Making Your Business Memorable: Real-Time Marketing Strategies

1. Introduction: Hello everybody, I'm Ekaterina Walter. I am a passionate marketer, author of two books; one is Think Like Zuck, another one, The Power of Visual Storytelling, and it's my passion to take marketing from just the traditional approach and into something innovative that really helps connect with your customers and with the audience in a very meaningful, authentic way. Real-time marketing is the class that's focused on how to build your brand through real-time interaction and connection with the audiences. What are the techniques, and strategies, and tactics that you need to think about, and how you need to organize yourself internally to brand yourself effectively. 2. Why Real-Time Marketing Matters: Hello everybody. I'm really happy to have you here with me to talk about one of the topics I'm really passionate about, which is real-time marketing. Hopefully by the end of the session today, you will learn different techniques, you will be inspired by multiple examples, we're going to talk about what is real-time marketing, why it matters, we'll talk about different business cases for real-time marketing that you might want to consider, we will talk about types, and also applications and case studies. Then at the end we're going to wrap it up with, how do you organize yourself for success, and do's and don'ts of real-time marketing. With that, let's start. Let me tell you a story. Last Christmas, when I was getting way too close to the holiday and they still didn't have all my gift shopping done, I decided to tweet one of my favorite brands REI, and REI is sort of the outdoor sports type of store, in the Northwest. I asked him, I said, "Hey guys, can you help me out. I'm looking for a gift, what's your recommendation?" I was actually quite pleasantly surprised when, about half hour later, they came back to me with this tweet, that included a custom video, specifically targeted to me, that talked about hey Katrina, we got your tweet, knowing a little bit about you, and all of the products in store, here's a product we'd recommend that you shop for, and it was really cool. Well, first of all, you feel so awesome about it because it's personalized to you, and then within a half an hour, it was amazing. That's what you call real-time response and true personalized marketing. So, I'm always curious as a marketer. So I actually connected with the team at REI and I said, "Hey guys. I want to talk to you. How the heck did you do that? Tell me about the whole setup." What I found out is quite interesting. They didn't have that big of a budget for that but they decided that they going to take as many tweets, as many inquiries as they can on Twitter, and they're going to do a personalized video for each person, in a fun and hopefully personal way. There's green vests on the floor at their stores, and the green vest are people who work there and know their products in and out. So, they set up, very inexpensively, green screens in their stores, and they would just record those videos and would post them in real-time. They said, "Well, how many did you do?" And they go, "Well, we did 80, about 80 or 90." And I said, "Okay, great. Let's talk about the results." And they said, "Well actually, within those couple weeks that we shot those videos right before Christmas, the traffic to our store or to our online store has doubled." So, the question becomes raise your hand if you want your traffic to your website to double. As a marketer you go, yes please, sign me up. This is an example that talks about real-time marketing done right, customized to the person, and still staying on brand. So, let's look at a definition of real-time marketing. The way I define real-time marketing is, and sometimes we shorten it to RTM. So, RTM is about raising awareness, creating demand, and furthering the brand's mission for connecting with customers in a meaningful way, in the right place, at the right time, through the relevant content, relevant message. So, all those right place, right time, the right person, right message, they're very critical for real-time marketing. It actually goes by different names. So, you're going to hear it as you're looking at the industry, and you're saying, "Well, I have heard it called agile marketing, and we've heard of called responsive marketing, always-on marketing or sometimes even on-the-fly marketing," And it all means the same thing. It all means, how do I connect with my customers in that moment where they need help or they'd like to engage with me? That is what's important, how they deliver what they need in the right period of time. So, let's talk about the reasons for the rise of real-time marketing. Well, first of all, you need to remember that right now we live in the "now economy". Literally, you can say now and exclamation mark because that's how radical it is. It's all about things happening in real-time, information getting to you in real-time, we know Twitter is you- actually news break on Twitter before they break at news outlets. How crazy is that, before even TV reports it or newspaper prints it, it's already all over Twitter and that's already old news. That's real-time, and what contributes to that is the Newsfeed mentality, that changed the way people get and consumer information. So you have Facebook newsfeed, you have Twitter newsfeed just rolling by, so fast. You have different aggregators that deliver and filter information in real-time that's only relevant to you, but also there's just so much information in the world, that you need to figure out which information do you want to consume, and how you want to connect with it at that particular moment. That's why it becomes so much harder to marketers to stand out. So, think about this Americans now engage with several different channels or sources at the same time, they they consume seven different amounts of information through different channels. You have you TV, you have mobile, you have iPad, you have laptop, you have gaming consoles, I mean, there's just so much going on, and the flow of news accelerated dramatically, compared to what we used to. If you look at the average lifespan of a tweet, it's probably about an hour. Now if you look at a Facebook post you can say, okay, fine, maybe it's about 20 hours, but it's blinking and passing as by, so what is very important to remember is that, as the adult attention span gets shorter and shorter every year, this year it's between 3-8 seconds, we need to figure out, how do we actually stand out, and how do we connect with people in a meaningful way. So, the bottom line is every 48 hours, we now create and crank out the same amount of information we've created from the beginning of time to the year 2003. I mean, beginning of time to the year 2003, that's how much information we are now cranking out over 48 hours, and it's going to be even 24 hours pretty soon. So, we live in what I call the age of infobesity. So, in the age of infobesity there are several ways for businesses, and it doesn't matter who you are, are they your market or, again, you are a designer or you're a journalist, for anybody really to stand out, whether you are a brand brand, or your personal brand. One of those ways is to understand the strategies and techniques behind real-time marketing. 