David Meerman Scott Interview Transcript

[Jim’s questions have been edited to make him sound more coherent. The original audio and video can be found here David Meerman Scott Interview]

Jim: We’re here with David Meerman Scott. Well, I say here but not actually here , David’s sitting in Boston. Are you in Boston David?

David: I’m in Boston where we have 3 feet of snow right now Jim.

Jim: 3 feet of snow. Oh my God. Australia’s going some weird weather, Sydney’s just going through one of its hottest spells in history but Melbourne is experiencing a big wet, as is the rest of the country. But I just can’t imagine even 3 feet of snow. As I’ve told everyone before, David’s coming out to do a tour up and down the east coast of Australia, Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney. And if you’re involved in the PR industry, the marketing industry, then you really should go and see David. I’ve seen him speak several times and I’ve banged on monotonously about him and I’m just going to ask him a few questions today about what we can expect in this tour of 2011. Who are the seminars or the workshops targeted at David?

Real Time Marketing & PR Masterclass

David: Yeah, thanks for doing this Jim, I really appreciate it. There are a couple of main people that can generate lots and lots of valuable information from coming to the seminar. The first one is anybody who is marketing or public relations professional, either at a company or an agency. Everyone’s always looking to make sure that they have the latest set of skills and my job, what I do for a living is travel all over the world, giving seminars and doing keynote speeches at companies and organisations and associations all over the world. So as a result of that, I’m constantly being exposed to new and interesting ideas, which I’ve read about in my blog and in my books. I look at myself as somebody who can gather what’s going on and put it into use. So that first group is gonna be people who are marketing or public relation professionals.

The second group and in fact, this group is really a great audience for what I talk about are entrepreneurs and business owners who are trying to grow their business and that can be any industry. It could be a non-profit, an educational institution, independent consultants – virtually any type of organisation who’s trying to grow and wants to understand how to use the tools of the web, the tools of social media, the ideas of real time marketing to generate exposure for their business can get a great deal out of the information I’m gonna share.

Jim: Ok. Fantastic! You mentioned real time marketing there and as I’ve explained to viewers previously, Google’s whole business model, and as you’ve pointed out too, was changed by the advent of something called Twitter. You can put David Meerman Scott into Google now, which I’ll do right now, and we have on Google now on the left hand side, a little link that says “RealTime” and will tell us what discussions are going on in real time about David Meerman Scott and you’ll be interested to know the last thing was 4 hours ago by Amazon.com on Twitter. But what does real time marketing mean to you?

What is Real Time Marketing?

David: You know, this has been, I think the most important thing that has happened to the web and to marketing in the last decade is the idea that anybody can now communicate instantly. And I’m fortunate because my first job out of school, I worked on a bond trading desk in New York City, I actually worked in the World Trade Centre with a company called Dean Wither and I saw the transformation of the bond market to be a real time business with Unix computers and then later PCs that went on to the desktop. Prior to that it was kind of like a clubby old boy’s network where people traded bonds over the phone and it turned into a real time data driven business.

The same thing, I think, is happening right now with marketing and public relations and what’s happening is that people are talking about your business right now on the web. There are things happening in your marketplace right now. There are regulatory changes that can happen. There are all sorts of things that you can react to instantly and the opportunities to be able to instantly engage an audience based on what that audience is interested in is an absolutely huge transformation in what we as marketers can do.

Now I contrast that with how most marketing and PR has traditionally been done in that what people typically do, and this is what almost everyone does, is they plan a long drawn-out campaign and they think about what they are gonna do next month and next quarter and six months from now and even next year. They plan out product releases, they plan out advertising campaigns, and they plan out press releases based on an editorial calendar. None of that is bad, I’m not suggesting that companies abandon that kind of planning process but the thing is that it means that you don’t have a chance to think about and react to and take advantage of opportunities around what’s happening right now this instant. So, I read a book about that that came out in November of 2010, it’s only a couple of months ago and it hit number 2 in the Wall Street Journal bestseller list. It’s doing really well because people are really interested in these ideas. So I’m gonna be sharing a whole bunch of real examples about how companies have been able to take advantage of these ideas of real time. And my goals in the seminar, one of the goals, at least, are to change people’s mindset about what time is. Time is just an incredible opportunity if you can react quickly, and it can be an enemy if you don’t react quickly. And it’s something that’s completely overlooked in virtually every marketing and public relations and advertising department in the world. It’s overlooked as an opportunity.

