3 Ways Real-Time Marketing Could Blow Up Bad

A whole lotta hype has been growing around the term “real-time” marketing since Oreo sent a single tweet during the Super Bowl blackout. Speaking of hype, Oreo won some fancy-pants award for it too, crediting no less than 13 people for sending a tweet. Did they each take a keystroke?

The fact that a brand sending a single tweet wins an industry award tells us much about the state of so-called “real-time” marketing—there’s not a whole hell of a lot of it going on. Of course, to those of us in the industry, my even mentioning the Oreo tweet is old news, like saying the Palm Pilot is a pretty nifty device. But the story is so much larger than a tweet or a Facebook update: Can brands actually keep up with the torrent of content that’s being generated each and every minute?

The answer is quite simple: No. At least, not yet. Let’s dig into a few ways in which real-time marketing can’t happen, unless a few things change.

Not Everyone’s Important
Not every tweet is important. Not every tweeter or Facebook updater or Instagrammer is important. There, I said it. There’s absolutely no reason to get all up in a bundle about a guy with no friends sitting in his mom’s basement blasting away at you. Now, on the other hand, if Vladimir Putin is all up in your business, then you need a response plan. Today, I see entire departments running around like head cases whenever someone utters anything critical of a brand. It’s not necessary.

Misassignment of Duties
OK. Forget about prioritization, it’s really all about the wrong people doing the job. At some point in a brand’s early experiment with social media, they realize they’ve delegated experimental responsibilities to the people who aren’t terribly integral to the business—namely, the part-timers and interns. Now, I understand like the next business owner that we need to keep these people busy in order to meet our obligations for their internships, but turn over the keys to the daily buzz in the marketplace to them? Not so much. I’ve seen it. While the interns are managing a community of thousands, their bosses are stewing over a brochure or trade show booth designs that perhaps hundreds will see.

The “Just What The Hell Are We Doing” Problem
Execution of real-time marketing—like Twitter feeds, LinkedIn, and Facebook updates—takes almost zero dollars to make happen. And that’s the problem. A gigantic mistake is only 140 characters away. So, does that absolve you from pursuing these dynamic conversations? Absolutely not. They should fire you up even more to actually have very well-thought-out goals and aspirations, aligned with the right people, who have the resources they need to do their jobs well. A plan that is fluid and responsive can set you apart in ways we’re only just now beginning to understand. It’s time to put your top thinkers, planners, and execution people on the job.

Four Future Obsolete Things

Last weekend, I was up at my place on the North Shore of Lake Superior and got to thinking about how fast everything is moving in the world right now. This is easier to do when you’re sitting on lakeshore with no Internet access.

I got thinking about my kids, and the lives they will live. To this day, much of what I grew up with is pretty much obsolete. They will never know what rotary phones, card catalogs, three-network television stations, or cassette players were. Hell, this morning one of my colleagues didn’t know who Edie Brickell is.

Over that weekend up north, I began imagining what will become obsolete in the relatively near future. Here are my predictions.

Chemotherapy
This is a no-brainer. When I tell my grandkids someday that we used to inject poison into people that killed both bad and good cells in order to “heal” them from cancer, they’ll think we were savages. Yup, we burned people from the inside out. Why? Because for a long time, we didn’t know any better, and then a whole bunch of science deniers decided that using stem cells was somehow sacrilegious. During that time, research was slowed down as we came to grips with the fact that God also created human intelligence, if you must believe in something.

Power Lines
Whenever I’m on the North Shore, I hike a lot near the Superior Hiking Trail. My favorite short hike takes me to the falls at Caribou River. The vistas over the lake are amazing, yet there they are: power lines. They break up the view. It just seems to me that a) we’ll figure out a better way to move power, either through localized sources, like solar or thermal, or b) power will become safely “wireless.”