3. Real-Time Marketing Statistics: All right, now you are asking yourself why would I do that? Give me some data, give me some stats. So, here is an Evergage and Realtime Report that was done and commissioned. They did a survey of 114 digital marketers in 18 countries to determine the perception of marketers of real-time marketing and the use of it. So, on the screen, you're seeing some statistics that are quite interesting. So, 76% of marketers are using real-time marketing today, 88% consider it important in their plans, 41% have included it in their 2014 budgets, and 20% of marketers actually track ROI report really insane results. So, results above 75% that's pretty darn good. Now, here's some of the types of our RTM activities. Again, on the screen, you're seeing what are the activities that are mostly used. So, you see personalizing content kind of like my ROI story or personalizing creative and respond to customer interactions. Then you have responding to customers in context of their web interaction or taking advantage of trends. So, specific current events and then it goes from there. So, like live chats and triggered emails, but then if you look at the channels, the interesting thing is it's easier to do real-time marketing through social. So, you've seen 48% actually use social media to address customers' concerns or have conversations with them, 45% website, 39% still use email, then there's call centers, online display, et cetera, et cetera. So, there is a variety of channels that real-time marketing touches and we'll talk about that when we cover some examples. But you're asking what are the benefits? And so, the same study says that most marketers report the benefits of increased customer engagement as number one 81%, improve customer experience 73%, increase conversion rates 59%, improve brand perception 52%, increase in retention and actually reduce in churn with 52% again, which is very important, increase loyalty, increase brand awareness, et cetera, et cetera. So, the benefits are really quite clear of making sure you are at the right place at the right time with the right message. There's also obviously obstacles to implementation. We'll talk about implementing it internally, but here are some that talk about lack of resources as the biggest one. Time to implement obviously and absolutely it takes preparation. We'll talk about that. Lack of knowledge and skills. So for example, a lot of brands now are hiring journalists because journalists not only they're strong writers and copywriters, they actually are used to responding in real-time and you can see the rest of the obstacles on the screen, but they are very real but nothing that you can't overcome. But here's going to business case. You're saying okay, great. So, but what does that mean for me and the ROI of whatever it is that I'm doing? Here's the study that was done by Golin Harris that's been sort of summarized by e-market in this particular case and what they are saying is that exposure to real-time marketing increases awareness, consideration, and purchase. So, if you really look at the chart and you see that before real-time marketing, people feel positive and they may be interested in something. They're willing to recommend your brand or even consider to buy it, but it's almost double almost in every single case after real-time marketing exposure. So, very real data and here is another one. This study was done by Monetate and Econsultancy. They did a survey of 900 global marketers and they found that companies execute in real-time realized a 26% lift in conversion rates and the benefits that that study reported were also better customer experience, improved customer retention, better brand perception. So, very real results that talk about the importance of shifting our marketing strategies to think more in real-time and to become more agile with any function that that touches. 4. 7 Types of RTM: All right. So, let's talk about the types of real-time marketing, because there's all kinds of ways you can approach this. So, let's walk through them, and these are the types that, Debbie Williamson, my favorite industry analyst that writes about real-time marketing for EMarketer Outline in one of her reports, and I think she's absolutely right, these seven types are very inclusive and to any activity that you need to consider as a business person. So, one of it is, social customer relationship management. So, one of the easiest ones to say, "Hey, we have a social media, we want to respond to customers in real-time." So, this is a way of using social media to rapidly respond to customers who comment, complain, or just want to engage with you on social media sites. So it can include a variety of them; Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, Instagram, et cetera, et cetera. The other type is dynamic creative optimizations, so the way this is defined is a method of automatically changing ad creative to gain the best response from the ads target audience. So, when you're putting out you paid media or different types of creatives, we call it AB testing. So, I'm going to put five types of creative out there with different messages and I'm going to see which one actually works. So there's a lot of tools now that exist that allow you to do it so fast, in very much real-time, to really make sure that whatever paid strategy and paid elements of your paid strategy exists, you have an opportunity to play with it, and figure out what are the ones that drive the most traffic in the most attention. The third one is real-time content marketing. So, this is using insights from social analytics, to quickly develop digital content that meets an immediate marketing need. So if there's holiday going on, we will talk about definitely Grammys and Super Bowl, there's something going on in real-time, you need to be ready to create the content that really addresses the need and jump in with a very relevant messaging. So that's absolutely an important element. The next one is the real-time marketing ad campaign rebalancing. So this is using insights gleaned from online conversation about ad campaigns to make on-the-fly changes in media mix or creative. Again, taken the response from people is it overly negative, is it overly positive, do we need to crank that up, do we need to change it, do we need to pull it, which happens with marketing all the time. So decisions made on-the-fly based on the the response that the customers sometimes even strong response the customers are having. The next one is aligning marketing with trending topics, and that is creating content, post, any marketing material, theme to news or events or topics that social media users are currently discussing. So, jumping on and having some smart content or smart response and just making conversation that's more interesting without hopefully selling too much. Another one is real-time buying. So, what that is, it's an automated method of buying and selling and impressions on demand and on an impression by impression basis often referred to as programmatic buying, so it's more around again paid media and your paid media strategies, that done right and after you test what works. The last one is strategic business decisions, that's also critical and often is overlooked. Applying insights from social media to rapidly make changes in product development, pricing, or other larger business activities. Now, this one is tougher because it requires so many more departments to be involved in it, not just marketing and PR and others, it actually requires the whole company to be prepared to say, "We'll take that feedback, and we will incorporate it in real-time." It's very tough, but those companies that do it like for example sometimes Nike or ModCloth is a clothing company that puts out their catalogs online, and says "We're going to let our fans decide, what products they want to see in our upcoming catalog." That becomes an important element of bringing in your audiences into your brand. 5. Applications and Case Studies: Now to the fun part, we are going to talk about what are the examples of different case studies of how companies have done real-time marketing right. I'm hoping in this section, you can draw a little bit of inspiration from how this was done, and it goes from real cool utilitarian responses to real funny ones. So, let's see what's in store. Now, before we start, there's one thing I think we need to remember, and that is relevancy has a deadline. The whole class is about that, but just as a business person, as a marketer, keeping that in the back of your mind, the fact that relevancy has a deadline and there is the right time and opportunity to jump in, and there's an opportunity to maybe stay away from, that needs to be incorporated into mentality and the fabric of the company to be able to execute on some of those strategies and also similar examples in the right way. So, there's different themes for real-time marketing and occasions. So, you have holidays, you have world events like sports, anything really, TV shows and TV events like awards, celebrities. So, you could have a topic about celebrity and anything that comes with that, like for example, royal baby, the birth of the royal baby in the UK. Milestones, so that means anniversaries, tributes, et cetera, et cetera. There's also times of crisis, which we need to handle a little bit better. We'll talk a little bit about that. But things like news, latest craze, like viral videos or different insane memes that you may want to pay attention to, that might be on brand for you. There's brand-on-brand interaction. So, brands talking to each other and picking on each other online, that draws an audience to the jumps in and just kind of has that human interaction. There is addressing negative comments. It's very important to make sure that your negative comments don't go unanswered. So, there's that customer support element to real time, and then also, obviously, converting competitors' dissatisfied customers into your customers. Some of the industries do that very well, like airlines. If somebody is unhappy with one airline, the other airline is listening in their command centers and jumping in and saying, "Oh, great opportunity to steal a customer. Maybe we have a flight for them if they missed theirs or something happened that they can convert. By helping them in real time, we can steal the customers from a competition." So, there's a lot of different themes and occasions that you can capitalize on. So, here are some other examples. So, one of the things you can do is ride the trend. So, go back to the Super Bowl now two years ago, the most important, the hottest example of real-time marketing done right was done by Oreo. So, Oreo, when everything went dark and the blackout happened, they put out this tweet with this awesome image that says "Hey, you can still dunk in the dark," and it went viral because it was so spot on. It was in real time, it was right on topic, and it was hilarious. It got a ton of exposure, over 16,000 retweets, and it was covered in so many publications that the brand itself, just out of that tweet, got so much awareness and promotion that named them the Master of Social Media and Master of Real Time. At that same event, there were others, like for example, this tweet that include a divine image from Calvin Klein that says, "Hey, since the lights are still out, dot dot dot," and it's a young man in Calvin Klein underwear doing push ups, which, what woman wouldn't want to look at that while blackout is happening. So, there was also a lot of other examples that were a little salesy and some that were cute, but definitely, you would say, in that case, Oreo stole the funder and set the standard at that time for the rest of the industry on how to do it real time. So, there is another way to go about it. Instead of just more entertainment route, it's more of, "How can I provide utility?" So, in this case, here's a story of Paull Young. He was riding a Citi Bike in New York. He fell off the bike, and his pants tore. So, they were totally ruined, and he tweeted about it. Citi Bike, New York was fast to join in. They partnered with J.Crew and send out this tweet that say, "Stay tuned, help is on the way via J.Crew! Hashtag PANTSFORPAULL." So, a little time later, at his office, Paul gets these gift cards to go buy a new pair of pants in real time, so he doesn't have to go home pantless. So, he tweeted this image and says, "My PANTSFORPAULL from Citi Bike, New York after my post-stack PLEASESENDPANTS plea this morning. Day made J.Crew." This is an opportunity for both brands, Citi Bike and J.Crew, to really jump in and help pull out. Now, Paull runs marketing at Charity: Water, a very well known brand. Paull is also very known in the industry. He talks at a lot of events, and just what they do at Charity: Water is so amazing, how they help bring clean water to the world. So, those brands jumped on chance to help somebody from Charity: Water to have a happy ending. So, that's an example of providing utility. But to do that, you have to be listening to conversations, and we'll talk a little bit about that. 6. Experiment, Entertain, and Celebrate: There's also a way to align yourselves with a TV events for example. So, one of real cool examples was Grammy. Well, actually, one of real cool examples was Oscars in 2014 when the movie Gravity was nominated for a number of Oscar awards. NASA took it as a real good opportunity, as a perfect opportunity to tweet out as people are talking about the movie, Gravity, to tweet out a lot of facts about the Earth and space, and just real fun fact. So, this is one of their tweets after another Oscar win for movie Gravity. They said, "Congrats on another win at Oscars #Oscars2014 #Gravity for cinematography. Here's the #RealGravity - Earth from #ISS." So, they used hashtags very creatively, they added their own hashtag to an Oscar hashtag and a Gravity movie hashtag, real gravity. That whole series of real gravity tweets covered all the interesting facts that you might want to know about the Earth. It attached fantastic images of the Earth from space