Real-Time Technology

While flipping through David Meerman Scott's Real-Time Marketing & PR, I found a graphic I really enjoyed about real-time technology on page 189. From a business side, we pay attention to real-time news and commentary, real-time social web, and real-time web site traffic. These are all things we need to be sure to manage.

To do this, we tap into our three databases: customer, journalist and prospect. A customer database includes all existing customers and their purchasing history, plus records of who has contacted them, when and about what. Journalist database is a database of known journalists and analysts, including bloggers and other citizen journalists. A prospect database is potential customers with information on how they found your company, which salesperson is in charge of the relationship and status of discussions.

We also watch customer relationship management, web site analytics, social site analytics and marketing automation. These databases and tools to manage help us create real-time playbooks, which are best practices we develop in our organization to engage buyers for maximum growth.

Managing all of these things help with real-time dashboard and mobile applications. This also influences marketers, salespeople, customer service, public relations and management. All of these inputs and outputs help support real-time business and are a part of the technology infrastructure.