But let’s face it, in the real world, it can be challenging to bring these new processes into an organization. And simply telling the CEO to read Seth Godin, or Chris Brogan or David Meerman Scott isn’t going to cut it. 

Forrester speaks of Adaptive Brand Marketing as a movement that will “shift the discussion from the classic four P’s — now table stakes rather than differentiators — to permission, proximity, perception, and participation.”

Real marketers need to really adapt to marketing in real-time.  Marketers must adapt – quickly and creatively.  It’s not just about data, it’s about using data to become more creative.   It’s a new breed of marketer – one that uses both halves of their brain equally.  That’s the Adaptive Marketer.

Why We Blog About This

As real-time marketing trends move – we want to keep up.  We want to discuss it.  We want to track it – and most of all we want to stay on top of it so that we remain relevant.  

We’re here to learn what we can, help where we’re able and always continue the discussion.  We believe it’s all possible.  It’s your story. And hopefully The Adaptive Marketer can, from time to time, help you tell it.

As they pass the group of sports writers, one says to the others – "geez, if she catches him, we'll have to actually write something".  And, then they go back to their card game.  The story left to legend. 

Can you imagine that happening today?  Within hours, there'd be thousands of TwitPics posted, blogs featuring candid photos and video.  Wolf Blitzer would be in the Situation Room, Glenn Beck would weep, the scorned woman would be represented by Gloria Allred and the Today Show would devote a special hour to Dan Abrams and the legal situation both find themselves in.

If you're not ready for the Real-Time world – get ready – because this week felt like the tipping point. 

This week the news was filled with stories of the real-time world of media consumption finally taking hold.

Of course there was the Tiger Woods story – and this is the story which really sealed it for me.   The amount of coverage over one man's fender bender was simply breathtaking.  And, the quest for all of the media to produce real-time coverage of the events was simply ridiculous.  It got to such an absurd point, that the Daily Show dubbed it "Newsak" and did an amazing piece setting it to Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody (this is a must watch).

By the way, as an aside…. The product image in this post is an actual new product.  It's called the Walkstation.  And it's a workstation attached to a treadmill.   Basically allowing the new office worker to actually work, and exercise at the same time.

Anyway, back to our regular scheduled blog… There were also these moves last week:

Google acquired EtherPad – a software that provides "real-time" word processing.  You've all, no doubt, heard a bit about Google Wave – the real-time collaborative content sharing service that Google recently has put into beta.  Well, EtherPad's technology could empower Google to employ real-time word processing into that environment.

Then, also from Google (definitely a trend here) they are now offering real-time finance news streaming.  This will be finance news streamed to your screen – not unlike the way you see Friendfeed posts come onto your screen today.

And, finally if you haven't seen this article on "Nowism" from Trendwatching, it's worth it. They define Nowism as a "lust for instant gratification… being satisfied by a host of novel, important (offline and online) real-time products, services and experiences"

So, what does this mean to marketers?

The world of consumer media consumption and decision-making is shrinking.   2010 is going to be a year, when we need to radically re-think the way we plan, budget, place media and adapt to an ever-shifting landscape of marketing strategy.

Take a look at this video from Ad Age.  In it, Rob Katz – the CEO of Vail Resorts, explains how they have completely abandoned long-term advertising strategies and built a new marketing engine that uses the immediacy of social media, search and other digital marketing to quickly adapt to the real-time landscape.   My favorite quotes from his speech:

"Last year, people went from deciding 4 or 6 months in advance to take a ski vacation…. to 2 weeks".

"This real-time decision making is not going to go away…"

"One of the most important aspects of social media is that it has changed the way you can get a message to your customers"

This is extraordinarily important for us as marketers now.  The cycle in which we strategize, plan, budget, execute and adapt – has shortened almost to the point of being in real-time.   As Katz states later on in his speech – trying to guess where the real world will be four months from now is impossible. And, developing a message that will hopefully resonate with customers four months in advance is ineffective at best and dangerous at worst.

Katz goes on to talk about the fundamental shift he and his team have taken – to the point of last year spending 80% of their budget prior to ski season.  This year, that 80% still sits in a reserve – ready to be spent.  They literally take a week by week look at a messaging calendar.

As we put together our "plans" for 2010 – let's make sure we are not taking the traditional way of market planning.  Rather, we should be building a new, effective "process" that enables us to execute a broad, long term strategy by being able to adapt quickly.  This means that we need to have tools and processes in place that allow us to execute and publish messages quickly and to every device that our consumers utilize.  It means we need to have metrics and analytics in place that give us quick dashboards and insight into how those messages are resonating.  And, finally, it means we need to have the internal permission and stakeholder buy-in to fail quickly, adapt effectively and have meaningful conversations with our prospective customers.

Now, if you'll excuse me… I have to run… My blackberry just buzzed with tweets from breaking news… I think Tiger has just been spotted having breakfast… 

A quick how-to using Typepad – although others would work.