like this one. It was a great way to not interrupt the conversation, but align with it. Here's another one. Now this is a Grammys example actually. So, Daft Punk got the Album of the Year at Grammys, and their man, Pharrell Williams, who wore this insane weird looking hat, and he went on stage and said a couple words. Arby's look at his hat and said, "Oh well, hold on, our logo is almost exact replica of the hat that he was wearing." So, they sent out this tweet that says, "Hey, Pharrell, can we have our hat back? #Grammys." People went on saying, first, they already made fun of the hat at that point, but the way Arby's included themselves into this conversation was insanely, partly just perfect. So, Pharrell writes back and says, "Ya'll trying to start a roast beef?", and retweeted Arby's post. Then, other brands actually chimed in and kind of admitted that that was a very brilliant move on Arby's part, so Honda USA tweeted, "Well played Arby's," and they included the image that said, "Best 'I wish our logo was a hat, so we could've tweeted it,' tweet." That's the example of a brilliant marketing in real-time where you really fits so perfectly into the conversation that you just cannot not take a stab. There's also ways to experiment with new types of media. So, one of the pretty new media channels is Vine, and a lot of brands are already doing a lot of cool things with Vine. But, this is an example of what General Electric did, they started putting out different vines to feel how the audience would respond. So, one of them was how does color travel through liquids. So, they poured the milk, as you can see in the image the milk on the plate, and they added different colors, and they showed how different wonderful combinations it can create. It got insane amount of response. I think they got over 230,000 views. From there they said, wow, people want to hear a little bit about science, so they created a hashtag called #sixsecondscience, and they started putting out a video. They did a series of six-second videos of those science facts, and people went gaga over it. It was so perfect, it was fantastic. So, experimenting and seeing what works, new channels as well as new content is really critical as well. Then, you can entertain. I worked at Intel for eight years, how build social business at Intel, so Intel is a brand that's near and dear to my heart. But, there was a lot of cool things that Intel is doing on Facebook and Twitter that we thought will really truly resonate with our geeky audience, the audience that likes math, and science, and fun facts. So, when Olympics came about, one of the Facebook post that Intel put out there. It said, "The record for longest ski jump is 246.5 meters. That's more than the length of two soccer fields." That's a cool fact. This is something that says, hey, we're geeks, we like math, so count with us, but also something that provides a real-time fact about the events that everybody is talking about. So, very critical to entertain and educate at the same time. There's also things that you can do to celebrate. So, here's an example and we talked about celebrities and celebrity events, and here's an example from Oreo cookie. "Prepare the royal bottle services!" Tweet when the royal baby in Britain was born, and they've done it in, I think, tasteful way. So, kind of celebrating with the world major events that people are thinking about and talking about at that particular time is important. Here's an example from Starbucks UK, "And then there were three. Congratulations!" They have three Starbucks cups to big 11 small one, for Kayden William and the Baby M. Very well executed, something that's just blends into the conversations that are happening online. 7. Connecting Through Video: Now, there is also ways to really connect with the audience for video. Video's becoming an insanely effective tool to not only deliver information, but also have a conversation. So, not only recording your own videos, but responding with the video becomes a great way for brands to really truly connect with the customers so instead of saying, "Hey here's a text," we can respond in the video, especially if a customer produced a video for you as well. So, this is an example of how one of these sports stars and athletes, Tiger Woods and his company, responded to a glitch in the video game, and this is an old example, but it's one of my favorites because it's so brilliantly executed. So, Tiger Woods put out a game and at some point a customer played the game, post the video on YouTube that says, "Oh look at here, there's a glitch in the game." Tiger is actually walking on water and he calls it a Jesus shot. So, Tiger and his team doesn't hesitate, they produce this video in the response and post it. The video goes absolutely viral, got over, I believe seven million views, and that is an amazing way to really truly connect with the audience in real time, as well as, respond to potentially negative or explosive comment from a customer in a fun way where it goes, Yeah. That's a fantastic response. So, here's the video. We got the new, what is this? We got the new Tiger Woods 08, best game ever. We got the new feature. You could stand on water, let's see. There is another fantastic example of a video response that I want to make sure that you guys see that Honey Maid did. They launch this "This is Wholesome" campaign that celebrates, the ads that celebrates all kinds of families. Gay families, interracial families, parents with tattoos all over them, but really true. An ad that reaches every corner and make sure delivers a message of love, that no matter what family you are from, there is such thing as love. There has been an overwhelming number of positive responses for them, but there is also a negative response from a subset of an audience that didn't like the fact that families of different backgrounds are being featured in a national ad campaign. So, the way Honey Maid responded to that, was absolutely brilliant. They made this video. As you can see, what happened is they asked several artist to take and create the word love out of all the negative comments. They printed them all out and they put them in the middle, and then what they did, is all the way around, they put out the background made out of all the positive comments, which is 10 times the amount of negative comments that they received. What this shows to me, is staying on brand, staying strong when a brand wants to defend the message, but also show them that it's not about humans fighting humans. It doesn't matter what family you are from. What's important is love and I think that was one of the most, the strongest responses we've ever seen, especially used in video from brands in the past couple of years. I believe it's very well done. 8. Brand "Feuds" and Having Fun: Now, there's other fun things that you can do. So, one of the example is a brand feud. So, what you see on the screen is a Tweet that Oreo cookie actually tweeted at some point and what they said is a very generic question and they said, "Ever bring your own Oreo cookies to the movie theater?" So, AMC Theaters were not going to be left behind in the