Stop your PR campaigns and start living in the NOW
I’ve been a long time follower of David Meerman Scott, author of the brilliant The New Rules of Marketing and PR which I still remember reading for the first time a few years ago and the impact it has made on my outlook to the industry in which I work. Six months on the BusinessWeek bestseller list and published in 26 languages from Bulgarian to Vietnamese, New Rules, now in its second edition, is a modern business classic.
There have been a few new books written by the author since but for a real take on what makes @DMscott tick, I would highly recommend dipping into his blog WebInkNow for some truly insightful posts on marketing and social media PR in 2011.
It is on his blog that I caught the following video of David delivering a keynote speech about Real-Time Marketing & PR at the Marketing Sherpa Email Summit in Las Vegas.
In his own words, David describes the video thus:
“I created a crowdsourced video, with inspiration from crowdsourced concert films by Radiohead and theBeastie Boys, to pull everything together to give you a sense of what it was like to be in the audience experiencing the talk in real-time.”
David Meerman Scott Real-Time speech trailer from David Meerman Scott on Vimeo.
You can view the complete crowdsourced video (50 minutes in length) here: http://vimeo.com/20136837
Magdalena Georgieva (@mgieva) has created a step-by-step guide on how to create your own crowdsourced video over on the HubSpot Blog. Go and take a look, there are some interesting uses of Twitter hashtags included and some tips on editing the final masterpiece together.
I find David’s take quite refreshing and a welcome step away from ‘campaign marketing’ where I guess many of the big brands still find themselves today. The budget-driven planning of marketing campaigns means that many brand managers are still focusing too much energy on long-term calendar activity which is ‘safer’ than real-time seat-of-you-pants reactive PR.
In his speech Scott gives the example of Oakley sunglasses equipping the Chilean Miners who were recently thrown under the global news lens with branded sunglasses on the day that they all emerged safely from their mine. It is estimated that this act alone secured the company around $41m worth of advertising value and is a lesson to brands to get off their behinds and start playing in the real world of ‘Now’ marketing.
I can’t help but read the following statement on Oakley’s blog and admire their unashamed pride in securing the publicity around the Chilean Mine affair:
The rescue team in Chile is relying on Oakley eyewear to protect the miners’ eyes when they are brought back to the surface.
A few weeks ago, Oakley was contacted by Jonathan Franklin, a journalist who works for Addict Village, a boutique media agency in Santiago, Chile. Mr. Franklin was covering the rescue efforts and had recommended Oakley to the Chilean private health insurer, known as ACHS “Association Chilena de Seguridad,” for eyewear protection for the miners once they surfaced.
Based on their requirements and full product specifications, Oakley donated 35 pairs of Oakley Radar® with Black Iridium® lenses in Path™ and Range® lens shapes for the miners who will need the protection of Oakley sunglasses as their eyes return to normal. Minister of Mining Laurence Golborne (who is leading the rescue) has asked to wear one of the extra pairs to show solidarity.
Now the question for me is this: If you can secure up to $41m worth of advertising publicity by being reactive (although the Oakley example is probably exceptional), shouldn’t brands be allocating more budget on a reactive presence office (social media + traditional press office) and hire a team of real-time marketers who can act with agility and precision?
I still value the power of the long-term campaign in terms of brand equity building (Guinness and St Patrick’s Day, Ben & Jerry’s and Free Cone Day, Thorpe Park Fright Night and Halloween, etc.) but many brands need to step away from the safety of their budget/planning cycles and take a punt on the news agenda once in a while. Sometimes it can pay off handsomely.
The above video and speech draw upon David Meerman Scott’s research contained in his latest book Real-time Marketing and PR which I have to admit, I still haven’t got around to reading. I guess I need to focus a bit more on the NOW and get a copy!
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Rax,
Wow — I love this post. Thanks so much for this!
The more I study the idea of real-time the more I realize that speed is a decisive competitive advantage. Yet so few people understand that.
Good luck implementing these ideas yourself. Let me know when you achieve a notable success yourself!
David
Right on, Rax! David does a great job of organizing a very messy real-time world.
Interesting. I like David’s work quite a bit and use a lot of his lessons from The New Rules of Marketing and PR in my own practice.
While a lot of the larger brand efforts are interesting case studies, how do you think the lessons there translate to small companies or niche brands? Oakley perhaps was contacted for this opportunity because they have spent years on their “traditional” marketing and brand building so they came to mind. What about new entrants to the market? How would they have been able to make themselves available for or respond to a Chilean Miner Sunglasses kind of opportunity?
Thanks Heidi. David sure talks a lot of sense!
Hi Pamela
I see what you’re saying when you question the scalability of reactive marketing and whether it can be inclusive of smaller brands. For me, the only limitations that stand in the way of any sized brand fully immersing themselves into real-time marketing are imagination and creativity. Admittedly, the Chilean Minor episode was a massive coup for a brand like Oakley to pull off and you’re right – there’s no way that a smaller brand could have gotten near the media circus without establish PR routes.
However, if we look at more regular occurrences that take place around the world, why are so few brands (big and small) not bothering to set up their stall and positively piggyback off existing media attention?
Here’s an example… Over here in London, we frequently experience the inconvenience of industrial action on The Tube (our equivalent of your Bay Area Rapid Transit service!). Unsurprisingly, whenever a 48 hour strike is called by the transport unions, the whole of London grinds to a standstill, causing misery for millions of commuters trying to get to or from work. A cloud of gloom appears over our capital and everyone looks somewhere to find a ray of sunshine.
So where are the brands capitalising on this deficit of happiness? Why doesn’t my local coffee-shop offer free top-ups to anyone looking to ‘beat the strike’ and stay out late partying as a solution for not being able to get home? Why don’t the local independent bike shops offer discounted bicycles to anyone who wants to ride their way into work? Where are the small beauty salons offering ‘sore feet pedicures’ to commuters who walked into work due to the train strike?
My point is, that there are hundreds and thousands of small businesses who can benefit from real-time marketing tactics and most of these have the advantage over their larger counterparts due to the locality of events. It’s probably difficult for a brand like Coca-Cola for example to be able to immediately unlock marketing budget from a centralised pot for a small unpredicted local event. Big businesses can be sluggish and may find it difficult to turn on a dime to respond to a reactive news agenda, diverting funds away from larger marketing projects in the pipeline. This is where small brands can have the advantage. Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook, meetup.com all enable small brands to create a lot of noise in a short space of time. This is where the real opportunity lies for small (and large) brands.
I’ll keep an eye out!
Thanks for stopping by!
David!
Thanks for taking the time to stop by! I’d be interested to get your take on my response to Pamela.
I worked for a while in central government over here in the UK and speed, among other factors was the key issue in why social media cannot be used in its purest open, reactive form within the public sector. Large, heavy, sluggish organisations rarely have rapid response paths engrained within their comms culture, so real-time becomes a logistical (and often idealogical) impossibility.
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