Peter Kim, author and head of solutions architecture at Dachis Group, Andrew Ashton from Yum Brands, and Pablo Henderson from the W Hotels Group joined me on Thursday to talk about real-time marketing, and it was a big-time treat. You can listen to the webinar here, and I urge you to set aside an hour to hear it through, but my primary take-aways are:
Long before you talk about real-time marketing, you need to have a team, a platform and a process in place for real-time "listening." Yum Brands, which owns KFC, TacoBell and Pizza Hut, has a team of three "core" analysts who have trained 250 people around the world whose role is not necessarily just marketing or social, but could be communications or customer service. They also leverage and train their agencies on the platform according to their brand relationship.
Influencers are key here (as they are everywhere in social marketing.) Yum targets its brands' influencers in order to prioritize its listening efforts and when it's time to spread the word, they're going to be most effective by working with those same influencers. Yum is also using its social listening for twice-a-day reporting to top management including one that is broadly distributed to all its market segments. PR is still the lead in responding... not marketing. (Interesting opportunity here, perhaps, for marketing to more closely collaborate.)
Pablo Henderson's warning was sound: without a good sense of your brand's story, real-time marketing can be a "distraction." Another good piece of his advice was "pick very small things that you can respond to in real time, and then work on decreasing the response time." In so doing, you will create "an emotional" connection with the brand that will be very valuable.
Peter Kim pointed out that Klout alone is not a sufficient measure for deciding how or whom to respond to, but you need your company's own custom measures as well, especially - hold on - your own CRM system. Ashton foresees, as well, a time when everyone is living in real-time for the next level of empowerment of the employees.
I was very proud of our panel for taking this conversation into a way-deeper look than "news-jacking" to get attention or even focusing solely on social heavy-hitters to derive real value from real-time marketing.