dust. They tweet back, retweet their tweet and add in caps, "NOT COOL, COOKIE." What they mean is, "Hey, you know the policy. We don't bring food inside the theater." So, there is a lot of cool examples where brands are engaging with each other and maybe doing a little bit of a feud thing, there is famous J.C. Penney, I believe and that was a Kmart. There's a lot of cool examples that you can find on the web that just shows you that you don't need to necessarily only engage with your customers, you can also engage with your ecosystem and with your industry. So, a lot of fun ways and creative ways you can do it that way. There's also memes, right? So, have fun with memes. Here's an example of a meme from HubSpot went back when the memes of ''Here's what my family think I do, here is what I think I do, here's what I actually do'' type of meme. That's one of my favorites that HubSpot created, but there is a lot of memes starting to increase in popularity. So, brands are jumping on the bandwagon, hopefully, in the right way to participate in that craze in a meaningful way. Then, obviously have even more fun. So, here is an example of my favorite hilarious examples is from Smart Car. So, Clayton Hove, he works at advertising agency and he is a really great character. He has some of the really hilarious tweets and one day, he tweeted this he says, "Saw a bird had crapped on a Smart Car. Totaled it." There was so many retweets, there was conversations around that tweet, and Smart Car could have ignored it because he doesn't have huge following, it's not like it's a big deal that you could just ignore and it will and go away. But they sensed, "Oh no, this is a brilliant opportunity to jump on the conversation and really have some fun with it." So, they came back with this tweet, ''Hey, couldn't have been one bird sounds more like 4.5 million. But seriously we did the math.'' They attached the info graphic that actually shows, that to total a smart car, it takes 4.5 million pigeon poops, 360,000 turkey craps and 45,000 eimu craps to actually total a frame of Smart Car, they branded it and they put it out there. So, not only they got this tweet back from Clayton saying, ''Outsmarted by Smart Car, best social media response ever." They got so much press over the years for that one funny example, because everyone likes to laugh, everybody likes to see brand use a little bit of humor when they're responding, that everybody wanted to cover it and when I speak I talk about it, I'm showing it to you guys right now. So, how tuning potentially negative explosive comment again to do something that can totally benefit your brand and start a whole new conversation, is a really smart way to approach this. Then also make marketing personal. So, one of my favorite brands is Dunkin Donuts. What they do, here's a vine that they actually created for somebody, they found out one of their customers is getting engaged and they posted this vine with two Dunkin Donuts cups and the actual ring in the middle and one cup is giving the ring to another cup, and it's just all sort of love stories in the Dunkin Donuts cups and their message just say, ''Congrats on getting get engaged." DD, Dunkin Donuts. So, they even played on the copy. So, very well done, they make it personal where they find somebody who might really appreciate that personal touch. Again, think back to the RAI story I told you guys in the beginning, for my personal story, it's very similar to that. Then there's real time marketing and there's real time way of thinking. That's true mentality. So, here's an example of one of my personal favorites and I understand and a friend of mine Ramon de Leon back then he was working with Domino's Pizza. At one of the events that he spoke at, he actually met MC Hammer and the first thing you think that you're going to do personally when you see MC Hammer, and you're a fan, you are going to go, ''Hey can I have an autograph?'' Well that's what he did, but he didn't do it for himself. He did it for his customer. Ramon is very focused on customer service. He's all about the customers, all about local community in Chicago. You can tweet at him at any particular point with hashtag ''Ramon wow,'' and you're going to have pizza delivered right away. Now, he's not with Domino's pizza anymore, but you knew you're in Chicago and tweet Ramon, he'll find you even in the snowstorm. He was that good. He really valued his customers and cared about his customers that much. So, he comes up to MC Hammer and says, ''Look I have this customer who is amazing and she loves you. Every time she comes to the store or I talk to her, that's what she talks about. She talks about MC Hammer. Can I get a photograph for her?'' So, he takes an autograph, takes a picture, an autograph is customized to the customer, and he also says, ''Let's do a quick video and say a couple of words to my friend.'' MC Hammer did. It was a quick video. So, Ramon walked away with all of that, for one of his customers. That's the way of thinking, that's the way of really truly connecting with your customers, in the way that they'll remember you and they'll engage with you forever. That's the way of building to advocacy and true loyalty. 9. Preparation and Beyond: Now these are examples of social media but there's real-time marketing examples beyond social. So here's an example of a company, gardeners supply company, that makes sure that they increase their conversions on their website of the traffic that led for social. So one of the things that they noticed is the Pinterest has driven quite a number of traffic to the website but the conversions weren't happening. So, what they did is when they when the customers came from Pinterest, they had this real-time message pop up on their website that says, "Hey, welcome Pinterest visitor, here's a surprise for you, here is a discount offer for you to go shop." So what that lead to is the increase in traffic coming from Pinterest 3X, so there's a lot of real time chats and different features that you can add to your website, that will help guide people through the process all the way to conversion and eventually purchase. There's also real time marketing offline. So this is an example of Sharman and I love that brand, this is a brand that really doesn't put their own brand up front and center, they actually prefer deliver utility to folks, even just take their SitOrSquat App that allows people to find clean rest rooms or allows people to add different rest rooms all around U.S. and it's all crowd sourced to help folks rate different rest rooms by cleanness and access etc. and it's a real true utility. But in this example that I want to share is Sharman donated 70,000 rolls of toilet paper to Detroit fire department. They found out that the firefighter's paying for their own toilet paper out of their own pockets because the city couldn't afford to provide it to them. So they claim that they send the toilet paper and some cleaning supplies to them, and it was an amazing and emotional story and then now they're rolling out a program that does it across multiple fire departments in the United States, so a really well done helping