How Not To Suck At Real-Time Social Marketing

Like many social marketers I talk to these days, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the amount of information coming at me on a daily basis.

Sifting through thousands of company mentions, hundreds of emails, and dozens of texts and DMs, all waiting for me to respond. All coming at me in real-time.

Last month I talked about the need for a digital detox and the one small step I took to balance family time with my digital consumption and communications. The goal being to better manage the flood of information that a staggering 90% of young people keep within arms distance 24/7.

The call to respond in real-time

Last year, I was attending a social media committee meeting for IAB, and our co-chair convincingly made the case for us to focus on real-time marketing. Connecting in real-time was the next frontier for social marketers and engaging with your customers and prospects directly leads to great result she argued.

My intuition at the time was that she was pushing this agenda on behalf of her employer as it conveniently played to their strength, their platform.

But her prediction was right on.

Flash forward to two months later and the darling of the Super Bowl was not a 30 second spot, but one little Tweet from the team at Oreos. But their real-time marketing success did not happen overnight. They had just finished honing their real-time “culture jacking” skills through a 100-day program called “Daily Twist.”  The program was 100 days of real-time postings of Oreo’s responses to what was happening in the news.

This raised the bar for all social marketers and challenged us to be more responsive. More “in the moment.”

Mistakes will be made

Recently, AT&T and the Los Angeles Lakers were called out for gaffes they made when they tried to tie their brands to 9/11.

The road to brand hell is paved with good intentions, and Real Time Marketing Sucks is here to keep us honest.

The idea is simple. When a story or event becomes so massive that it’s dominating search trends and essentially  “owning” the interwebz (think Miley Cyrus), you come up with a way to tie your brand into that story.

But it’s not that simple.

For example, Shark week takes the web by storm and social marketers can’t resist attempting the tie-ins even though should probably let it go.

Having a team with the confidence to respond in real-time is not as easy as it looks. Trust, autonomy and a deep understanding of your brand identity and voice is critical to your success. Trolls, critics and your competition are watching. But at the same time, your fans and advocates are also watching, and can be great allies under this kind of pressure.

We often refer to our social media-marketing manager, Brandon Swanson, as our resident Meme-ologist. Being on the pulse of the web helps us connect with our fans in real-time.

At the end of the day, marketing is tied to brand and your brand should always have definitive boundaries around what you should and shouldn’t be mentioning on social.

This means, regardless of what’s trending, if a topic is not suitable for your brand (as in the 9/11 examples above) it shouldn’t be covered. Period. Not in real-time, or any time for that matter.

Conversely, if a topic is suitable, jumping on it in real-time may not always be the best approach for your brand. You may want to wait for all the opinions to be offered and then publish a longer, thought provoking piece and be the final word.

Points of passion

My first experiences with real-time marketing in my current role was by chance. We were testing blogs that chased trending topics, similar to the tactics sites like Buzzfeed and The Huffington Post use. We quickly learned that breaking celebrity real estate news that was tied into the news cycle offered tremendous rewards.

Large spikes in traffic, press coverage, growing our fan base and generating excitement around our brand became commonplace. We realized that we were connecting with people’s points of passion while getting a better understanding of what they wanted.

Today, my team has the confidence and freedom to experiment. So when the NFL season was about to start, we were ready and had relevant content to delight editors and ride that wave.

Here’s a recent example of one of our stories making the main carousel on a major portal:

My team is doing what we’ve always done: responding directly to friends, family, fans and having fun doing it! And yes, it’s all in real-time.

We’re connecting with our fans and adding value to our community.

What experiments in real-time marketing are you doing? Is it working? Is real-time marketing and targeting going to be a priority for you in 2014? I want to hear about it in the comments below, and naturally on Twitter.