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Real time, data driven marketing and sales

I write about strategies to turn fans into customers and customers into fans. I also share ways to use real-time strategies to spread ideas, influence minds, and build business.

Real-Time Marketing & PR

1 low res floor My first job was on a bond trading floor at a Wall Street investment bank. It's impossible to overstate the impact of innovations in computing and telecommunications on the financial markets in the 1980s.

Within a decade finance was transformed from a clubby, old-boys' network to a 24-hour global trading system.

With that revolutionary shift a new currency of success emerged: the ability to gather, interpret, and react to new information in fractions of a second—real time.

Today, no financial professional would ever consider making a transaction without understanding where the markets are trading right now and what’s happening in the news at that precise moment.

It has taken a quarter century. But in fields like marketing and public relations the impact of the real-time revolution in finance is finally beginning to be viable for any organization.

Here is just one aspect -- a data driven real-time website -- of what the instant environment offers:

As a buyer visits your Web site and registers for a webinar, an alert is triggered on the salesperson's real-time dashboard, providing details about the buyer based on the page that person is visiting. The alert notes that the person downloaded a white paper a few days ago.

In fact, the alert is flagged as high priority because that combination of actions (white paper download plus webinar registration) is highly indicative of a propensity to buy.

The alert automatically pulls up information on the buyer's company. Are they already a client? Have others from this company visited the site before? What do third-party information providers say about the company? News stories from Dow Jones or Bloomberg appear along with a company snapshot from an information supplier like Hoovers.

Even the buyer's LinkedIn and Twitter profiles appear. And all this happens in real time.

This is just what happens with a real-time website.

There's similar revolutions happening with real-time product development, real-time media relations, and real-time marketing.

In the emerging real-time business environment, where public discourse is no longer dictated by the mass media, size is no longer a decisive advantage.

Speed and agility win.

But you need an infrastructure much like a Wall Street bond trader to play in this new world.

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More in my new book Real-Time Marketing & PR, which officially releases in North America next Monday, November 1.

Trading floor photo courtesy of Jeffries & Company