the community just feel more comfortable providing that utility that really truly will stick with people. Then also what I want to finish with is knowing when to quit. So we'll looked at an example of Oreo and they're blackout tweet or image which was two years ago. What they did this year for Super Bowl was pretty brilliant. They said, you know what, there's going to be a lot of people competing for space, there's gonna be a ton of tweets, a lot of noise this time we're going to make news by doing something new and interesting which is absolutely quitting. So they sent out this tweet that says, "Hey guys, enjoy the game tonight, we are going dark, #oreoout." Now that's brilliant, right? Knowing when to quit and knowing when you might not necessarily belong into conversation or you might just add noise is a fantastic way and again they got a lot of exposure for that as well, just to say well that was brilliant. Last year they went out with a bang and now this year they're actually saying, well, we'll just enjoy the game, we're not going to part of that conversation. So the bottom line is, focus on what your community wants and give them something that truly changes their day. That is what real time marketing, real-time business, real-time intelligent, real-time design, real-time conversations is all about, giving them something that changes their day and hopefully makes their day a little brighter because if you do that, your brand will stay on top of mind consistently. All right. Now let's talk about preparing for real time internally. What you see on the screen is a list of things that you need to realize to be truly effective, you have to force that environment of urgency. So when it comes down to brand strategy, content marketing, message and media optimization, alignment with any topics or content, engaging audiences both online and offline but also elements like customer service and product development real-time touches and plays an important role all the way across all of them. The reality is that real time takes preparation, so here's the difference. Planning is when you say well we know the holidays coming up so we're going to have canned custom stuff that we're going to put out there, great. There is some space in your marketing strategy for that as well, but preparation is being prepared internally for anything. So not just putting out a Super Bowl tweet or image out there but putting out a blackout image which is when something happens, you produce it real time and it works for you. For that there is a lot that needs to be put in place, and it takes time, it takes changing the mentality internally to really truly change that. So for example, listening, you have to have command centers, you have to have a way to figure out what are the conversations that are happening overall maybe in your industry or just in the world but also, what are the conversations happening around your brand and make sure you track that very well. You have to have meaningful data and also actionable insights. So for example, if you put out one piece of content, how does it perform in real time and maybe we should switch it up and have a different conversation. You also have to empower your employees and agencies. That's one of the big points that I think is missed a lot of times is, how is your team set up and is your team empowered to react in real time. So there was a whole team of agencies and brand on standby during the Super Bowl and that's how they were able to produce that tweet, that visual and that image in real time and put it out, and also the question becomes, do you have the flexible strategies? Do have editorial calendar? How rigidly do you stick with it? Because you might need to leave a room for being flexible and you also need to take risk, right. Take risk, but take risk that's on-brand and that's important. Until you try out what works and until you actually practice it, it's not just going to magically appear and so having a mentality of operating and thinking like a publisher, again that's the reason why people are hiring journalist and newscasters and inviting them into their business and their brands is because that mentality of real time and thinking like a publisher of producing content less than 24 hours versus what we use to producing content in a week, six months, that mentality needs to change and obviously you also need to make sure you have a budget that continuously stays flexible. So you have a portion of the budget that you spend on something strictly but then there's a piece of the budget that needs to stay flexible. So if you need to produce something or pull your agency in or or produce a piece of content in real time, that you have that budget available if needs be. 10. Looking Back: So, going back to the Oreo example. You look back at that black out tweet. The reality is that that team has by that time practiced for over a year with real-time marketing. How? Well, here's some of the images that was produced somewhere before Super Bowl that was part of the 100 days sort of 100-day to his campaign. They celebrated 100-day where we celebrate 100-year anniversary and what they said is, "What we're going to do is we actually going to create real-time content and real-time images for our social networks for a 100 days straight", and some of them were prepared beforehand, but some of them were produced in real-time. What they did is they practiced and they practiced and they practiced. Think about real-time response is like a muscle memory. So, like if you play tennis or racket ball, you have that muscle that you train and you continuously perfect it over time. Same with that, same real marketing, real-time response. It's the same thing as practicing over and over. So, those images you're seeing are some of the images that were from the campaigns before the Superbowl that allowed Oreo brand, as well as, their agency 360i to prepare ahead of time to make sure that they're on standby and ready to respond with that one perfect tweet. Here's an interesting fact, so if you take Publicis Groupe, for example, on the bigger agencies that's comprised of a lot of other agencies under them. They have what they call Newsdesk, and it's a department of 50 people, they include social strategists, designers, creative, copyright etc, that monitors social media for eight of their larger clients and looks consistently for opportunities to jump in the conversation and respond in real- time. That's the setup that you need to be consistently successful. Then 360i, the agency that helped Oreo with that famous blackout tweet, they did something interesting internally is they found that need for journalistic like or or real-time mentality and skills. So, what they did is they created a class and hold sort of this journalism classes for all of their employees without the background in journalism to help them reach that mentality or help them understand that mentality or help them write in real-time or design in real-time and the classes were so popular, they had to do a number of them all around the agency because the agency is very innovative and they know that this is the skill to have to