Class-Style Education
I am not implying anything here controversial or anti-teacher. Believe me, please. But we know factually that all of us learn so incredibly differently from one another. Many kids have no problem learning in a classroom setting the same way. Many, many others very much struggle with this all-for-one method. My son is an example. He is non-linear. He thinks very differently than his peers. And so do many of them from him and each other. Technology, brain science, and custom-learning philosophies will render current classroom methods obsolete as we figure out how to deliver content, teaching, and methods in more individualized ways, while keeping teachers engaged in new and more consultative roles.

Advertising
Advertising will not become entirely obsolete, but we will think of intrusion-based advertising as a relic of the 20th century. We will look at these first two decades of the 21st century as a holdover from the last one. We will consider today’s advertising to be like the Ford Motor Company of the beginning of the 20th century, where assembly lines pumped out exact replicas of black Model Ts one after the other. In the end, we all wanted something different from the automobile. The same goes for advertising and engagement with brands. The way we advertise now will seem so forced, so unintellectual, and so trite compared to what is to come.

I would love this post to stir additional ideas and refutations of what I’ve posted here. The future is not that far off.

Data Overload, Insights Light

Last Thursday, I was honored to host and moderate a panel at the second Ciceron MBA program on data and customer insights. My distinguished panel included Jim Cuene from General Mills, Jeff Dachis from Dachis Group, Jason Nyhus from Digital River, and Jen Swanson from Capella University. This was truly a powerhouse group of national experts.

Here are a few major takeaways:

We’re drowning in reports, rather than insights.
Why is this? I asked the crowd, “How many of you are being asked for reports?” Many hands went into the air. It seems as though people at the highest levels, while they complain often about not receiving actionable insights, are indeed asking for report after report. You get what you ask for. Dachis made an excellent point: “We’re simply counting. More Likes. More followers. More everything. And counting isn’t analytics or insights.”

We need to challenge ourselves and understand that at any point, we might be wrong.
Cuene illustrated this point: “The real transformative effect comes when you have the courage to start challenging your assumptions about what you’ve always thought or about what you’ve always done or about what you’ve always believed.” He used General Mills’ change in advertising spending with Progresso soups to illustrate his point. “We realized that there was a very specific point in the fall where the searches [for soup] stopped, and so we realized, ‘Alright, we should stop advertising. Let’s reallocate that advertising to a time when it’s going to work, because clearly nobody gives a crap about soup after a certain point.”

It’s everyone’s job to interpret data and to act on it.
According to Nyhus, “Everyone in the company who touches the data has a responsibility to take an action.” Making data actionable is everyone’s job, but according to Swanson, “The people who are the most in-demand within our company are the people who can take things—take data point A, data point B, and data point C—and tell a story . . . what we’ve demanded of that type of analyst role in the past is nothing near what we need it to be in the future.”

This was truly an instructive evening on a complex topic that is long overdue. In the coming days, video from the event will be available on the Ciceron website.

Ageism, Rampant Risk, and the Role of the Social Media “Manager”

Not long ago, I was giving a pitch to a potential new client. Midway through the presentation, the client paused and asked, “How old are you?” “I’m 44,” I replied. “What does a 44-year-old know about social media?!”

I thought he was joking, but this person was absolutely dead-serious. What I really wanted to respond with, but couldn’t because I’m Scandanavian, was: “What the hell do you know about putting a 22-year-old in front of 20,000 of your very best customers, day in and day out, with absolutely no understanding of business? What do you know about that?!”

I didn’t say that. I wrapped up the presentation, wrote a serious proposal the next day, and was rejected. I was screwed. I was too old to be in this business, apparently.

This mentality on the part of businesspeople is rampant and completely risky. If I were to walk into the CEO’s office of any company and say: “Over there, in that stadium, are 20,000 of your very best customers and prospects. They are eager to hear from you and are interested in your products. Who should go address them?”

“Get the intern!” the CEO says. Right?

Of course not. So why do we allow this to happen with social media relations all the frickin’ time?

