Would you say customer experience (CX) is one of the key corporate buzzwords in the last few years? 

I'd definitely say so. Alongside digital transformation, it's probably the biggest concern for a lot of companies. 

Why is that? 

Well, because the customer really has become king.

Consumers have never been so empowered as they are before - they have the internet at their fingertips, they make buying decisions on their own through their research and with the help of peer recommendations, they are vocal and complain when the product or service doesn't meet their requirements, reaching hundreds, thousands or millions of people so companies very much depend on the positive experience of consumers to drive sustainable growth.

Businesses have started building their own teams to deal with customer experience - customer success, for example, has never been as important as it is now. 

But what is customer experience and what is customer success? 

I've been covering a lot about influencer marketing over the last few months.

In my latest post about it, I shared how I used to work with influencers. 

I think everyone has their own formula and every brand have their own process or strive to develop their own process but there are some basic, important steps that must always be considered and need to be part of any influencer marketing campaign.

With that in mind, I was quite happy when I stumbled upon a good infographic that explains the roadmap or 10 key steps to run an influencer marketing initiative. 

Before I show it to you, I want to emphasise that the very key thing (and because of that the first step in the roadmap) is to define your goals - what are you trying to achieve, what does influencer marketing mean to your business and how do you expect it to help you with your overall business goals? 

These are some fundamental questions you need to have answered if you are hoping to get budget for influencer marketing. As we all know, every money spending decision must be justified.

To be a successful project manager, one of the key skills you need to have or need to acquire is stakeholder management. This is yet another of the project management fundamentals.  

That's especially important because often you'll be the person responsible for the execution and the success of a project and you'll have a team of people who will be doing the work but they won't report into you directly. 

Being able to influence is crucial so that your team can follow your guidance and requirements, but it's also important even before you start your project - you need to be able to get stakeholder commitment so that you can get the resources you need for your project and have the buy-in of key people in the organisation that will support you in case of difficulties because you'll need to have convinced them of the importance of your project. 

There are typically five strategies for gaining stakeholder commitment. I learned about them from a paper on PMI written by Bill Richardson.

We'll cover them briefly in a second but what I'll also do is to spend time on looking at how these strategies might have to be adapted based on cultural differences.

If you work in marketing and PR, you know there’s been a sea change. The old “push” tactics the industry once relied on no longer work well in the digital age.

As a PR professional, journalists and media folks are your consumers and today’s consumers increasingly reject top-down, interruptive messages trying to sell a story.

What they accept and crave is relevant content that draws them in, engages them, and helps them write the stories they know their readers want.

They want tactics that are inbound.

The problem, however, is most PR firms are still outbound organisations trying to survive in an inbound world.

What’s Not Working in PR?

I promised to write more about project management this year based on your interest so I'm starting a project management series today. 

First, we'll cover important project management fundamentals - we've gone through an overview of them with three infographics and we've also discussed the most popular project management methodologies and the differences between projects and operations.

Today, we'll go through another foundational topic: projects, programmes and portfolios. 

A lot of people don't know the difference between these and intercept them, making their work less focused and less specific which in turn leads to an organisation that's not as well organised as it should be so that it's efficient and effective. 

What are Projects, Programmes and Portfolios?

Let's take a quick look at these three terms: