tech company. That’s nothing to sneeze at, and you know what else? IDG also had a brand culture problem. It was so big that the individual business units were silos. We’ve heard about silos before, right? Apparently, IDG had never hired a chief marketing officer which is highly interesting for such a massive global corporation.

The company decided to relaunch the brand to better inform customers about what else was available throughout the company, and in order to do so, it had to align its brand culture with all internal stakeholders.

The very first step taken by IDG was to research. This is ALWAYS the first step to take to find all of the problems and to then apply strategy to solve them.

Brand Ambassadors Are Employees

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Branding And Helpfulness Begin With Culture

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Helpfulness is akin to giving, giving back and paying it forward. When someone deigns to be helpful, they are thinking not first of themselves, but of another who is more in need.

What does that ‘need’ look like? Down and out, a home crushed from a natural disaster, job loss, medical matter, need for information, an elderly person unable to drive for the groceries or change the light bulb, or someone just plain depressed over the loss of a loved one.

There are many reasons why someone needs to receive an act of helpfulness or kindness, but this is not about challenging you to do more of that. Person-to-person helpfulness is simpler to ascertain, isn’t it?

When you put helpfulness into the same discussion with branding, then the understanding is somewhat blurred. Humanity is helpful; is a brand?

. Within you as a human, is a desire to be kind, genuine and helpful. It forms your person, it becomes your personality, and it is visible in your aura. What’s also apparent is whether this helpfulness philosophy is genuine, or not.

Helpfulness in Branding

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Blog Distribution Channels To Earn More Traffic

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Blog distribution is rarely thought of, and I’m here to tell you that has to change! Your blog posts, the most valuable pieces of owned media you have in your archives, should never just be published on your website and forgotten. These stories need to be distributed on a wide variety of channels and in a wider variety of repurposed creativity.

Let’s explore further, shall we?

Blog Distribution Channels — A Long List

1. So easy and obvious, is the very first place a blog post is published and greets the world. Ensure your website is owned by you; it’s your created domain name, and it’s on a hosting platform you’ve selected.

1a. A blog post comment section is key for links to others’ content to get added. Sometimes a blogger asks for shares, and these can get added manually. If you sign up for Livefyre, a blog comment platform, your latest blog post is automatically added to your bio descriptor.

2. LinkedIn posts are another obvious pseudo blogging channel. In fact, I had elected to craft this post and publish it on LinkedIn FIRST. Then, as I kept writing and writing, I realized how dumb that would be. I need the content and link juice for my own blog! Remember, that when you publish original content elsewhere first, you miss out on the strength of that content for links and traffic. Do build up your own archives first. Because I’ve been blogging since 2010, I have archives of more than 650 blog posts to my credit. A blogger’s life is never over; there is always a fresh audience seeking content with a twist. Stand out! [Read more…]

5 Reasons Why I Was The Victim Of Fraud

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ALT="Duh Road sign on Soulati.com"Being the victim of fraud is one of the most excruciating pains for the psyche. There’s not a moment that passes when you don’t think of yourself as stupid and dumb (probably the very same thing) for falling for it. Especially when the tells were there.

I am a marketing professional. I like to think I’m pretty keen on knowing when something smells rotten. But it was the perfect storm, so let me tell you about it so perhaps you’ll recognize the signs a lot faster than I did. [Read more…]