Your PR Architect

Kmart talks "asset light" and "member-centric" while removing services I stopped in at Kmart to buy a shirt. And I discovered  they'd removed the walk-up electronic price scanners that helped shoppers verify item prices and discounts. I now needed to wander the floor, hoping to uncover an employee with a pricing gun. Good luck with finding floor personnel at any Kmart. Really? At a time when retailers should be doing everything to build engagement with consumers, Kmart is removing most of its ways to deliver value to customers. Seems counter-intuitive to a retailer that touts a "Shop Your Way" connection with customers.  No store generates more paper at the register than Kmart. (c) DKassnoff At the checkout, the cashier announced to a fellow clerk, "I'm clocking out at five," before handing me a wad of auto-printed coupons and promotions. Five slips of junk for products I'd never buy. If there's a PR strateg...

By Drapplesi (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons This isn't a rant. It's not a diatribe. It's simply my point of view. I don't carry a smartphone. They're easy to get and operate. But I resist using one. Why? Because it quickly becomes an intruder in my real life. And, if we're having a conversation, it's intruding in your life, too. I believe in the art of listening over the artifice of texting. I believe in building relationships between placing my order and the arrival of the meal. I believe in eye contact, not eyestrain. And I find the creepy blue glow of a smartphone casts an unflattering pallor over the face of the person using the phone. In a dim restaurant, it looks like a scene from "The Walking Dead." Yick. Yes, I've used Yelp to help me find interesting restaurants. But I don't want Yelp to tell me whether...

On the day I wrote this post, bloggers were creating and posting more than 2.2 million new posts. On a Sunday afternoon. Ready to enter the long tunnel of blogging? You want a presence in the blogosphere. You know social media can reach new customers and prospects. But, creating and maintaining a business blog isn't easy. A well-written blog can help build your brand and visibility. The downside: you need to refresh a blog consistently with meaningful, persuasive content that your customers and followers will find engaging. And you need to get them to read it. And come back to it again and again. That's how you build awareness and a relationship. It can seem like you're entering a long tunnel, without knowing where the journey may lead. Steamfeed.com recently shared a concise article about business blogging. The most useful tip: planning ahead, and developing a steady flow of topics and stories that resonate with your customers. That's a tall order. You...