Trivia Questions For: David Meerman Scott, Bestselling Marketing Strategist & Thought Leader

As part of our “Trivia Questions For…” interview series, I am honored to have caught up with David Meerman Scott, internationally acclaimed marketing strategist and author of the BusinessWeek bestselling book The New Rules of Marketing & PR. A celebrated thought leader on the new realities of marketing & public relations in the 21^st Century, David is a respected blogger and highly sought-after keynote speaker. His new book is Real-Time Marketing & PR: How to Instantly Engage Your Market, Connect with Customers, and Create Products that Grow Your Business Now.

Today, I’m asking him about how companies and brands can maximize their efforts to engage with their customers both online and offline.

Your latest book is called “Real-Time Marketing & PR.” Can companies realistically incorporate real-time marketing tactics into long-term strategies?

For decades, marketing has been about long-term campaign building; you would create an advertising campaign to launch the next quarter/year, you worked on a product launch that was going to happen at the beginning of next year, and most PR & marketing strategies were built on campaigns that were executed on timeframes that were right for the company.

The idea of real-time marketing is completely different. You have to operate when it’s right for the marketplace, or for your potential customers or the media – a completely different approach. And that’s actually the biggest challenge of implementing real-time, is that it is a completely different mindset than most marketers have experienced, and therefore goes against everything they’ve ever done in the form of creating marketing/PR initiatives because it requires quick thinking, fast execution, and doing thing when the time is right, not when you’re good and ready.

How can brand managers incorporate real-time social media into brand awareness events, to maximize engagement with loyal brand enthusiasts while reaching new audiences?

It seems to me there’s a great opportunity to integrate offline with online, and not that many organizations really do that. For example, I’m a professional speaker – I speak all over the world. And most of the times when I deliver presentations, I work with the organizer of the event to create a Twitter hashtag, so that when I’m speaking those people who are active on Twitter can be talking about what I’m saying at that exact moment that I’m talking about it, and they can have this kind of back-channel conversation as I’m speaking.

I find that to be really great as a speaker because I might be talking from the podium about something, and then if I reference, say, a particular company, somebody in the audience might then tweet using a hashtag for the event- link to whatever it is I was talking about. People can add context to what I was saying.

The other thing that’s really cool is that people who aren’t physically in the room can learn about it, so that’s another small benefit of merging the online and the offline. What I’ve seen a lot recently working really well is the use of QR codes; if you have an offline event of some sort and you want to deliver information to people in an online way, you can just deliver them the QR codes, and they can grab that information themselves. It’s actually pretty green as well, because it cuts down on the amount of paper you have to give people. Instead of giving 100 pages of documentation, why not just give a QR code that people can use to look up and find what you wanted to provide them with?

So you think live tweeting isn’t a distraction, but an effective way to integrate real-time marketing into events?

For me I do, yeah- for the people in my audiences, I absolutely do.

New York City recently joined Boston and other large urban areas in providing limited cell phone service in the subway. In an increasingly digital world, is there still value for companies to market their products & services in the traditional real-time way, through “offline” experiential marketing and brand engagement events?

I think that we’re going through a communications revolution right now, where so many people are finding answers to problems on the Web. They’re either going to Google or other search engines, or they’re asking their friends & family members through social networks, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and a bunch of other different places.

The challenge with any kind of revolution like that is the people who need to adopt to what’s happening in this world. The truth is people go to the Web to solve problems, they do searches, they go to their friends and colleagues on the Web, so the challenge is to be able to take advantage of all of those opportunities to reach people in ways that they want to be reached. But it’s also a challenge that it doesn’t mean other forms of marketing, offline marketing, are going away.

Look at history; new technologies have not necessarily displaced old technologies when it comes to communications. Radio didn’t disappear when television came around, even though many people thought it might. Of course, offline marketing is still valuable- if it’s working for your organization, certainly it makes sense to continue to do things like face-to-face selling and marketing events, absolutely.

But I wouldn’t just do them because you’ve always done them. I would make sure that they still make sense, that they are still providing a positive return on the efforts that you’re putting into it. I run across people all the time at B2B companies, for example, who say, “we’ve always done the trade show,” etc. and therefore have to continue it, and no, the fact that you’ve done it for 20 years does not mean you have to continue – it certainly doesn’t mean you should stop, but give some thought to it.

I think that the companies that are successful are those that are doing a good job combining both online and offline, and that’s a challenge when you’re going through a revolution.

Now, David has a trivia question to ask YOU:

What’s the difference between Nordic countries & Scandinavian countries?

To find out the answer, ask David by emailing him through his Website, www.DavidMeermanScott.com, commenting on his Blog, www.WebInkNow.com or by connecting with him on Twitter @dmscott.