REAL-TIME MARKETING IN A VISUAL WORLD 185 Successful marketing uses cutting-edge social technology to understand customers and anticipate need as never before. You bought a particular product? Here are two more sugges- tions based on your personal profile, tailored to your buying habits and network or friends. You are interested in an event? Here is how our brand is leading the conversation around that event. You have a comment, suggestion, or complaint? This is the creative response that will not only answer your query but will also turn you from a detractor to a committed fan, eager to tell your friends about our company. Real-time marketing is about more than a quick response. It is about creativity and driving dialogue, and about peo- ple doing real things and having meaningful conversations in real time. With so much social data at our fingertips, marketing departments can not only respond to the zeitgeist in real time but they can also drive it in a way that was unimaginable until now. The availability of reliable, timely data has always been key to suc- cessful marketing campaigns, and the explosion of social media in the last five years has provided companies with a wealth of data—if they choose to make use of it. You can see how RTM is about more than just adver- Over half (53%) of brands sur- tising or smart content creation—it is about a relevant and veyed were planning to make timely two-way conversation between a brand and its cus- greater use of real-time data, tomers. True RTM mentality needs to permeate all of the with only 17% of brands say- relevant internal stakeholders and strategies from a com- ing they either didn’t plan on pany’s creative to its social responses, to traditional media using it, didn’t know how to, and beyond. This is marketing at its very best. or couldn’t afford to. First-time users numbered 11%, a sizable 9 adoption figure.