analytics next frontier - real time

INTRODUCTIONIn 1999, Rick Levine, Christopher Lock,Doc Searle and David Weinberger wrote‘The Cluetrain Manifesto’,1 the first thesisof which was: ‘markets are conversations’.2

In the following 94 tenets, the writersstressed how the internet wasrevolutionising the way businesses shouldcommunicate with their customers andthat businesses that failed to adapt andtreat their customers with respect, theircustomers would desert them. Its tone wasat times irreverent — ‘Companies need torealise their markets are often laughing. Atthem’; and at other times deadly serious— ‘We want you to take 50 million of usas seriously as you take one reporter from

The Wall Street Journal’. Its prescientwarning that ‘We are immune toadvertising’ foresaw the impending socialmedia revolution that gave users aplatform on which to subvert andcircumvent normal advertising channels.2

As ‘The Cluetrain Manifesto’ pointsout, ‘Real-time marketing is the executionof a thoughtful and strategic planspecifically designed to engage customerson their terms via digital socialtechnologies’.2 Wikipedia expands thisdefinition, defining real-time marketing as

‘marketing performed “on-the-fly” todetermine an appropriate or optimalapproach to a particular customer at a

� Henry Stewart Publications 2050-0076 (2014) Vol. 2, 3 000–000 Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing 1

Real time: The next frontier foranalyticsReceived (in revised form): 23rd September, 2014

Andrew W. Pearsonis the Managing Director of Qualex Asia Limited, a leading software big data, fast data, mobile andsocial media implementer for the gaming, finance, healthcare, energy, hospitality and retail industries. Hehas written books on casino marketing, predictive analytics and mobile and social media. A frequentspeaker on such topics as big data, predictive analytics, customer relationship management (CRM) andsocial CRM, as well as mobile and social media, Mr Pearson is fascinated by the rapidly changingbusiness world, especially in Asia.

Qualex Asia, 1 Central Residences, Lot B, Zone B, Tower 7, 24A, NAPE, MacauTel: +853 6265 5885; E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract In 1999, ’The Cluetrain Manifesto’ warned that ‘markets are conversations’.Finally, some 15 years later, software, hardware, mobile and social media vendors havecome together to provide tools that allow companies to join and manipulate theconversation. This paper provides a quick overview of the available hardware andsoftware solutions; a discussion of the in-memory landscape, including the strengths andweaknesses of the competing products; and a summary of the latest developments in thesocial media monitoring space. Given the importance of personalisation and one-to-oneadvertising for increasing traffic, raising customer conversion rates and increasing averageorder value, these systems can either be a company’s best friend or its worst enemy.

KEYWORDS: augmented reality, in-memory systems, personalisation, CRM, social CRM,real-time marketing, content marketing, social media monitoring, social media sentiment,social media context

particular time and place. It is a form ofmarket research inbound marketing thatseeks the most appropriate offer for a givencustomer sales opportunity, reversing thetraditional outbound marketing (orinterruption marketing) which aims toacquire appropriate customers for a given“pre-defined” offer’.3

Real-time marketing is inexpensivecompared with the cost of traditional paidmedia. ‘Expensive research, focus groups,and awareness campaigns can be replacedwith online surveys, blog comments, andtweets by anyone or any business’.2

Successful mobile advertising requiresthree things: reach, purity and analytics.Reach can be fostered by accessingaccounts through multiple platforms likeblogs, geofencing applications, over-the-top(OTT)4 services, mobile apps, QR codes,push and pull services, RSS feeds, search,social media sites and video-casting, amongothers. Purity refers to the message and itscleanliness: if the data are unstructured anduntrustworthy, they are basically useless.Data governance is paramount forreal-time advertising to work properly. Thethird ingredient, analytics, ‘involvesmatching users’ interests — implicit andexplicit, context, preferences, network andhandset conditions — to ads andpromotions in real time’.5 An explicitinterest would be an easily quantifiableone, ie one that could be manually addedto a database, while an implicit one mightbe a user’s behaviour patterns, ie somethingindirectly expressed.

Successful marketing is about reaching aconsumer with an interesting offer whenhe or she is primed to accept it. Knowingwhat might interest a consumer is half thebattle to making the sale and this is wherecustomer analytics comes in. Customeranalytics has evolved from simplyreporting customer behaviour tosegmenting customers based on theirprofitability, to predicting that profitability,to improving those predictions (because of

the inclusion of new data), to actuallymanipulating customer behaviour withtarget-specific promotional offers andmarketing campaigns. These are thechannels where real-time marketingthrives, and this is where a company cangain a powerful competitive advantagewhen using it.

