You’re waiting for the train on your way to work. You’ve got a long day ahead, and don’t feel like swinging by the grocery store afterward. Fortunately, there’s a supermarket kiosk on the platform. You scan the barcodes with your phone and arrange for your food to be delivered when you get home.

As you cross the street to your office building, the strap of your computer bag finally breaks. You don’t have time to run out and get a new one, but that’s okay. Once you’re in your office, you log on to the company’s website, put on the augmented reality headset, and virtually try on different bags.

At lunch, you head down to your usual restaurant. The AI in the touch-screen kiosk suggests sandwiches you might like based on your order history, then uses facial recognition to complete the order and charge your account.

This is phygital marketing – all made possible by advances in augmented reality (AR).

The global AR and virtual reality (VR) markets are expected to reach 18.8 billion USD by the end of 2020 – over 78% growth from spending in 2019. By 2025, that growth is only expected to increase exponentially.

With the sophistication of AR/VR tech, more companies are incorporating it into their campaigns – and more consumers are expecting it.

In this Process Street post, we’ll take an in-depth look at the what and why of phygital marketing, but you can also skip ahead to one of the following sections:

• Phygital isn’t a real word… Is it?
• Living in a phygital world: Nintendo, Porsche, and Sephora
• Phygitalizing your brand

Let’s get phygital!

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When I first heard the phrase “entrepreneurial spirit,” I laughed. Scoffed, actually.

I pictured zen-like self-help gurus in yoga pants up on a mountain retreat à la Topher Grace’s Black Mirror tech genius encouraging his followers to embrace their culturally-appropriated spirit animals and open their chakras for more fulfilling hostile takeovers.

Or Jared Leto.

“Does anyone even say that?” I asked Adam, my editor, during our 1:1.

“It’s an interesting concept,” he said. “I think you should explore it.”

Dubiously, I set off to find out what this entrepreneurial spirit thing was all about.

Naturally, Adam was right.

Not only did I discover it’s definitely not as mystical as it sounds, but it draws heavily on some very ancient philosophy, and makes sense for both the personal and the professional.

I’ll walk you through what I learned and how you can use it, or you can skip ahead to the juicy bits:

• What is an entrepreneurial spirit?
• What does ancient philosophy have to do with modern entrepreneurs?
• Ryan Holiday: writing, entrepreneurship, and Stoic principles
• Arianna Huffington: Stoic inspiration for a better work/life balance
• Tim Ferriss: the philosophy of one of the most innovative entrepreneurs
• How to cultivate your own entrepreneurial spirit

Now, get comfortable and still your mind…

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Alex Zubkov is a technical writer at LITSLINK from Dnipro. Alex has 15 years experience in sales, marketing, and product promotion for both local and international markets. He’s also a techno geek and amateur photographer with a love of gadgets and the Arsenal FC.

Quality assurance (QA) is an essential stage of any software development cycle. It helps developers catch the lingering bugs and inconsistencies in the product’s functionality before you deliver it to your customers.

According to Statista, companies spent 35% of their financial resources on software testing in 2015. In 2019, this figure went down to just below a quarter of the company’s budget, but it is still taxing in 2020 to balance financial expenditure and product performance.

A sophisticated QA process can cut costs by reducing the number of errors that need fixing and, subsequently, the amount of iterative testing required. It can also improve the reliability of the testing process, further reducing expenses, which is crucial for startups and low-budget, middle-size enterprises.

In this article, we’ll briefly run through the key stages of the QA process:

• Key stages of the QA process
• What tools should you use?
• The role of QA processes in your startup growth

Let’s get started!
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“The misinformation crisis is a symptom of the enormously significant ways that the internet has changed our information ecosystem, which I don’t think anybody, least of all governments and traditional media, has fully got to grips with.” Al Baker, Managing Editor at Logically

If you’ve been on social media at all in the past decade, you’ve likely spoken to at least one synthetic person without even realizing it.

To be honest, probably more than one. In the early months of 2020, Twitter purged 174,000 bots it claimed were being used by the Chinese government.

This is what propaganda looks like today. But no, you say, propaganda is kitschy, cartoonish posters from the 1940s, and, once upon a time, you’d be right. The truth is, though, modern propaganda is almost completely digital – and not nearly as easy to spot.

Dictators use bots to stifle uprisings. Political candidates use bots to promote their platforms. Civil rights advocates use bots to schedule protests and share information. That new startup has bots to raise its brand profile, and if you’ve ever scheduled an automated post, you’ve used one, too.

Like most technology, bots aren’t malevolent by nature; how they’re used, however, is another matter entirely.

This article is going to examine the methods and origins of modern propaganda and what’s been done to combat it.

• Is there a difference between “fake news” and propaganda?
• Is modern propaganda really doing anything new?
• Meet the AI generating synthetic content
• How you can spot modern propaganda

Onward, we go:
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With nine years in the aviation industry, Daniel Martin is an experienced team-builder with several high-performance content creation teams under his belt. He is currently the Head of Customer Success at LinkDoctor.

As of October 2019, there were 1.72 billion websites on the Internet. Keeping up with reputation and rank is important for any website owner, but it’d be impossible to manually check every site one-by-one.

Google has developed a ranking algorithm that crawls through billions of websites in a short time. This algorithm determines the site’s relevance and trustworthiness based on several factors, including backlinks from other sites.

A backlink is equivalent to statements such as “I trust this website,” or “This is a valuable website.” This is why link-building has become necessary to get higher ranks on the Internet.

High-ranking sites are more visible on search engines’ results, which leads to higher conversion rates and traffic.

When it comes to organic links, though, you can’t just ask other sites to give them to you; you need to earn them. But how do you get other sites to link to yours?

In this article, I’ll cover everything you need to know about:

• What are organic links and link building?
• Focus on gaining these high-quality links
• Low-quality organic links to avoid
• How to deal with toxic backlinks to your website
• Determining the best strategy to gain organic links
• Understanding user behavior and interests to increase organic traffic
• Identifying your site’s customer personas for more tailored content
• How to create high-quality, linkable assets other sites will want to use
• Optimizing your website for better organic links
• Leveraging social media for more backlinks

Read on for step-by-step instructions on sowing those backlinks to your site!

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Call center quality assurance is like going to the dentist: everyone agrees it should be done regularly, no one likes doing it, and it’s probably been put off much longer than it should.

No one’s blaming you – agents hate it, supervisors hate it, even quality assurance auditors hate it. It’s tedious, time-consuming, and repetitive. Add to that the high call center attrition rate and low job satisfaction, and you may be wondering: why even bother?

Well, I’ll tell you. In this post, I’ll cover:

• What is call center quality assurance?
• Why is call center quality assurance important?
• How to overcome your QA obstacles
• 11 free call center quality assurance templates
• Automate your workflow with Process Street + Zapier

Plus I’ll provide you with 11 free checklists to take the drudgery out of QA audits!

If you came for the templates, grab them here:

• Call Center Agent Training Program Checklist Template
• Call Center Quality Assurance (QA) Agent Training Process Checklist Template
• Call Center Quality Assurance Structure Template
• Call Center Quality Assurance Audit Template
• Call Center Customer Service Quality Assurance Form
• Call Center Sales Quality Assurance Form
• Call Center Outbound Sales Quality Assurance Form
• Call Center Helpdesk Quality Assurance Form
• Call Center Metrics Calculation Checklist Template
• Manager Weekly Report Checklist Template
• Daily Supervisor Checklist

If you want to use these checklists, just sign in with your Process Street account and start customizing your templates. If you don’t have an account yet, sign-up here to get started with your free trial!

Otherwise, let’s get to it.
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