Jim: I’ve read the book too, quite a book, really enjoyed it – some very funny case studies and anecdotes in there so I highly recommend it.

David: Gotta have humour, right?

How does a business develop real time skills?

Jim: Yeah. I enjoyed it a lot. You talked about an organisation to be able to act in real time like that and traditionally they’ve always planned campaigns out and that’s not a bad thing. How do you plan or do you train or do you hire to find people who understand what real time to an organisation means? Do you plan to not plan?

David: I think that’s part of it. You leave time in the day so that you can react quickly. You know, most people have got every second of their day planned out and as a result of that, they’re not able to drop everything at a moment’s notice when the time is right to do something. So the main thing is that it’s a shift in mindset and thinking about what marketing is, what public relations is, to include the element of time and specifically being quick. So that real time mindset shift is really important. What a lot of people then need to be thinking about is “Ok, how we can do this as well?” “How can we shift the way that people individually, as well as the company as a whole, to be thinking about time and take advantage of these ideas?”

I’m gonna share tons of examples. Just a real simple one is, almost everyone remembers when those Chilean miners were stuck in their hole for 2 months. It’s an incredible story of how they drilled down to reach them and they brought them back up to the surface after they’ve been down there for 2 months.

But the real time marketing aspect of that story comes out when Oakley sunglasses donated 33 pairs of sunglasses worth $180 a piece to each one of those miners as they came out of the hole. Their eyes would’ve been damaged by UV light had they not had sunglasses to wear because they were in the dark for such a long time. Oakley donated sunglasses. Everyone in the world, over a billion people who saw that story saw them wearing Oakley sunglasses when they came out. And that was worth tens of millions of dollars in free exposure all because somebody was very clever in thinking in real time about how they would do that, how they would be able to help those miners.

Now, most organisations don’t think that way because they’re too busy planning their product announcement for 6 months from now. And so, I think what it takes is this mindset shift, much like the way that we shift our minds when we think about exercise and we make it a part of our life. If you want to be fit and healthy, you’ve got to exercise regularly. And it’s about shifting your attitude and your mind to make exercise a part of your mind to the point where you don’t even think about it, it just is. And that’s exactly the same approach with thinking about real time is that you just make a part of your life to look at the opportunities that present themselves on a moment by moment basis. And it doesn’t mean you act on every single one, but over the course of the week, maybe there’s a couple of things you act on, which is a couple of things more than a vast majority of people act on because they’re so busy with this long-term planning mentality.

Jim: How important do you think is it to have people in the organisation to know that you have the ability to react in real time but to get to that point to know how or where you can react? You always talk about when you respond to a customer complaint; respond in the same medium that they complained in. How does an organisation get people using the tools and how important are the tools as opposed to what you talk about, which is the mindset?

Tools or company mindset?

David: I think the mindset is the most important thing. The tools come after you’ve changed your mindset. Just like with exercise, once you’ve decided that you’re going to exercise, it kind of doesn’t matter whether you end up wanting to go out for a run or ride a bike or go swimming, the tools will come so the mindset shift is the most important thing. But I do think it does require a technology infrastructure to be able to monitor what people are saying or doing out there. Much like a bond trading desk needs the technology and infrastructure to know what is going on in the market and I think that marketing is becoming a much more technology driven practice than it has been in the past.

In the past, marketing and public relations have been more creative pursuits. Not that any of that is changing but to be successful with real time, you do have to be aware of what is going on. By doing so, you need to implement the technology that allows you to monitor what is going on. You mentioned one of them, just Google news and Google search, now the real time search results are in there but that is just one example. Monitoring Twitter, monitoring Facebook to ensure that you know what is going on in your website in real time you know, it’s not just a matter of collecting leads that come through and checking them on a monthly basis. It’s about understanding who is on your website right now? And what are they doing? And what can you glean from that? And how can you engage from them in this instant when the time is right?

Jim: The reason I asked about the tools is there are so many corporate Twitter accounts out there and you cite some really good examples in your book of how they are being used. And we’ve had this discussion before about, if it’s a corporate account, do we have a real person behind it? I mean does that personality come out from behind the brand? Or where is that crossover between the individual and the brand?

The brand or the individual?

