186 THE POWER OF VISUAL STORYTELLING Great marketing is now a conver- The Importance of Agile sation based around communities Marketing and Social Data and passions—and it needs to be flexible, responsive, and creative as Two things we can take away from Oreo’s ability to pro- never before. duce clever content around current events are relevance and creativity. But a good RTM strategy doesn’t have to mean a constant rush to produce content in response to events. That can give a negative, knee-jerk appearance to your marketing. The best strategies mix real-time marketing into a carefully planned media campaign schedule. This means that RTM techniques can be used to tweak a campaign either in response to a changing mood before it is aired or as the campaign progresses by monitoring the public’s reception to it. The audience will very likely never realize this more subtle approach is even happening, but timeliness, speed, and creativity will be just as important. Real-time marketing content should support the wider marketing strategies of the brand, perhaps continuing a theme that has been prom- inent in its advertising, or it should encourage conversations around the new product lines or, better yet, the customers’ needs. Departments need to be agile enough to react to situations that call for good, cre- ative content, but they should not neglect their priorities in order to join in every conversation. It is easy to be overwhelmed by the amount of social data out there, but good agile marketing works when depart- ments remain focused on their priorities. Companies shouldn’t let their marketing strategy be swamped by gimmicky reactions to events, but good structuring can enable RTM to align with wider campaigns and to become a habit, or a way of life, in the day-to-day operation of brand marketers. Marketing departments have had to change the way they operate in order to meet the challenges and opportunities that the availability of social data means for them. Social media command centers, pioneered by companies such as Cisco, Gatorade, and Dell, have become the norm in some larger organizations, and analytics tools have made the work of