have. Now this is something you might want to check out, I'm not going to talk too much about it, but take a look at this. This is a calendar the Twitter UK actually created with their own hashtag OwnTheMoment. So, they created this OwnTheMoment planner specifically targeted for UK events obviously, but where it lists different events, so seasonal, TV, sporting, cultural, business. Different events that a brand might be or business might be aware of and might potentially figure out which conversation to jump in. That's a great example of something that you need to have internally as an editorial calendar, planned ahead and something's obviously you can't plan for so you need to be prepared, but something that you were you know what's going on and you know what conversation you not only want track, but engagement in, so really cool. Here's the quote from Bonin Bough that sums up how to do real-time marketing, and how to think about it in the right way. He said, "It's not necessarily about developing creative in real-time, it's about having a creative approach that allows you to operate in real-time." That's what it's about, it's not that you got to be extra creative or extra cool, but you need to know your customers and you need to organize yourself internally for the success that you want to see. So, ask yourself these questions: Is it in your DNA? Are you focused on the conversations that matter? Because if you just all over the place trying to jump in all kinds of conversation, you're going to look desperate and you're going to look disorganized. Not every conversation is a perfect fit for your brand. Do we have the right infrastructure in place? Do we have all the listening setup? Do we have the right people on standby if something really truly hit so we can produce it in real-time just like 360i. did. Is our culture brave enough to try new things, and do we have an authority to act fast? If we don't we need to institute that and you need to fix that internally first before you try to go for something cool because if that mentalities is in place, what you think might be cool might turn into pretty much a PR disaster. Do I know our audience and what they want? Because if you don't know that, everything else is useless. Are we ready to fail? The reality is no matter what role you're in, no matter what you're trying to do, failure is a fact of life. It's just going to happen. It's how you going to get up and bounce off of that and say, "I'm sorry, I apologize", be human and move on. So, are we really truly ready to fail? Do we do real-time marketing for right reasons? Because if you don't do it for the right reasons if you just want to insert yourself in the conversations and interrupt it versus being a part of it, it's really not a good enough reason to start. Then on this slide you can see the metric. So, what do you to identify for yourself is how you measure it correctly. So, are you looking at the right metrics? What do you want to really know at the end of the day when you do this? Is this audience grow for each engagement, is the share of voice? What is that? Here are just some of the options and suggestions I have, but at the end of the day that needs to be defined before you go into it. 11. The Do's of RTM: The last section, do's and don'ts of real-time marketing. All right, we are getting close to the end of our session. You probably are excited. So let's talk about do's and don'ts. Some of them you already kind of heard me say, so I just want to recap and create a list for you to think through as you're going back to your business and trying to incorporate that into your marketing or strategic or product development efforts. So, do's, let's start with that. Make sure the message you send out connect with your audience and aligns with your brand. Everything needs to align with your brand's story. So, brand DNA, brand story, we talked about it make sure it is something that really truly compliments to everything you are doing versus just a one-off attempt that looks desperate. Try to integrate real-time efforts with existing campaigns. Trigger emotions that relate back to the brands larger mission. Again, make sure it compliments everything you are doing and not something that's just disrupt other bigger efforts that your company is trying to implement. Then practice, engage listening, find natural openings into the conversation. You need to be an extension of the story, not just a step, daughters step as step son somewhere to the side where they will look at your content and say, "Ha, that doesn't make sense." So, how do you naturally help extend and carry the story in a way that relates back to your brand? Then obviously, know where you brand is most credible. There's different themes and discussions where you will know your brand is definitely a welcome addition and a very credible source for conversation. So, find those touch points and do more of that. Be witty, not awkward. So, obviously, humor is a very touchy point. What's funny to some people might be not funny for others, so use that smartly and may be test it out before you do it. Then also be human authentic. I mean, allow yourself to even be wrong at times because the reality is when people connect with you, they want to connect with human person, they don't want to connect with the cold looking brand logo or business logo. So, what do you need to realize is adding that human element is very important. People will forgive you and accept you if you're human versus if you speak corporate or you prefer to not apologize for a mistake you made. Just be human and perceive your community and talk to your community like you would with a friend. Then invite your customers in. Some of the examples that I haven't showed as much is user generated content examples. But when you invite your customers in, take the creative and the messages that they've crafted around your brand and actually do something out of it and showcase and then say, "Here's our things that our customers created." So, for example Dunkin Donuts has on their Facebook page fan of the week, sort of this image that they put on their cover photo right there on Facebook. They take one of the fans that took a picture with their cup or their donuts just anywhere in the world with Dunkin because they love Dunkin so much. Then they feature one fan a week and that really brings the fans back and makes them feel like they're not only listened to what they're truly a part of the community. Then be ready to turn off scheduled post. Sometimes when a disaster or tragedy hits, some of your scheduled post might sound cold or they might interfere with particular topics, and may be construed as rude. So, just be sensitive to that and if something really tragic happens, I would just turn off all the post and just try to help community as much as you can but not sell, sell, sell, are not really participate in conversations with messages that may not be top of mind that particular day or that particular week. Also own up to your mistakes. Own up to your mistakes, be human, say I'm sorry and then move on. I remember that me too efforts sort of, oh I want in to, I want in