David: Yeah. Good question. It partly depends on what kind of organisation but in my opinion, for most organisations, the corporate twitter feed where it’s the name of the company and it’s probably a logo as the image, the corporate twitter feed is a pretty different tool than the twitter feed of an employee who works for the company. And I think the best approaches are those that focus on the people. But then you might have a way that you can broadcast information through the corporate account.

A good example is IBM. IBM has 400,000 employees worldwide. They’re located everywhere. And of those 400,000 employees worldwide, 200,000 of them are active in real time media. They have Twitter accounts, they blog, they have Facebook accounts that they use related to work – now that’s an incredible amount of people who are now operating in real time and evangelising for the company in precisely the forums and the blogs and the places that their customers are operating. And that’s one of the tenets of this is that when your marketplace is participating in a certain forum or chat room or social networking site, that’s where you have to be too. And there’s no possible way in hell that a 400,000-person company can do their real time engagement from some corporate platform where they’ve got an IBM Twitter feed. It’s impossible, it’s absolutely impossible! The only way to do it is to disperse it down so that every employee is part of the process.

Now I know that’s a fairly tall order for large organisations but I imagine back to what it would have been like at the turn of the last century when the telephone was invented. You know at first, maybe they had one telephone for the whole company but sooner or later everyone’s got a phone on their desk… same thing with computers, same thing with email, same thing with access to Google and the web. You know, at a certain point, companies need to realise that this is about having everybody be involved and they need to have the guidelines in place. These are clearly things that need to get done to make sure that the lawyers and the HR people and the PR people are satisfied but then it’s all fairly easy, the hard part is the mindset.

Jim: A lot of marketing & PR managers that I’ve spoken to in publicly listed companies, are filled with dread to think that employees are out there tweeting or Facebooking about the company. I like your take on some of these issues; that is, treat people like adults.

Corporate fear of losing control

David: Yeah, exactly. And you know it’s really interesting because you’re right, a lot of companies do have fear of these things. And the fear stems from the fact that most organisations have operated on a command and control mentality. They feel as if they’ve had, they try to have a control over what people say. That’s manifested through inane kind of vision statements that companies post on their website, you know that sort of stuff.

And that’s just, what’s happening now is that everybody’s engaged, everyone’s talking about you and if you’re not part of that, then you look sort of silly because you’re literally not there. It’s like there’s a party going on and you’re not at the party. Some people are talking about you and you don’t know what they’re saying. Eliminating the fear and eliminating control is a really big aspect of the mindset shift I’ve talked about where people need to have that mindset shift in order to be successful in real time marketing.

Jim: Part of that mindset shift that I’ve seen in Australia, are a couple of big companies running searches on Twitter for their brand.As soon as I’m bitching and complaining about a particular bank or particular Telco who’s sending me large paper directories and dropping them on my doorstep,all of a sudden they’ll pop up and they’ll respond. I’ve gotta say, both Telstra and certainly National Australia Bank have in my personal experience done quite well. I mean I don’t normally have a lot of nice things to say about them but they’re running a search on Twitter and when you talk about them, they come straight in and they respond. And I think the people behind these corporate accounts who are actually operating them at the time, have had really good customer service training. Maybe they’ve worked in a call centre in a previous life because I can get a bit grumpy at times on Twitter as we all can at bad service but they seem to respond pretty well as opposed to someone who has had no training.

Have you seen organisations that have actually targeted individuals for their customer service skills to respond online?

Customer service as well as marketing opportunities

David: I think you’ve hit on something that’s really important. Yeah, for that kind of reactive approach to real time communication, monitoring Twitter and responding appropriately, that’s very much a customer service initiative and clearly great customer service translates into a form of marketing because then people will talk about you, and say well Geez I had a great experience with Telstra. They’re a great company; that’s gonna have a real big knock-off effect. But I think that’s only a portion of what’s going on around here.

The other aspect is being aware of what’s going on and being able to create something that new as a result of something that is going on in the industry as a result of something going on with a competitor and what-not. And that sometimes is a little bit harder and requires people not who have a customer service background like we just talked about but marketers, and I’ll give you an example.

