On Nov. 23, I embarked on an epic journey to the depths of Waltham to see David Meerman Scott speak at an AMA Boston breakfast event at Bentley University. The talk came shortly after the release of his latest book, “Real-Time Marketing and PR: How to Instantly Engage Your Market, Connect With Customers, and Create Products that Grow Your Business Now” (affiliate link).

I will fully admit to having a total crush on David Meerman Scott — well, his ideas at least — so I was beyond excited to see him speak, even if it meant getting up at 4AM to catch a weird express bus to the suburbs (but since when am I one to turn down an MBTA adventure?).

The talk echoed a lot of the content I’ve read on his blog, but he is a very engaging speaker, so it was great to see it all pulled together into what he made a very interactive, compelling event. The short version: if your organization is not acting and reacting in real-time, you will soon be left behind.

If you want a taste of what this real-time business is all about, Scott has a free ebook, “Real-Time: How Marketing & PR at Speed Drives Measurable Success” [PDF], which shares some insights on the ROI of real-time engagement based on a survey of Fortune 100 companies. You can also watch a free HubSpot webinar featuring Scott discussing the ROI of real-time engagement.

The key points of Scott’s talk were as follows:

• Social media are tools; real-time is a mindset
• Few companies operate effectively in the present — most are focused on the distant past and the distant future.
• Companies need to listen to the market in real-time and respond accordingly, acting quickly to take advantage of the window of opportunity before it vanishes. This is why speed and agility are decisive competitive advantages.
• Companies must also engage the media in real-time to get coverage and exposure.
• There is a positive ROI to real-time engagement. According to Scott’s research [PDF], the Fortune 100 companies who engage in real-time communications outperformed the S&P 500 stock index by 3 percent in the first eight months of 2010.

All companies, says Scott, must take four actions to become real-time players:

• Appoint a chief real-time officer, someone who is charged with finding the opportunities to act and react in real-time
• Develop real-time guidelines (e.g. IBM’s social computing guidelines)
• Implement real-time systems. Scott foresees future marketing offices looking not unlike a trading floor, with a real-time data infrastructure set up to monitor and assess the flow of information and inform decisions/conversations. Pepsico/Gatorade has a mission control that embodies this vision.
• Develop a real-time mindset.

Scott shared several examples of companies doing real-time right (as well as wrong):

• The recently rescued Chilean miners emerged from below the earth sporting $180 Oakley sunglasses. Considering all of the media coverage of the miners’ rescue, that exposure has been estimated at being worth $41 million in equivalent advertising. At $180  per miner, and 33 miners… that’s less than $6,000. Oakley capitalized on the attention surrounding the miners’ rescue to give their product amazing, nearly free publicity.
• When Gap changed its logo, Scott said, “The market went, ‘What in the world are you smoking?’” Scott’s answer as to why they did this? “Because they have lots of money and because they can.” The new logo quickly became a joke. Within four days, Gap backtracked and reverted to its old logo. In a normal world, Scott said, it would have taken a year.
• Paris Hilton was arrested in Las Vegas on felony drug possession charges in late August. A few days later, Wynn Resorts responded by banning Hilton — a hotel heiress — from its properties. The media ate it up, giving Wynn tons of free ink. In the talk (and in a September blog post), Scott described this tactic as “finding something that the news media is talking about and then drafting off of it in real-time.”
• Who broke the news about Michael Jackson’s death? Not People magazine — it was TMZ. People did not get the story because they are not acting in real-time. For every Politico that’s breaking the latest story out of Washington, there’s a WaPo or BusinessWeek missing out. Taking a closer look at BusinessWeek, after being a huge mover and shaker in the business publication market since 1929, they were sold in 2009 for just $5 million to Bloomberg. Why Bloomberg, says Scott? Because Bloomberg (and its $6.5 billion in 2008 revenue) lives in real-time.
• In July 2009, Dave Carroll of the Canadian band Sons of Maxwell created a song and video called “United Breaks Guitars,” detailing his months-long ordeal to get United Airlines to compensate him for guitars they broke in the baggage handling process at Chicago’s O’Hare airport.
• The video quickly went viral, with bloggers catching the story first before the mainstream media caught on. The video now has 9.5 million views. As Carroll recounted to Scott, he realized that when the video became popular, he had a small window of opportunity that he needed to capitalize on, so he dropped everything to do media interviews, create follow-up videos, etc. United’s response? Silence, probably (theorizes Scott) because the lawyers got involved.

  What would Scott have recommended they do? Respond to the crisis in the media where the crisis broke. Strap a flipcam to a suitcase, send it through the baggage handling process and have the chief of baggage handling for United at O’Hare narrate the video and describe the process. There is no time to consult lawyers; the priority is to respond.

  But the story doesn’t end there. Taylor Guitars, the manufacturers of the guitars United broke, created a response video of their own showing solidarity with Carroll and sharing tips for traveling with guitars. And Calton Cases, the maker of the case that held Carroll’s guitar, created a signature edition guitar case, from which Carroll receives sales royalties. Carroll gets support, and Taylor and Calton get free, positive publicity. Everyone wins.

• Last summer, when Amazon yanked George Orwell’s “1984″ and other titles off of Kindle users’ bookshelves, the community went ballistic. Amazon responded, but not for a week. Once they did, however, the community immediately re-embraced them.
• The more instantly you can react on the web to an emerging event, the better positioned you will be as an actor in that event. Casein point: the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, which formed a website just a couple days after coming together in the wake of the Haiti earthquake, raised $2 million in its first day and $30 million total.
• One heard tweet became $250K in business for Avaya, a corporate telephony company. As Avaya’s Paul Dunay explains,  responding to a tweet by someone weighing Avaya versus a competitor, his company’s response to that tweet helped seal a quarter of a million dollars in new business — $4,000 per character.
• Shaun Dakin, founder of StopPoliticalCalls.org (a site advocating for the end of political robocalls), blogged about Zane Starkewolf’s sexy robocall in the days leading up to the 2008 election. By drawing the media’s attention to a very newsworthy story, he in turn got attention for his organization and his cause.
• A blog post by Eloqua CEO Joe Payne, adding commentary and context to the purchase of competitor Market2Lead by Cisco, gave the media some substance aside from the terse one-paragraph statement issued by Cisco. Payne’s blog post came just hours after the announcement, as he saw the opportunity to respond in real-time and become a part of the story. The resultant coverage included prominent quotes by Eloqua’s Payne, and Payne’s take on Oracle joining the marketing automation party helped shape the tone of that coverage. In short order, Eloqua’s marketing team smartly reached out to Market2Lead customers — and that e-mail was the first they had heard of the sale. In the weeks that followed, needless to say, Eloqua raked in some new clients, including a $250K deal with Red Hat.

Stay tuned for a follow-up post, where I recap the closing presentation by Tim Washer, marketing manager for Cisco, on the value of humor in business communications. Thanks, AMA Boston, for an awesome event!