to. They're really not real-time marketing just because everybody else is jumping on the trend, doesn't mean you have to. Be very careful that again not to look desperate. Then like we said, leave room in your plans and then you budget for something unexpected and make sure you are prepared to be flexible as you go. Then the big one goes back to your internal organization is break silos internally to make sure you work with different departments, creative, web, social, PR, even legal, to make sure that everything is happening in real time because in my experience and I can guarantee you, if you sit down and you educate your stake holders on why this is important and why this needs to be happening in real time, you're going to get way better results. At Intel, our legal department was never a hindrance. They were our ally and that's because six years back we sat down with them and said, "Please participate with us in creating social media policies or real-time response policies, or risk and crisis mitigation procedures and be part of that team." When you educate people on that and bring them in, that becomes a huge help and they become your biggest advocate and it helps to break silos in the organization in an easier way. Then make real-time marketing your every day event. That's a very important is real-time marketing isn't really something reactive. I'm going be reactive here and there and then I'm done, it's every day. It's your customer service, making sure everybody gets their questions answered. It's your fun banter with your community. It's really truly being present in that moment every single day. 12. The Dont's of RTM: Before we close, let's take a look at some don'ts and look at a couple of bad examples of real-time marketing. Don't mistake innovation for impulse when you try out new things. So, if you are trying something just because you had an impulse and you said, "Oh, this is great." Trying to want to jump in might not be the right choice for you. Again, go back to the do's and make sure you align yourself with the brand and how to do it correctly. Don't prioritize being first at an expense of creating really good content. That's very critical. Just because you're the first one to see the trend or tweet, it doesn't mean that you need to jump on it in the next couple of seconds. Think through it and make sure that this is the right thing to do. Don't act desperate. Don't stretch or force your message to just get in front of a big audience like Oscar's or Superbowl or anything else. It might not necessarily work. If you craft something, craft something that hits the right tone. Don't be self-involved or self -promotional. When blackout happened, I think it was Walgreens and there's other brands that did it pretty poorly. They tweeted, "Hey, we have candles at Walgreens. Come see us." It was really self-promotional. It wasn't something that really resonated with the viewers very well. So, don't pitch your own stuff. Help people, educate people, entertain people but try not to pitch. Also, don't ever exploit the tragic events or controversial events. You don't need to talk about religion, politics. This might not necessarily be the topics that are something that that fit your brand. Don't do silly things, and I'll show you a couple of examples of that, like Cole did with the uproar in Egypt. There's topics you better stay away from rather than try to ride the wave of condensation. Don't ever ignore negative feedback. Remember that. Every negative feedback is your golden opportunity to turn that person from a hater right now to a lover of your brand. There's way fine a line between hate and love, and you can absolutely turn those people. But what you can do is turn people who are indifferent, so take that negative feedback because the fact that people provide that feedback shows that they already care about you. They care enough to put that feedback out there. So, work with those people, don't ignore them and turn it into something positive if you can. If you can't and it persist, there's at some point you just need to walk away. Then also don't react to anything and everything. You don't need to be in all places all the time. So, pick and choose your battles here and then assume real time in and don't assume that real time is the right time. It might not be. So just really use your knowledge of the brand and your knowledge of the environment to do it right. So, here's a couple of examples of brands that I don't think did it right. These are some of more extreme ones. So Sears, for example, sent out this tweet during Hurricane Sandy and said, "Did Hurricane Sandy affect your city? Get your generators, air mattresses and more in one place and here is the link, and #HurricaneSandy" It's insane. Again, a very salesy, promotional effort has nothing to do with helping community. That was the tweet they should have not sent. Here's the kind of cold tweet that I mentioned before, and when the events first starting unraveling in Cairo, they send out a message that says, "Millions are in uproar in Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spray collection. It's now available online at, and here's a link." It is actually Kenneth Cole himself that tweeted that. This wasn't the only tweet he's done. He's done several of them, and he defended his position since then. By the end of the day, there's just some things you can't defend, and that was I think a very inappropriate tweet. If you need more examples, here's the link. Check out RTMSucks.tumblr.com. There's a lot more that you can find of examples of what not to do, really funny and weird examples out there. Somebody is actually aggregating those. So, the message that I want to leave you with is this. Be a welcome addition to the conversation, not an interruption. It's not about hot conversation. It's about the right conversation. That is one of the critical things to remember. Just because something is hot right now doesn't mean it's the right conversation for you to have and be a part of. Then don't just create marketing campaigns, right? Build tribes and create a movement, and real-time marketing allows you to do that. Marketing now is more so about advocacy than anything else. It's not anymore about the ad campaign or TV campaign that we're building for six months and then it just blows up all over our TV screens. That's not what it's about. Real true marketing is about building movements around something that you truly believe in that you hope your community believes in. So, whatever role you serve and wherever you think about business goals and marketing goals, think about tribes, think about taking care of your, maybe even smaller communities right now, because those advocates and those small communities will bring more people and more new customers to you because they love being a part of something bigger. Thank you for being with us and for listening, and I really hope to see on the interwebs and also looking forward to seeing your comments. You can find me on Twitter or any other places. I would like to engage in a further conversation. I'm looking forward to seeing the results of our class project. Have a great day.