Social Customer Experience Management (CEM) can be defined as the "Business strategy for intentionally using social media to engage with customers and deliver an experience that builds brand loyalty." There is research to show that in doing so organisations drive up revenues and profits. A 2009 "engagement" study by Altimeter Group and Wetpaint found that "companies that are both deeply and widely engaged in social media surpass their peers in terms of both revenue and profit performance by a significant difference." Now the data does not prove a causal relationship; merely that those brands that engage the most with customers also happen to be more financially successful, but you don't need to be a rocket scientist to understand that when you are more engaged with customers they are likely to be more engaged with you.

Perhaps that is why a recent Forrester forecast (The State of Customer Experience 2011) predicts that spending on interactive marketing will reach $55...

Zappos Culture – © Zappos.com, Inc, 2011

“A company’s culture and a company’s brand are really just two sides of the same coin. Brand is just a lagging indicator of culture.”

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com

It’s time for organizations to pay as much attention to the employee experience as the customer experience…

The essence of a highly distinctive customer experience lies in the emotional connection made with the customer. Research by Ogilvy for their annual BrandZ loyalty survey found that companies “…successful in creating both functional and emotional bonding had higher retention ratios (84% vs. 30%) and cross-sell ratios (82% vs...

“Marketing is a tax you pay for being unremarkable”
Robert Stephens, The Geek Squad

Marketers face enormous challenges today. Targeting, locating, communicating and maintaining any form of reliable relationship with customers or consumers has never been more difficult.

Digital, mobile and web technology has transformed the media landscape into a bewildering array of possible channels and means of communication, many of which are beyond the control of anyone but the consumer. Social media is being used to punish brands or force them to change everything from supply chain policies to marketing tactics; even – as in the case of Gap – an expensive logo change.

Increasingly marketing-savvy and empowered consumers demand authenticity and consistency from their brands. And the ability for competition to nimbly and rapidly copy, outsmart or outmanouevre each other means that consumers have...

Gutenberg invented the printing press 570 years ago and the reading experience hasn’t changed much since. Almost every other form of communication has changed beyond recognition, yet we still read in largely the same way as our ancestors did in medieval times.

But what about the Kindle, the iPad or, indeed, any of the other forms of e‐publishing? Surely they are very different from the books we grew up with. But although the medium has changed, the user experience has not. Usually, books are simply converted into a digital format and people read them on their e‐reader in largely the same way as they would a print version: sequentially and chapter‐by‐chapter.

The battle for bookshelf space

As a means for communication, publishing is very inefficient; there are estimated to be 11,000 business books published every year in the U.S. and yet the average U.S. non-fiction book sells...