Don't sell Flip Flops in a Blizzard

Artificial Intelligence is no longer the imaginative filament of a futurist's dreams - it is now a business requirement. There are lots of apps that will allow your company to literally unplug and "hire" a social media manager that eats only RAM. Gone are the days where it requires an entire department devoted to research, curation and the composition of content..that loses its luster from the moment of publication. But please exercise caution - with any automated campaign, it is imperative that there is a beating heart at the center to monitor and "humanize" your brand messaging.

A quick Google search reveals a cornucopia of robust, pre-built, "hands-free" social media aggregation and management apps - Hootsuite, Feedly, Buffer and on and on and on. In fact, there is an actual site called "Automated Social Networking" and it purports to help your business increase SEO, leads and conversion rates exponentially. Why can this be an issue? First off, its not a numbers game. Sure, a 500% increase in SEO may seem alluring at first, but traffic without personalization devolves from sirens to static rather rapidly. A broadcast has its time and place, but a broadcast a day will eventually land you on a corporate blacklist, or if you're in Canada, in violation of CASL's and subject to a hefty governmental fine.

Furthermore, contextual messaging is also key. By expanding the range of your brand messaging, you'll no doubt see the need for regional and cultural personalization and geo-tagging. While it is technically possible to allow geo-tagging within Hootsuite and other applications of that ilk, this functionality is limited by the location and physical range of your mobile device.

In today's hyper-connected world, there is no excuse for not knowing whether there is a snowstorm in Phoenix. Brand messaging can no longer be of the "spray and pray" variety. Augmented search and messaging can mine the darkest caverns of the interwebs but, without an individual behind the screen who can attribute semantic meaning to the data, it's all 1's and 0's. Think of these applications as a fancy recommendation engine. They can advise the most well informed recommendations for content creation, but the actual response and delivery is still left up to the user. And if the user still thinks it is important to sell flipflops in the winter, that's what will happen.

This shouldn't dissuade your company from investing time and resources into an Augmented Messaging business strategy, however. AI is becoming the de facto business platform and the sooner you can augment existing processes, the more competitive you will become. It works well as the execution arm of your brand messaging, but it needs to have an organic heart (literally) at the center.

Questions? Comments? We're here to help... sound off below! :-)