This week I moderated another Social Media Today webinar as part of their Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of Marketing at the Speed of Life: Engaging Consumers When, Where, and How They Want. We assembled a fantastic panel to give us their perspective on this topic: Ashley Brown, the Vice President of Social Strategy at Spredfast; Rob Robinson, a Senior Social Strategist for Nissan North America; and Aileen Dreibelbis, a Senior Marketing Manager for Social & Digital Media at Aramark. This webinar was also sponsored by Spredfast.
Ashley set the stage by starting with an example of real time marketing from Coca-Cola and then a discussion of some more recent and topical real time marketing campaigns such as HTC's response to the new iPhone 6 rollout. Some of his key tips: gimmicks are fleeting; brand building happens when you play the long game. Real-time marketing that's grounded in relevant moments is authentic, useful, and emotional. It is high-risk and operationally challenging. But it works. Big time!
Aileen took over after Ashley and talked how Aramark is marketing at the speed of life based on one of their key campaigns that targets college students. At Aramark they have a few hundred colleges that they service as well as a number of large companies that they service, spanning both B2C and B2B relationships. This one campaign was really to engage with the college student at various inflection points during their college career. Staying relevant with what's happening on campus and in the larger community is important, but it's also important that they can insert themselves at the right time by marketing at the speed of life!
Rob then finished off the presentations with some real time marketing examples from Nissan. Rob and his team really leveraged a variety of events and occasions to insert their message. For example they targeted a particular race car driver, Andre Drummond, with one of their new performance models and got him to change his impression (publicly) of the Nissan brand. Other times they leveraged hashtags like #BeforeIdieIwanna and #Undateablebecuase with some of their other models. All the time staying true to their charter and creating engagement.
Now, if you have ever been on a Social Media Today webinar before, you know they are very "participant-driven" and we love to ask your questions of our panelists. Some of the questions we covered included: How do you measure ROI and the connection to your corporate strategy? How do you staff for a real time campaigns?
If that piqued your interest, you will want to hear the replay of this webinar or review the slides from this webinar. Otherwise, we hope you will join us on another Social Media Today webinar! The next webinar is on Protecting Your Brand: The State of Social Infrastructure in The Enterprise; sign up for it or view the schedule of upcoming webinars here.