CXM: Do you Hunt and Make Fire or Order Pizza?

pizza

Call the holistic practice of engaging customers via the internet WCM, WEM, CEM or CXM – there is essential business change required to really provide a consistently great, cross channel, global customer experience.

I was pondering this today, as a couple of articles popped into my RSS reader on the changing role of the CMO and I thought about how marketers are really reacting to the digital shift – and I thought of this analogy… it’s like the decisions we make about dinner.. or specifically, the decisions I made last month.

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Will “mobile first” one day seem as ridiculous as “Internet Explorer” first?

omnichannel2

Ridiculous isn’t it to say “IE first”, yet in the olden days of web development when browser compatibility was no such thing – web designers had to think like this, to create a web presence optimized for one browsing experience (perhaps IE) and then to adapt it to another (say Netscape).

Yet, today its perfectly acceptable to talk about a mobile first strategy – to create a web presence optimized for one browsing experience and then to adapt it to another.

Of course that equally applies the other way around as folks create desktop web experiences which they then adapt for the small screen.

Will this one day be considered just as ridiculous?

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Can you be too engaging with your customer?

wine shop

Near where I live in Connecticut there are two local wine stores, in both the staff are friendly, they are as knowledgeable about wine as I need them to be and they both recognize me when I come in.

They sell pretty much the same selection of products that easily satisfy my wine preferences, there is no difference in price and very little in their proximity to my home.  However I am starting to choose one over the other. Why is that?

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Social Media; The new “it’s not what you know”?

handshake

A lot is written about the risks your social media presence can have on your current or future career, the ill advised Facebook photo, a slightly ranty tweet or a staring role on YouTube – that uneasy feeling that big brother Google is indexing a big data catalogue of all of our lives.

Yes, yes we have a connected generation that have got over all of that – and if you are one of them, then this is a no-brainer post for you, but for some senior professionals that I meet this is the predominant feeling that scares them away (that and “they don’t have the time”).

So is it right to sit it out, or is social media now an essential career skill?

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If You Love Your Content, Set it Free!

love-free

I’m sitting on my deck, the sun is out, I have a cup of tea resting on the broad arm of my adirondack chair.

After a cheery wave to my neighbour, with my favoured mobile device in hand, I am indulging myself in a long overdue catch-up with my RSS feeds on a fine Saturday morning. Contented as I flick through the wisdom of the bloggers I have chosen to follow.

But wait… I have had to jump up, grab my laptop and blog – what has disturbed my idyllic peace?

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Book Review: Managing Content Marketing

mcm-book

It’s been a while since I wrote about a book on this blog, but I’ve just read Managing Content Marketing – The Real World Guide for Creating Passionate Subscribers to Your Brand, by Robert Rose (@robert_rose) and Joe Pulizzi (@juntajoe) and I wanted to share as it might not be a book you’ve heard of, compared to say the more obvious Seth Godin I’m normally reading. Plus, it’s really jolly good.

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Email as a Mobile Engagement Strategy?

email2

I have found this great app for my iPhone.

It’s a great newsreader, it pushes essential blog posts so I can catch up even when disconnected, it connects me to Twitter and Facebook, I can collaborate with my colleagues, I can submit blog posts, jot down notes that get stored in the cloud and can be retrieved from any machine.

It’s available on every type of smartphone, it’s not $2.99, not even $1, it’s free.

Everyone has it, across all platforms, no download required, it works.

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If You Get Social Media Engagement; Say My Name..

BA_tweet

Last week I had a splendid experience flying British Airways. I am shallow enough to admit that on this occasion “splendid experience” does indeed include an upgrade, but it doesn’t always with BA.

I am also not naive enough to know that my nice treatment is not down to my smile, but the commercial reality that I was getting on a British Airways plane five out of every six weeks last year.

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On Online Surveys: Rich Hall – Marketing Genius

surveys

If you don’t know Rich Hall, he is an American comedian who’s also done quite a lot of stuff on UK TV. A very funny fellow, who I now believe is an online marketing genius.

Why do I think he’s an online marketing genius? Is it that he sells a gazzillion DVDs or the iTunes equivalent? Maybe, but not what I was thinking.

I would like to nominate Rich Hall into the halls of genius marketers for a rant he did once did about US election polling – that I’ve thought about a lot as I get confronted with yet another website survey.

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Personality goes a long way….

kettle

In this post I would like to explore personality in content marketing and the digital customer experience, but I am going to start with my kettle.

Moving into a new house from the UK, we found ourselves needing a new kettle. Not much in that, I’m English, I drink tea, so I am bound to need a kettle. We had lots of choice, but we bought one that sits on the hob, looks old fashioned (like the Connecticut house we are renting) and it whistles when it’s boiling.

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