For a real-time platform to work, datamust be gathered from multiple anddisparate sources, such as enterpriseresource planning (ERP), customerrelationship management (CRM), andsocial CRM platforms, geofencing6

applications (like Jiepang and Foursquare),over-the-top services (like WhatsApp andWeChat), mobile apps, augmented realityapps, and other mobile and social mediasystems. The data must be collected andthen seamlessly integrated into a datawarehouse that can cleanse and prepare thedata for consumption.5 As the authors state:

‘The analytical system must have thecapability to digest all the user data,summarise it, and update the master userprofile. This functionality is essential toprovide the rich user segmentation that is atthe heart of recommendations, campaignand offer management, and advertisements.The segmentation engine can cluster usersinto affinities and different groups based ongeographic, demographic orsocio-economic, psychographic, andbehavioral characteristics’.5

This translates to a lot of data andbusinesses today are faced with the issue ofhow to deal with such massive volumes,which, in some cases, come from hundredsof different sources, including point-of-sale(POS) counters, other customertransactions systems, CRM and socialCRM databases as well as a multitude ofsocial and mobile platforms. Somecompanies will feel overwhelmed by suchvolumes of data, while others will see oneof the greatest business opportunities ofthe 21st century. Most major software

The next frontier for analytics

2 Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing Vol. 2, 3 000–000 � Henry Stewart Publications 2050-0076 (2014)

vendors are clambering for market share,but they have to walk a fine line as theirclients might be faced with complexlegacy systems that might be integratedwith software from other competitors. Anychanges to these systems could be verycostly. In-memory computing — thestorage of information in a server’s mainrandom access memory (RAM) ratherthan in complicated and comparativelyslow relational databases — has been allthe rage over the past few years andvendors like IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, SAPand Teradata are all fighting for superiority.

HARDWARE: IN-MEMORYIn-memory solutions that utilise a system’sRAM to quickly detect and exploitpatterns in massive data warehouses almoston the fly have been around for decades.IBM’s solidDB and Oracle’s TimesTen dateback to 1992 and 1996, respectively, butthese systems were developed as nicheproducts and are not useful for today’smass ERP markets.7 Current in-memoryheavyweights include IBM, Teradata andSAP. Microsoft and Oracle will beintroducing their in-memory solutions inmid-2014, with In-Memory OLTP(formerly Hekaton) launching alongsideMicrosoft SQL Server 2014.

As reported in Information Week, IBM’sBLU Acceleration is specifically developedfor analytics:

‘but IBM also offers all-flash storage arraysas a way to eliminate disk I/O bottlenecksand speed transactional applications anddatabase performance. Flash isn’t as fast asRAM, but it’s much faster than disk. IBMsays these arrays cost far less than addingin-memory database technology and stillcan reduce transaction times by as much as90 per cent’.7

Microsoft’s PowerPivot and Power ViewExcel plug-ins allow for some in-memoryanalytics functionality such as formatting

and filtering one’s data, creating calculatedfields, defining key performance indicatorsand creating user-defined hierarchies, but‘this client-side approach can createdisconnected islands of analysis withdisparate data models and versions ofinformation from user to user’.7 Thisnegates a lot of the reason why one wouldwant to install an in-memory system,namely, to structure data within the entireorganisation so everyone can be drawingoff the same data warehouse, data martsand analytics foundations.

Oracle’s answer for in-memoryanalytical performance, Exalytics, facessimilar limitations.7 This caching applianceoverlaps with its Exadata machine, creatingmore copies of data, and it also requires aTimesTen or Essbase in-memory databaselicence. In addition, the Oracle Database12c In-Memory Option will not bereleased before the first quarter of 2015 atthe earliest.

SAP advertises that its Hana platformcan run an entire company, ‘includingboth its mission-critical transactionalapplications (like ERP and CRM), and itsanalytic needs (things heretofore handledby the separate database managementsystems (DBMSes) underpinning datawarehouses and data marts)’.7 IBM’s BLUAcceleration for DB2 ‘combines bothcolumnar compression8 and in-memoryprocessing to accelerate analytics’.7

Teradata’s Intelligent Memory‘automatically moves themost-often-queried data into RAM toensure fast-as-possible query response’.7

Unlike SAP’s HANA solution, however,IBM’s BLU and Teradata’s IntelligentMemory solely address analytics, nottransactional applications.

Today, few would argue that in-memoryperformance beats disk-basedperformance, but there are two importantquestions companies venturing into thisfield must ask — how much faster will anin-memory system run my queries; and,


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more importantly, how exactly does thisspeed differential affect my business andmy all-important bottom line? Return oninvestment is a vital consideration and, aswith most new computing systems, it is ahard metric to calculate.

To answer the first question:

‘Estimates vary depending on disk speedand available input/output (I/O)bandwidth, but one expert9 puts RAMlatency at 83 nanoseconds and disk latencyat 13 milliseconds. With 1 millionnanoseconds in a millisecond, it’s akin tocomparing a 1,200-mph F/A-18 fighter jetto a garden slug’.10

To answer the second question, a fewindustry case studies from Information Weekmight shed some light on the subject. 10

For example:

• Online gaming company Bwin.partyuses in-memory capabilities to handle150,000 bets per second. This compareswith its normal system rate of 12,000bets per second.

