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Real-Time Marketing: David Meerman Scott at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011

January 25th, 2011 David Kirkpatrick

(photo credit: MYMRMARK)

David Meerman Scott is a marketing strategist and author of Real-Time Marketing & PR: How to Instantly Engage Your Market, Connect with Customers, and Create Products that Grow Your Business Now. He describes himself as a recovering VP of Marketing, and as the keynote speaker he pumped up the crowd at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011 at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.

Real-Time Marketing and PR

David shared a number of examples of actual real-time marketing and engagement, and one had a little relevance to the Summit because the event driving the effort happened in Las Vegas. At the end of last August, Paris Hilton was arrested in Las Vegas for possession of cocaine.

Paris Hilton and Wynn Resorts in Las Vegas

Wynn Resorts immediately sent out a press release stating that she was banned from their properties. The immediate result was that most stories covering the arrest also mentioned that Wynn Resorts banned Hilton as well. Over 5,000 stories were written right after the arrest and a Google search today using this string, “paris hilton arrest las vegas wynn banned” pulls up over 500,000 hits. Wynn resorts took advantage of a real-time event to drive promotion in the form of traditional media coverage.

David said speed and agility are a decisive competitive advantage. Reacting to, and focusing on, what is happening in the news can apply to both email and marketing campaigns. He added that too many companies are run by “MBAs and spreadsheets,” and are looking at data from last week, last month or even last year, and forecasting out as far as five years. He said he didn’t have anything against long-term planning, but David asks, “What about now?” Focus on today.

The Gap logo change

To provide another example of just how fast things happen in real-time, David talked about The Gap changing its logo. The change set off a firestorm of traditional and social media coverage, and most of that coverage was negative. The entire process from logo change, loud and energetic negative reaction, and The Gap announcing it was keeping its old logo happened over four days.

David asked the audience, “Is there anything you could have done with this?” for Summit attendees to think about opportunities with their own businesses and how they might use an event like The Gap logo change, and he pointed out that the event would have played out differently even two years ago. Twitter, Facebook and other online tools have changed the timeline of how the public reacted to the new logo.

(photo credit: @ContactLab)

Real-time guidelines

David said the way to start the process of real-time marketing is set guidelines in the company that allows for employees to take advantage of, and react to, real-time events. He pointed out that news happens all the time. The CEO might be away at a conference, or it might be the middle of the night, or during dinner after business hours.

To truly implement real-time marketing, the triggering event needs to be addressed immediately, and not have to wait for business hours and approval within the company.

Comments from the Twitter feed:

Nobody cares about your products, except you. Create interesting content! #dmscott #Sherpaemail — @BjarteFalck (Bjarte Falck Olsen)
Offer valuable content – not incentives. (@dmscott) #sherpaemail — @kristinhersant (Kristin Hersant)
Don’t “do” social media. Make it a part of who you are. (via @dmscott)#SherpaEmail — @martinlieberman (Martin Lieberman)
Create interesting content for your audience to share. People love to share valuable or funny information. (@dmscott) #sherpaemail — @kristinhersant (Kristin Hersant)
Hard to separate work/personal on social media. Just be an authentic human being. (via @dmscott) #sherpaemail — @martinlieberman (Martin Lieberman)
“virtually everyone is online.” @dmscott. Love it! #sherpaemail — @jenniebennie (Jennie Beyer)