Real Time Marketing

Presenter: Shiv Singh, PepsiCo
This was easily the best and most practical presentation of the day, providing a very clear outline for building a company structure to take advantage of a real-time environment.  The recent revolution in in Egypt highlighted the power of real-time communication and timeliness of information. Businesses can utilize social media for real time marketing, but there are six elements that need to be in place to execute effectively:

• Real-time Insights – It’s most important to be aware and know what your customers are thinking and doing in real-time.  The listening tools must be in place to provide a stream of updates.
• Real-Time Response – When you know what your customers are saying, you need to be in a place to act immediately.  A response only has meaning if it’s timely, so having staff who can respond in real-time provides an answer or response immediately.
• Real-Time Content Studio – Not only do you need to be able to respond immediately, but you need content and creative experts organize to be able to produce content in the moment.
• Real-Time co-creation – We can work together within the organization and with the consumer to develop the message and let it evolve.
• Real-Time Distribution – As a brand, the tools should be there to allow you to talk directly to consumers without having to go through your agency or a middle-man.
• Real-Time Engagement – Interacting and engaging with customers in real time creates engagement and trust.

All of this fits within a pop culture frame, meaning an awareness of the environment and what’s going on in the world at that moment.  The way we think and process information is changing, and new media technologies are literally addictive says psychologist Susan Weinschenk, fueling a “dopamine induced loop of seeking behavior and instantanious reward.”

There are 30 billion Facebook updates a month and a brand’s marketing message is competing for attention with all those status updates.  Therefore, brands need to think like a content company, regularly producing relevant content that cuts through the clutter.  During fashion week, Pepsi launched its new skinny can with a campaign called “Get the Skinny.”  During fashion week, they set up a content center for information on culture and fashion, essentially acting as a small news organization for the week.  It resulted in over 90,000 new Facebook fans and a large amount of engagement online with the brand.

Brands must be aware of culture and what the general public is thinking in order to take advantage of real-time opportunities.  During the BP disaster in the Gulf, Pepsi took the opportunity to expand the Pepsi Refresh Project.  They decided to give away and extra $1.3 million to fund reat ideas to help fund Gulf communities.  Because they were structured as outlined above, within a couple days, they got the idea, had it approved, and launched the site.  The next phase of the Pepsi Refresh Project will take advantage of consumer generated videos, allowing organizations who would like the grants to make a case to consumers via video.

Overall, in order to make this happen, Singh suggests that all of the following are needed to make it happen

1. Be able to ride “glocal” culture trends as they’re shaped by consumers.  Your company must be organized to communicate in real time, both on a global and local basis.
2. Target your brand loyalists and let them spread your message, but to do so you need to know who they are and have a relationship with them.
3. The ability to engage in real-time, meaningfully.  It’s about engagement, not just broadcasing your message, but if you’re able to do so, your message will be amplified by others.
4. Have a content studio to operate as a media organization in real-time.
5. Build your own distribution network.
6. Organize to be able to go from strategy to execution in seconds.
7. Don’t limit this to digital – make everything addressable, targeted, and instant.
8. Acknowledge real-time marketing has no geographic boundaries.

I got a question via twitter from @kellythul who asked what KPIs or metrics Singh utilizes for measuring success.  Singh suggested something he helped to develop while at Razorfish – the SIM Score.  The SIM Score for a brand is the ‘Net Sentiment’ for that brand in social media divided by ‘Net Sentiment’ for the industry.  Net Sentiment is defined by Razorfish as “Net Sentiment for the Brand = (Positive + Neutral Conversations – Negative Conversations) / Total Conversations for the Brand.”  He suggested looking at your real time score and comparing it to competitive brands within your industry.  He says that he has definitely seen a correlation with changes in SIM score and sales, mostly in CPG type industries.