How To Be Agile and Authentic in Real-Time Marketing and PR

How To Be Agile and Authentic in Real-Time Marketing and PR Practical, candid and timely advice from David Meerman Scott, Marketing Strategist and Leadership Speaker WHITE PAPER SAS® White Paper Table of Contents Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Do it now.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Good news travels fast. Bad news spreads even faster.. . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Be human. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Free your content.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Get more by giving more away.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 The Power of Story. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 If not the first paragraph, be the second paragraph.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Four Steps to Real-Time Marketing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Action 1. Appoint a chief real-time officer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Action 2. Develop real-time guidelines. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Action 3. Implement real-time systems. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Action 4. Develop a real-time mindset. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Show us the money. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Closing Thoughts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Additional Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 About David Meerman Scott, Marketing Strategist and Leadership Speaker David Meerman Scott’s book, The New Rules of Marketing & PR, opened people’s eyes to the new realities of marketing and public relations on the Web. Six months on the BusinessWeek best-seller list and published in 26 languages from Bulgarian to Vietnamese, New Rules, now in its second edition, is a modern business classic. Scott’s popular blog and hundreds of speaking engagements around the world give him a singular perspective on how businesses are implementing new strategies to reach buyers. His newest book, Real-Time Marketing & PR: How to Instantly Engage Your Market, Connect with Customers, and Create Products That Grow Your Business Now, was released in November 2010. It achieved No. 2 on the Wall Street Journal best-seller list and No. 3 on the USA Today best-seller list. He is also the co-author (with Brian Halligan) of the hit book Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn from the Most Iconic Band in History, and wrote three other books, including World Wide Rave. His blog – Web Ink Now – is ranked by AdAge Power 150 as a top worldwide marketing blog. Scott calls himself “a recovering VP of marketing” for two publicly traded technology companies and was also Asia marketing director for Knight-Ridder, at the time one of the world’s largest newspaper and electronic information companies. Scott has lived and worked in New York, Tokyo and Hong Kong. He currently lives in the Boston area. How To Be Agile and Authentic in Real-Time Marketing and PR Introduction On Oct. 13, 2010, 33 Chilean miners were rescued after spending 69 days underground. The eyes of the world were on them as the whole operation was streamed live on TV and on CNN.com. Since their eyes would be unaccustomed to the light, the miners wore Oakley Radar sunglasses with black iridium lenses, donated by Oakley. The signature “O” was unmistakable, especially in nighttime footage. For its philanthropic gesture costing about $6,000, Oakley got an estimated 1 billion views and 120,000 references on Google, media coverage that would have cost $41 million in equivalent advertising time, according Events now unfold light years to research done for CNBC. In donating 35 pairs of sunglasses, Oakley faster than a conventional became part of one of the biggest stories on the planet at the time. campaign can deal with. Call it philanthropy, goodwill or the product placement of the year, but this is what it A nimble, real-time-oriented means to be real-time, said David Meerman Scott, author of the Wall Street Journal competitor may snatch an best-selling book, Real-Time Marketing & PR: How to Instantly Engage Your Market, opportunity before you even Connect with Customers, and Create Products That Grow Your Business Now. notice it’s there. See an opportunity. Seize the opportunity. Do it now, while the story is still hot. Long- term campaign planning is fine and well, but if that’s where you put all your focus, you will miss powerful opportunities to draft off of what’s going on right now, according to Scott. If you need more proof of the power of injecting yourself into the story, recall the recent scandal where former Congressman Anthony Weiner tweeted sexually suggestive pictures to women who, unfortunately, were not his wife. Within an hour after Weiner resigned, Hustler publisher Larry Flynt offered him a job as the vice president of his Internet division. In a simple blog post, he wrote: “I would like to make you an offer of employment. As a congressman, you are known for your intensity and perseverance. I believe that this attitude … will make you a valuable asset to this corporation.” This tongue-in-cheek offer stirred up thousands of conversations that were picked up by hundreds of mainstream media outlets. Weiner was the headline, but Larry Flynt got his share of exposure too. “I spoke to Larry Flynt last week about this,” said Scott. “I said, ‘Larry, this is great; how do you come up with this stuff?’ He said, ‘I just watch the news; I look for something that’s interesting to us, and then I have the guts to put it out there.’” Do it now. “There are so many interesting ways to generate attention, particularly if you’re thinking about how you can generate attention instantly,” said Scott. You can take a serendipitous news story, and by being clever about it, you can create awareness that would cost millions of dollars under normal campaign-based marketing. 1 SAS White Paper However, marketers still tend to focus on long-term campaigns. All too often they start Gone are the days when you with data from months ago and use it to plan what’s going to happen months from now. could plan out your marketing They think inside-out about the products and events a company wants to promote – a new product launch, new release of an existing product, or the opening of another store and public relations programs or office – instead of outside-in about how they can dovetail with the market. well in advance and release them on your timetable. It’s “When everybody is focused on all this long term, they forget about right now, this instant,” said Scott. “What can you do right now at 1:56 p.m. on Monday, East a real-time world now, and if Coast time, to do something to draft off of something that’s happening right now on you’re not engaged, you’re your website, in the news, or with what your customers are saying and doing? Take on your way to marketplace advantage of that.” irrelevance. With the power of social media and other online self-publishing sites, you don’t have to have huge budgets to make a huge splash. It does require speed, because the public’s interest for a news story accelerates rapidly and then wanes just as fast. Good news travels fast. Bad news spreads even faster. Surely no one denies the potential of social media and online channels in general to generate positive buzz for your organization. What about the flip side? Can it be that powerful in telling you when you’re derailing, before you get too far off the track? Absolutely, says Scott, using Gap as the poster child for the value of real-time feedback. “When the Gap changed its logo, instantly people on social networks were saying, ‘What in the world is going on here?’ ‘Question: Gap redesigns logo … but why?’ I tweeted: ‘Answer: Because they have lots of money and because they can.’ People tweeted and retweeted my tweet. The mainstream media picked up the conversation.