I was listening to the latest TWIT Podcast (which is just really great btw) – and one of the things they were discussing was a growing fear that putting all our content onto services like Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and others was actually becoming pretty disconcerting.   The future of these services is never sure – and certainly Twitter has not shown itself to be business "reliable".  Especially in light of another friend of mine who has been having trouble with Twitter actually wiping out his entire account.  This has been documented before.

I have to admit that I was concerned about it myself.   I'm no Scobelizer, I Tweet about 10-13 times a day, but another thought was that all that content would be pretty good Google food as well.  And, maybe most importantly (and this is what ultimately motivated me to do this) was I sometimes use my Twitter feed as a way to remember links or ideas that I've had.   I often refer back to links I've tweeted for conference talks I'm putting together or articles I'm writing.

Anyway, it struck me that all this content that I'm taking the time to post should somehow be safeguarded and posted to my Blog and be archived there as a permalink – regardless of what happens to Twitter, or Friendfeed.

So, what follows is a quick "how-to" on setting up your own permanent "micro-blog".  Now, the ingredients I used to cook this up are:

My Microblogging Platforms

Twitter

Friendfeed

Linked-In

My Centralized Posting Places

Ping.FM

Hootsuite

My Regular Blogging Platform

Typepad

So, before I get into this, I'm absolutely positive that the way I did it is not the most technically elegant. But it was relatively easy – and I'm pretty darn happy with the results two days in.

So… I hope this is helpful for you….. 

1. Create Your Permanent Micro-Blog Platform

Typepad has a pretty elegant way of doing this – even if the design choices are limited at this point.   Basically, you select a one column format for your Microblog – and their "canned" design eliminates some of the other extraneous things – and puts your navigation all the way at the top and bottom – so that it more resembles what we've become used to from the Twitter and Friendfeed design.  But truth be told, any of the designs worked fine – it's more of the back-end magic of tying in your accounts.  For Typepad here is an instructional video on creating your micro-blog.

If you haven't already mapped a domain to your main blog, I would recommend doing it.  But beyond that, if you have, it now makes sense to map a subdomain (e.g. microblog.YOURDOMAIN.com) so that you'll get the SEO benefit from all this great new content that you're going to be generating – and so that it's tied into your main blog.  Or, if you're just interested in keeping the archive – don't worry about that.  You don't even need to make this blog public.  It can just serve as a private archive of your status changing ways. 

Anway, mapping a subdomain in TypePad is really easy – you just do it from your Accounts section – and then through your domain registrar.

2. Tie In your Feeds

Typepad has integrations into a number of the social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, Linked-In etc… You can set up your "Sharing" so that your services will be updated as your Micro-Blog is updated.  This gives you a central way to update all your services if you want.

And of course the reverse is true as well. But to accomplish that, you do it through another service… so….

3. Centralize (if you want)

So, like alot of micro-bloggers, I do most of my microblogging from one platform.  The key for me is an integration with Ping.Fm.   This was the easiest way I saw to update Twitter, all the other services I update AND my new Micro-blog at the same time.  Again, I'm sure there may be a more elegant way to do it – but this was easy and it works for me.  So, for my centralized platform, I like Hootsuite, but it would seem that Twhirl, Seesmic and other platforms have this integration with Ping.FM.

Tying that into the TypePad blog was simple and easy – and Ping.FM just makes really simple.

Now, make sure to be careful how you share through a service like Ping.FM.  You can get caught in a loop where you have more than one service updating another – and you can get double and triple postings on some of your feeds. This happened to me the first time I set it up.  I had Ping.FM updating everything AND I had Friendfeed updating services – so Ping.FM would update FriendFeed, and then Twitter would be updated, which would also Update Friendfeed.  So, take the time to figure out the stream of information and how it will work for you.

And voila… that's pretty much it…. 

So, now – as I Tweet from Hootsuite, Twitter is automatically updated, my Friendfeed is automatically updated and (most importantly to this exercise) my permanent MicroBlog is automatically updated – all through Ping.FM.  I actually turned off Facebook and Linked-In updates just because I thought that was a bit much for my network – but I could have easily added those too if I wanted.  Now if I get the dreaded FailWhale and need that link I Tweeted about yesterday I can point myself or any of my users to my Permanent Microblog… My personal microblog is also now searchable… So I can just search my stream.

And of course, I can do the reverse… If I micro-blog from my TypePad MicroBlog then all my services will be updated as well…. And that has the blogging via email which I like as well.

But, all my services are also separate.. So, if I go in and just update my Twitter status, or my Facebook or linked-in status directly from those services – it won't appear on my Micro-blog… This is nice because typically when I'm in those applications directly I'm just ReTweeting, or Replying to messages – which can be noisy on the micro-blog…  

I hope this is helpful.  Like I said – I'm sure there are a number of other technical ways to accomplish this. This process took me two evenings to completely sort out.  But I feel alot better about my content being archived – and it's kind of cool too.  I'll report back on any SEO benefits that I see.

And please if you hear of other ways or know of other ways to accomplish this – please share.  I'd love to hear about them.