The Real-Time Social Marketing

Feb 9, 2011
|By Gang Lu

[The reason I really love NetExplorateur Forum is that unlike most conference where companies just pop in to introduce their business, it only cares about the trend and the future. I am going to write a few posts inspired by the event, some are startup interviews and some are just my take-away which might be nothing related to China but I think they are worthy of sharing.]

Probably from the first day the social media was born, we understood the meaning of social marketing which sounds like a old topic to talk about. Social Marketing actually changed every aspects about marketing, such as pricing, promotion, brand loyalty management, communications with partners, measuring opinion etc. As now we are in the mobile era which enable us to access the online social media anytime and anywhere, we have to re-think the approach of doing social marketing: the social marketing must integrate the pertinent data in real-time. The discussion on “Social Media and the mobile web: measuring opinion and behaviour in real time” in NetExplorateur was quite inspiring.

What should we do in Real-Time Social Marketing

Thanks to Social Media where we can gather all the information we need for social marketing, But we need bear in mind that, social media also cause the infobesity, and the infobesity is now even got increased by real-time and geographical data. When we think about real-time social marketing, we may

  • Consider the consequence of real-time marketing. As it’s real time if things go wrong, sometimes it is hard to get things back on right track;
  • Rethink the corporate organization. Monitoring the social media is no longer a part time work as you don’t know what will be happening in next minute;
  • Reallocate the marketing money by considering when & where;
  • Adjust our expectation for marketing campaign by keep Testing & Learning;
  • Look at quality, not quantity of effects cause by your marketing campaign.

What can we do with Real-Time Social Marketing

So now you have the social data from real time and a certain location, what can do you with it? Nicolas Gaultier from DELOITTE and Nicolas Bordas from TBWA France gave us some good sample cases:

  • What if you could let consumers know about a good deal around the corner?
  • What if you could give clients a gift for checking-in?
  • What if you let consumers purchase as soon as they see your ads?
  • What if you added real-time social media ads on traditional ads?
  • What if you monitored what customers say in real time?
  • What if social media content could instantly alter how your audience sees you?
  • What if customer care happened in real time?

Real-Time Social Marketing, interesting and also challenging.

[image via webolutions.com]

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