The Altimeter Group is embarking on an ambitious attempt to understand and define the evolution of the customer experience, what they have coined “The Dynamic Customer Journey.” As they summarize it:

“The customer journey has evolved, yet organizations have failed to recognize and adapt to the change. Today, the new customer is empowered to make faster, smarter, more-informed decisions using technology, for instance, by accessing real-time information on their mobile devices or connecting with trusted peers across open and closed social networks. To respond to a dynamic customer journey, organizations must transform their rigid sales, marketing, and customer service programs and adopt an intrinsically more flexible organizational, technological, and go-to-market approach”

The Dynamic Human Journey
Their observations focus on organization, technology and process – but I hope they will also include, and invite others to comment on, core issues of human communication that arise from the often-bewildering challenges listed above. In fact, I submit that customers may not always be so “empowered” as “challenged” to “make faster, smarter, more informed decisions.”

Are Your Customers Developing a Complexity Complex?
Altimeter may be nodding in this direction when they note in a heading “The Factors that Impact the Dynamic Customer Journey Multiply Complexity.” Of course, we face more than just the question of how to control, minimize and seamlessly integrate structural complexities – we face the challenge of how to ensure that the composite end result amounts to useful, usable, human relations and communications.

Not surprisingly, “useful” and “useable” correlate well with “simple.” Siegel+Gale has been tracking the need for, and benefits of, simplicity for some time, and their latest Simplicity Index points out the paradoxical blessing/curse of technology:

“On the one hand, the steady stream of innovation continues to make it easier for consumers to watch, listen, share and communicate. But many companies in acquisition mode have expanded their profiles and portfolios and incorporated such a sea of product models and technology types that many customers feel lost as they attempt to navigate their way to a simple purchase.”

Simply Put, Brands Need to Put it Simply
The upshot seems to be that brands must embrace a unifying and simplifying approach to technology and communications. Easier said than done? Perhaps. Nonetheless, I suggest, and invite comment on, two guiding principles:

1. Brands that take the complexity burden off of consumers will step to the fore.
2. Of those complexity-defying brands, the ones that learn to also communicate in
   the simplest, most communally human terms will be the long-term winners

Human-to-Human Communication vs. Brand to Prospect
Do you agree? Disagree? And do you believe that considering the dynamics of honest human communication – alongside organizational, technological and process-oriented factors – would enhance the Altimeter discussion?

Please leave a comment, and join in the Altimeter discourse.

I’ve long explained to inquiries coming from our (still surprising to me) #4 ranking as a top SEO copywriting firm, per topseos.com, that we don’t concentrate on the typical relationship between copy and algorithm but, rather, on the human relationship between brands and the people they would honestly serve. And I’ve been feeling validated by developments in search of late, particularly as both user preferences and Penguin, the latest Google update, strongly favor content quality over keyword quantity or SEO gaming.

Content Curation vs. Creation
With all that, I wonder about the future of content development – specifically, automated curation and sharing vs. original content creation.  Just today I received an email from a leading – or at least an aggressive – curation platform, with the subject line “Content Marketing in a Box.”  I suppose that notion appeals to some, but I fear it all too aptly sums up the downside of automated curation.  In a marketing world that rightly holds that “thinking outside the box” is crucial to profitable brand differentiation, why would any marketer want to literally think inside the box?

Curation Services Inform – Human Curators Enliven
This is not to say that content curation services are not valuable – they simply can’t be used as a magic box out of which instantly pops a meaningful content marketing program (that same email claims that the service proffered will reduce your content time to just 20  minutes a day).  As another recent blog post notes, there are a lot of great services out there to pour content into your topical funnel, but only a human curator can distill it into a meaningful, manageable content offering.

What’s your experience with content curation services? And to what will you trust the future of your own content marketing efforts: the more affordable, relatively automated curated sharing of third-party content, or more expensive, out-of-the-box human curation and the original content it can support? (And if the answer is both, which do you see as being the dominant factor?)

BlogHer’s report “Women and Social Media 2012,” gave a big boost to Pinterest – it bested Facebook 81% to 67% on the trust rating.  OK, so the cute new guy in town, with a great face and wanting to talk about all the things women love, is a hot property. But will he last?  Possibly, if he stays true to the reasons why women trust him in the early going:

1.    Women trust Pinterest because seeing is believing.
There’s been a good deal of chatter about the rise of visual content on the Internet – and there’s no better proof than Pinterest. The torrent of keyword-packed SEO copywriting passing as content (a la this sentence) makes people cry out “Give me a break!”  The often beautiful pinboards are just what’s needed – they are literally sites for sore eyes.

 2.    Women trust Pinterest because they like Pinterest. 
One commentator,  a young female social media wonk, describes Pinterest as “relaxing.”  There’s less pressure to keep up with updates, or actively “Like” things – women can just look at the things they like. Call it a less creepy version of the voyeurism that drove the early financial success of the Internet, via the other gender.

3.     Women trust Pinterest because women trust women
As with most of social media, the truly social part is driven by trust of community.  A recent Nielsen survey found that 92% of consumers globally trust “earned media,” including word of mouth.  A different study, from The Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, further points out that when it comes to trust, women trust women more than they do men (interestingly, men trust women more, too).

So is Pinterest emerging as a “female trust fest,”  a woman’s welcome wagon that marketers can simply hitch their brands to and ride along?  I doubt it.  To be trusted on Pinterest, brands are going to have to invest as much heart and soul (oh yes, and money) as Pinterest’s female users invest of themselves.

Pinterest or all the rest – marketers need high-quality, highly creative content
This, of course, means that, at its heart, Pinterest requires exactly what all other forms of content-driven social media require for success going forward – an investment in creativity and quality of content over simple tonnage.  As one user was quoted, in a report on Pinterest use leveling off, “I need more time and motivation, not more ideas and recipes.”

Do you have a favorite Pinterest board to share with us?