Is Real Time Marketing in your future?

In fact I would argue it is here today.

Take a look at one of my last post on Hey Marketer - When was the last time you talked with a customer??

And then ask yourself - how long did some of those interactions take. For Example - We resolved the issue for the person below in 15 minutes! When is the last time you baked up a marketing plan, executed it, got the reaction and closed the whole thing off in 15 minutes!

I always felt marketing needed serious lead time to ramp up on any major strategic shift.

But over the last few years (including last year's recession marketing) we didn't have months to plan. My old boss used to say to me "none of our Financial Services customers are waiting to fix their mortgage exposure issues - they are diving in right now and we can't wait 45 days to put on a brilliant webinar on How to Solve Today's Mortgage Crisis - we need to do it right now!" Followed by "if you had a leak in your basement would you wait 45 days for a consultant to put on a webinar on How to fix your leaky basement??" (and that one always killed me when he said that!)

But ask your media partners if they can turn on a dime and get you a webinar in a week - answer NO. It takes months to plan and execute.

I would argue we are moving into an environment where we don't have months to plan and execute or even days to plan and execute - we are moving to Real Time Marketing. Where we see something on the Socialsphere and we plan and react to it in seconds. All brought on by things like monitoring your brand on Forums, Blogs, Comments, Twitter, and Social Networks.

Unfortunately I think the world has changed forever - so you better get used to the new world of Marketing - Real Time Marketing!