The Importance of Real-Time Optimisation
“I want it now”
The need for latest information at your fingertips is rapidly becoming something most people take for granted. Just earlier this morning before writing this article I found myself stuck on a train heading for Liverpool Street station caught up in major delays. Instead of joining in the communal verbal attack on National Express trains that was occurring on the train at the time, I simply tapped in a few keystrokes on my iPhone and voila, details of the delays and expected arrival times were available to me on their website.
Access to instant information is now a key part of most people’s lives – where would we be without Sky Sports News on transfer deadline day or without Radio 5 Live during the Ashes or perhaps stuck in town late one night trying to find a taxi using the latest app. Whichever way you view it, the demand for real-time information is increasing every day.
How do businesses optimise in real-time?
The same goes for business as well. Somewhere there is a person who is ensuring we can access live train updates, another person ensuring we can find the website in the first place. Businesses who can adapt to these changes fit seamlessly into our lives and go largely unnoticed as we take their ability to deliver relevant info for granted. It’s the businesses that fail at this which make the headlines – take the Habitat example for instance, a case if ever there was one, of the line not to be crossed when interacting with users in social media in real-time. It’s not just the day to day grind where real-time information becomes valuable but in breaking news also. You’ve only got to look at the surge in tweets during the London G20 protests, the outcry from many people during the Iran elections and even the number of status updates on Facebook when Michael Jackson died (see Diag 1). 2010 will be the year of ‘now’ and businesses have to adapt to this more than ever if they want to stay a step ahead.
Actual optimisation in real time isn’t just about the dedication of someone to act on the here and now but more about the preparation that goes into the planning. Having a solution in place is 80% of the work the other 20% is executing it.
Information on demand
The internet has made instant, up-to-date information more easily accessible. As major online portals and search engines change the ways they collate this information it’s important for marketers to update their marketing strategies. Google’s release of a refined search engine results page (SERP) allowing users to filter search engine results within the last 24 hours and even the last hour, makes real-time optimisation a great opportunity to interact with users in a near live environment.
Being able to react on marketing activity within hours instead of days is vital in this ever increasingly competitive arena. Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, Flickr, Facebook and other social media platforms are the common channels for real-time optimisation but reacting to feedback from these areas also helps to optimise other areas of the business. For example, acting on negative comments about the after-sales service of a business, can result in an improved service overnight or improved customer-service through a direct approach to offer some form of remedy or compensation.
Historically, paid search has always been the quickest way to get a specific brand message to the prominent positions in search results but with SERPs now showing up to the minute articles and posts, paid search needs to be impeccably maintained and optimised if it is to achieve strong performance and remain relevant in the real-time for the increasingly savvy users online.
