The Empowered Customer

How to Measure the Impact of Your Content Marketing – Many resources remind you constantly of the importance of developing and expanding a content marketing program. After launching your business you may be creating social media posts, blog posts, and optimizing your website to make sure that you’re being found during searches. But how do you make sure that all of your hard work is yielding the results that you want?

Defining the Customer Success Organization – Customer experience has always served as the primary foundation for customer success. However, as this key differentiator becomes increasingly critical throughout today’s competitive market, many brands have begun to establish dedicated customer success teams that are specifically tasked with creating the most engaging experiences possible.

6 Ways to Quickly Restore Sanity to Your Day  – It may seem counter-intuitive, but it is during your most stressful, crisis-filled times that you most need to take regular breaks. We often view taking ten as a bonus, an added reward on a slow day, and not the critical tool needed to get through the roughest of workloads.

The first bachelor’s degree in marketing technology launches this fall – by Dr. Kevin W. Tharp, an associate professor of digital marketing technology at the University of Wisconsin-Stout — and the founder of the first ever Bachelor of Science in Digital Marketing Technology degree. The Bachelor of Science in Digital Marketing Technology was approved by the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents in June 2015, is an online degree and is now accepting applications for the Fall of 2015. For more details about the degree, visit the program’s website. Kevin shares his thinking behind the design of the program, and more broadly, his thoughts about how the relationship between education and industry is evolving in an environment of increasingly accelerated change.

OPM makes new promises to protect hacked employees. How confident are you that they can or will? If you work for the Federal government, this is your worst nightmare. Your social security number is no longer secure and is quite possibly in the hands of the Chinese.  It is likely to also be in the hands of criminals already who can make your life miserable for a very long time. You can read details of the new plan to protect those affected by the hack here but it is not reassuring since you are already exposed.

Hirable like me? Most managers would like to think they base their hiring decisions on candidates’ skill. But new research suggests that once a candidate passes through an initial HR screening, a bigger factor comes into play: how similar the interviewee is to the person doing the hiring.

Your Team Can’t Read Your Mind HBR.org by Anna Ranieri | When you live or work with people for a while, it’s easy to assume that they can read your mind and that you can read theirs. Whether it’s a spouse or a long-time team member, you may presume that you know what they’re thinking and that you can save time and effort by not having to spell everything out. Unfortunately, though, mind reading is a risky short cut, and is more likely to backfire than not.

You have no credibility (yet) – Seth Godin – You believe you have a great idea, a hit record, a press release worth running, a company worth funding. You know that the customer should use your limited-offer discount code, that the sponsor should run an ad, that the admissions office should let you in. You know that the fast-growing company should hire you, and you’re ready to throw your (excellent) resume over the transom. This is insufficient.

Donor Experience Transformation won’t be easy. In fact, it will be hard! So many times, transformation into a donor focused world is framed as a no brainer. We feel like idiots that we aren’t there yet. Why aren’t we on board? Why is our nonprofit so immature? The fact is, transformation is hard. It is hard, hard work. It takes discipline. It won’t happen overnight. It isn’t free. It will cost us not only a little but a lot.

3 Tips to Elevate Your Digital Marketing With Millennials and Generation Z increasingly turning to social and digital channels to engage with companies, marketers must up their digital marketing game. So many, however, are just trying to keep pace with their current programs and initiatives that they don’t often find time to introduce new strategies or improve upon what’s in place.

The Creative Benefit of Complete Ignorance Although research is an important stage in the creative process, it can also hinder creativity. It fills our mind with ideas that have already been done and blocks original thinking. Being well versed in the requirements of a project can help with preparation, but it can also prevent us from taking risks. In her 2015 Harvard University commencement speech, actress Natalie Portman encourages graduates to act on their ignorance.

The Changing Landscape of Nonprofit Technology (and What It Means for Your Nonprofit) The emergence of cloud technology has changed the way people around the world work, communicate, share information, and support causes. More than 90% of nonprofit organizations are using some form of cloud technology today, with half of them using multiple cloud services. 

The vast majority of software is currently offered as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS/Cloud), and the growing use of these services is allowing individuals and nonprofit organizations to focus more on their services, programs and respective missions rather than investing valuable resources on an expensive, time-consuming IT infrastructure. The cloud typically scales faster and more cost effectively, and has greater stability and availability than in-house (self-managed) infrastructure.  However, even as a majority of nonprofit organizations inch toward implementing the benefits of a more cost-efficient and productive work environment, there are still major opportunities to take advantage of cloud-based services.

Michael Wilson is a Partner and Global Practice Leader for Fortium Partners. Fortium has over 40 partners. FORTIUM is dedicated to understanding and applying all things digital. A technology leadership services firm focused on providing world-class resources to clients with the most complex issues. FORTIUM serves nonprofit, public and private companies across a variety of industries, placing expert project teams and operational leadership resources in technology-related roles. FORTIUM resources usually have 25 or more years of experience, most recently in a senior leadership role.

I’m interested in a briefing on Customer Experience from Fortium Partners