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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…]

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…]

BASF Love In Business Campaign

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ALT="BASF Ad for Create Chemistry"Is there love in business? BASF, the 150-year-old conglomerate, thinks so.

In my hunt for good podcasting fodder, I was leafing through Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s The Year Ahead 2016 issue. When I landed on a full-page spread by BASF, which I thought made audio and stereo equipment, I came across this tagline:

We create chemistry that makes more power love a cleaner drive.

Eh? I read it again and again and still could not decipher whether it was referring to computer hard drives (as the left vertical image was of a super highway often depicted as the speeding Ethernet), or whether it was the clean fuel as depicted on the right vertical image in the ad. The blue heart conjoining the two images then made me wonder if ‘chemistry’ was the entendre for ‘love.’ [Read more…]

The Return of Social Media Engagement

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ALT="Soulati Media, Future and Past"We’ve come full circle. We’re returning to social media engagement. As I daily peruse the social media sphere and the lists of bloggers who still write daily, good for you, I am conscious of one thing in this chaos of disruption.

Human engagement with connectivity remains the number one most important metric of social media.

Says Social Media Explorer today (exact quotes) by Peter Friedman: [Read more…]

Direct Marketing As Strategy, Not Tactic

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ALT="Opt-in Marketing book cover by Scott Hornstein on Soulati.com"Direct marketing could be called dead like so many other things since the disruption in technology, but it’s not. In fact, direct marketing as strategy, not tactic is also smart marketing. That keen statement comes from one of the most influential marketers in integrated today, Scott Hornstein. The reason I know this to be true is due to the fact that Mr. Hornstein is our very first featured guest on The Heart Of Marketing podcast with John Gregory Olson and me. You do remember I launched at podcast in February, right? We’ve taped about 34 episodes already, and it’s tons of fun. Thank goodness John does the editing because, well, just because.

What are your views about direct marketing as strategy? [Read more…]