A company that I’ve worked with is called Eloqua and their biggest competitor, a company called Market to Lead was acquired by Oracle. Oracle acquired Market to Lead because they wanted to get into the marketing automation business. So this category of software is called marketing automation. Eloqua saw one of their biggest competitors acquired and most companies will say “Oh that’s interesting, we’ll get to figure out what that means,” and go to sleep on it, not even think about it for a day or two. But the CEO of Eloqua, a guy called Joe Payne did an instant blog post within 2 hours after the announcement, he blogged it and he said, “Hey this is great! You know, this really big software company, Oracle is now part of our industry. Isn’t this great?” He provided some statistics about it that he quoted and he knew and he did a very high level blog post welcoming Oracle into the new category product that they had a product in before.

The really interesting thing about it is that now the media had to write about this acquisition. It’s an important acquisition and the media has to write about it. And the only two things they had to go on at this stage, at the very early stages of this development, is a three-sentence announcement that Oracle posted on their website about the acquisition and this incredibly well-written blog post that Joe Payne from the competitor Eloqua wrote about. And now every single member of the media, Business Week, PC World, Information Week, all these sorts of publication, then talked about Eloqua in the same story that they talked about this acquisition. Then Eloqua sent an email to everybody in their marketing database who was tagged as being an existing customer of the acquired company Market to Lead and they said, “Hey, we just thought you’d like to know that as your marketing vendor was acquired, here’s what our CEO had to say about it.” Now remarkably, in this case, Jim and I’m amazed at this, Oracle and Market to Lead had not gotten around to telling their customers about the acquisition so the first person to tell these companies that their marketing vendor has just been acquired was the CEO of their competitor. And as a result of doing that, a whole bunch of those people wanted to get into the sales cycle and figure out, “Hey, what are these people doing? This is pretty cool!” “The fact that they are on top of this, this is a company I want to do business with.” They closed their first deal as a result of this, with a company called Red Hat Software. They closed in 3 weeks. It was a quarter of a million dollars sale. And since then, they closed nearly $1 billion worth of business. This new business, nearly $1 billion worth of new business came as a direct result of doing a real time initiative. They were monitoring what was going on with a competitor, they found out that competitor was acquired. They immediately jumped in to comment on it and generated nearly $1 billion in revenues they wouldn’t have generated otherwise. Had they even waited a couple more hours, they never would’ve had that opportunity. It was all about jumping in real time. And that’s what I’m talking about with real time marketing. Sure, the customer services aspect is important, monitoring Twitter and commenting on people, it’s very important, don’t get me wrong. But as marketers and as communicators and as entrepreneurs, the things that companies like Eloqua and companies like Oakley have done are fascinatingly interesting and I’m so eager to share them.

Jim: Wow! And viewers, that’s the sort of absolute gold case studies that you’re going to get if you come to see David speak in Australia.

Google did a survey last year where they found that 40% of Australian businesses don’t even have a website. Now, I’m presuming that a lot of those businesses are micro-businesses or they might be individual tradesmen, basically very small businesses. But if you were giving some advice to an entrepreneur today or a new business owner, where would you advice them to set up shop? Is it on the web? Is it on Facebook? Should they have a Twitter presence, should they do all these things?

Search Marketing is the most important thing

David: I think every company should have a website, a presence on the web. It’s just critically important because people go to Google first. All the studies that I have seen show that Google is more important than any other means for when people have a product or service that they’re looking for.

Jim: I just want people to hear that again. People go to Google first. That’s for all the people who have arguments with me on social media, keep telling me search is dead.

David: Oh God no. Search is the most important thing. There’s no question about it. People go to Google first. Now, with that being said, they also ask their friends on Facebook or Twitter for advice or email. But I think every organisation needs a presence on the web. And the main thing with a website is that it has to have interesting content that’s well optimised so that it’s likely that if somebody enters a phrase that you’ll pop up. And I think that’s really, really important. And that’s a great first step; you have to be really thinking about all the other stuff until you have that site. But I do think it’s really important to have that site and make sure that you’ve got something going.

Jim: Well David, thank you very much for your time today. I’ll let you get back to shovelling snow.

David: [Laughs] Fortunately, it didn’t snow today but we’re supposed to get some more the coming days. I gotta tell you, I’ve gotten some great exercise just shovelling snow. That’s really hard work. Taking on three feet of snow and I’ve got a hundred foot driveway that’s a lot of work.

Jim: God, that’s a lot of work. And for everybody who wants to see David when he comes to Australia, please head across to www.businessconnect.com.au. Thanks very much David.

David: Thanks a lot, Jim.