Real-Time Marketing and PR: Bigger Companies and Organizations Have To Work

David Meerman Scott, author of Real-Time Marketing and PR, takes the time to discuss "real time" and the demand for it in today's society. One topic he spends some time on is large organizations/businesses and how real time can be incorporated.


Chapter four, briefly mentions that the more people an organization has the more difficult it is to communicate in real time. In what Scott calls a command-and-control environment nothing can be done without someone with authority giving it the okay. He goes on to say that the challenge is to get a balance that allows employees initiative and offers real-time guidance when it is needed. There also needs to be a leader that is going to make it happen. Someone has to spread the mind-set of real-to,e communication throughout the organization.

Chapter five goes more into the idea of big businesses using real-time. An example that shows large organizations can do this is Todd Blecher, communications director at Boeing, who responded to a tweet of an irritated father. Harry Windor's, an eight year old, father was not to happy with the response his son's picture of a plane received from the company and tweeted that they needed to work on how they responded to children. Blecher responded that they could do better when it came to children and he personally did something about it. Todd called Harry and took the time to talk to him about the drawing. The quick response shows that big businesses can succeed at real-time communication.Things companies should keep in mind while trying to integrate this mind set is to build a team, monitor what's being said about the company (like the Boeing), develop guidelines and train staff and engage with the market.

I can personally say I have seen some of those in action with how Apple deals with customers. This summer I had a few issues with my phone because I decided to spend my summer in a small town of Tiffin, Ohio. Apple told me that the lack of signal was causing me to miss calls and texts. But, the biggest problem came when when they did a data transfer from my old laptop to my new one. I lost all of my contacts and every time I tried to sync them from the Cloud the disappeared right after. So after my first 2 hour conversation with them and a very mean survey, Apple put me in contact with one of their top tech people the following morning. The person I talked to not only fixed my problem, but saw the other issues I had and gave me his direct line and email in case of any further problems. Apple has a team of people set up to deal with customer issues as they happen, they have a way to keep track of past issues and they (try) to train their staff to fix problems quickly.