I predict there is going to be a tipping point when enough companies get burned by delegating to the least knowledgeable person in the company one of the most important touch points in communications. Only then will we see a total transformation of the role of social media manager.

This is no slam on these eager young people, but companies are putting lambs to the wolves. The role of social media oversight should absolutely be a senior level leadership position. Mature social businesses are recognizing that social environments are critical components of an overall customer experience. As a result, many companies are rejiggering their CMO roles to be more inclusive of all customer experience, not just marketing. Some have changed the name to CXO (chief experience officer). To me, this only makes sense. The change more aptly reflects the togetherness between brands and their consumers.

In addition, in this role the leader is potentially closest to some of the most valuable business interactions and sources of intelligence within the organization. Increasingly, social environments are where brands live and die a little every single day.

These critically linked networks are becoming the source of data that indicates where companies can make incremental improvements in service, product design, sales support, and HR. Only a C-level executive can garner the respect to move across the organization to make organizational recommendations and insights.

Will the Kids Unplug?

Yesterday was my daughter’s 13th birthday. She was born on May 5, 2000, during (technologically) more innocent times. Granted, by then, I had already run Ciceron for five years, but everything was just so fledgling. No smart phones. Google’s IPO was still four years away, and there was no viable social network. My Internet access was likely ISDN. I don’t remember.

Loren was born into a world where childhood would change forever. Her generation is one consumed by technology. It can impact every element of her life, from Smart Boards and iPads in the classroom to her iPhone and 300 Facebook friends. In fact, the idea of “friendship” has even changed. Fortunately, she hasn’t “unfriended” me yet on Facebook—although she did try once—so I have a fairly keen view into her world of budding friendships.

In my parental mind, I am thankful for this. But as I reflect on my own teenage years, I think of them as a time when you are truly trying to find oneself, and that included being at one moment cunning and the next one manipulative. C’mon. Admit it. Even the best kids were pretty bad at some point or another. Learning from stupid mistakes and friendships gone sour is part of the human experience, and certainly, part of teen evolution.

So how does this change when you are a 13-year-old with a profile that reaches 300 of your “closest friends”? (Guffaw, right?) You become a brand at a very young age. I listened to a fascinating interview with Susan Cain, author of Quiet, a book about introversion, in which the commentators were indicating that, as humans, we are moving from developing character to creating personalities. This concerns me greatly. Developing character is a very inward, reflective process. Creating a personality is an outward, often shallow, and psychologically nomadic exercise.

My greatest concern about all of this technology—whether you’re a kid or an adult—is that we forget or even learn how to live in the physical world. I would say that one of the greatest things to happen in my lifetime was when my in-laws purchased an old family resort on Lake Superior. It’s rustic, to say the least. No heat or running water in the winter (my favorite time to be there). One mile from the majestic Caribou River waterfall. And the cabins were grandfathered in so they are nestled right on the shoreline.

And, most important, at least until now, there’s no Internet.

In the winter, going up to the cabin can be hard living. And I’m talking 19th century hard. You chop wood. You haul water. You pee in a cold outhouse. You bundle up under quilts. And I LOVE watching my kids and their friends “suffer” when we go up there. Because at the end of the suffering is the blessing of post-technology-withdrawal bliss. Sure, they’re teenagers so they’re not going to express this to me, but I know it. Having technology withdrawal is a very healthy thing. It shows you in stark terms how twitchy and connected and shallow we can be in this day and age.

You need periods of time to unplug and let go. Find yourself. Not the image of yourself. The actual self— the one that cries, is fearful, vulnerable, and hopeless at times. The one whose joy is found from within, not perceived by outward influence. We can all be 13 years old again, wondering about what we want to be when we grow up, who we’ll meet along the way, and who we’ll play checkers with in the old folks home . . . wearing Google Glass.

Note: I cannot write this blog post without a significant shout out to the now-famous appearance by Louis C.K. on Conan, now known as “Everything Is Amazing, And No One Is Happy.” Enjoy and share.