There are a lot of great tools out there on the web that automate processes. The problem with automation though is that you not only loose the human touch, you are relying on processes to take place in an unpredictable environment.
Two things that highlight this for me in the past few days.
Firstly, a lot of people have started to use tools such as Ping to update all their social messages at once. The way I see this is that my Facebook audience is different from my LinkedIn audience, which is also different to my Twitter audience. If you take the basic principals of Permission Marketing, I should not be making it easier for me - I should be making it relevant to them.
Secondly, and this one is not nice. I clicked on a link through to a story on a local newspaper website. The site does, as many do, run display advertising. But, considering the story, the message is the thing that caught my eye for all the wrong reasons.
As these systems appear to make our lives easier, we need to remember that we still have the human touch…
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I certainly agree with you with respect to the online automation making our lives more complicated - often generating ‘noise’ - sometimes emanating from humans and sometimes from bots. I however tend to think that in certain cases online ‘automation’ can work. And this is not a marketing workflow process but a business workflow process. I use Deskaway to manage my workflow in a manner that helps me automate certain things such as who is responsible for what tasks, what issues are likely to come up; reporting is auto generated et al. So that kind of automation to my mind is good. Cross linking things for marketing purposes, as you pointed out may not be the best idea. Your thoughts?
These kind of tools, I agree, are great, for optimising workflow. Mainly because is effectively a software tool, rather than an automated system for filling in data.
Another example is Googel Adsense. I have seen some very bizarre adverts come up on some of my pages that run adsense because the topic used certain words that weren’t in context.
Thanks for the link, I will check out the software.