• For retail services company Edgenet,‘in-memory technology has broughtnear real-time insight into productavailability for customers of AutoZone,Home Depot, and Lowe’s. Thattranslates into fewer wasted trips andhigher customer satisfaction’.10

• ConAgra, an $18 billion-a-yearconsumer packaged goods company,‘must quickly respond to the fluctuatingcosts of 4,000 raw materials that go intomore than 20,000 products, from SwissMiss cocoa to Chef Boyardee pasta’10 souses an in-memory system to assist inmaterial forecasting, planning andpricing. It also taps its in-memorysolution to make company promotionsmore relevant by using faster analysis,allowing ConAgra and its retailercustomers to command higher prices inan industry notorious for razor-thinprofit margins.

• Maple Leaf Foods, a US$5billion-a-year Canadian supplier ofmeats, baked goods, and packagedfoods, finds that profit-and-loss reportswhich ‘used to take 15 to 18 minuteson conventional databases now take 15to 18 seconds on their in-memoryplatform’.10

• Temenos, a banking software providerthat uses IBM’s in-memory-based BLUAcceleration for DB2 system, reportsthat queries that used to take 30seconds now take one-third of a secondthanks to BLU’s columnar compressionand in-memory analysis.

For Temenos, in particular, such adifference in speed means that mobilecustomers will be able to quickly retrieveall of their banking transactions on theirmobile devices, rather than just their lastfive, which could mean the differencebetween handling customer issues on amobile device rather than in a companystore. ‘Online or mobile interaction coststhe bank 10 to 20 cents to support versus$5 or more for a branch visit’, meaningthat the cost savings are substantial.10

One caveat here about in-memoryspeed: the abovementioned speedadvantage will never be capturedcompletely because there are too manyconstraints (such as CPU processing time)that affect the overall performance.‘In-memory performance improvementsvary by application, data volume, datacomplexity, and concurrent-user loads, butHANA customers report that thedifferences can be dramatic’.10

PERSONALISATIONThe potential to market to an individualwhen they are primed to accept suchadvertising is advantageous for bothparties. Marketers do not waste timeadvertising to consumers when they arenot primed to accept the advertisements,



and can focus their marketing toconsumers when and where they mightwant to use said advertisements.

Composing the marketing message,however, is probably the easiest part of theprocess. In its ‘Delivering new levels ofpersonalization in consumer engagement’survey, Forester Research found thatparticipants believed that personalisationhad the potential to increase traffic, raisecustomer conversion rates and increaseaverage order value.11 Surveyed marketersfelt that personalisation capabilities couldimprove a variety of business metrics,including customer retention (75 percent), lifetime customer value (75 percent) and customer conversion rates (71per cent).11

These survey participants see e-mail,call centres, corporate websites, mobilewebsites and physical locations (such asstadiums, sporting venues and hospitalitysites) as today’s key customer interactionchannels, but reported that their futuremarketing efforts would be ‘focused onmobile websites, applications, and socialmedia channels’.11

Understanding customer-specifiedpreferences is imperative forpersonalisation:

‘80 per cent of marketing executivescurrently use them in some or allinteraction channels. In addition, 68 percent of marketers personalise currentcustomer interactions based on pastcustomer interaction history. Othercommonly used personalisation methodsused by nearly 60 per cent of firms in someor all of their interaction channels are basedon the time of day or day of the week ofcustomer interactions’.11

According to Forester Research,11 thedifficulties of personalisation include:

• continuously optimising campaigns inresponse to a customer’s most recentinteractions;

• optimising content or offers for eachperson by matching identities toavailable products, promotions,messages, etc;

• creating a single repository containingstructured and unstructured data abouta consumer;

• delivering content or offers to aconsumer’s chosen channel in real timefor the purposes of conversion; and

• analysing all available data in real timeto create a comprehensive, contextuallysensitive consumer profile.

The executives polled by ForesterResearch expected also there to be a ‘hugerise in personalisation using consumer’semotional state, social media sentiment,and context’:11

‘Only 29 per cent of respondents claimtoday to use inferences about theconsumer’s emotional state in some or allchannels. But 53 per cent expect to do thisin two to three years’ time. Only 52 percent of marketers currently use sentimentsthat consumers express in social media topersonalise interactions today, but fully 79per cent expect to do this in two to threeyears. In addition, only 54 per cent capitaliseon the consumer’s current contextualbehaviour, but 77 per cent expect to do soin two to three years’ time’.11

AUGMENTED REALITY

Augmented reality (AR) works by‘displaying layers of computer-generatedinformation on top of a view of thephysical world’.12 It is ‘a technology thatalters the perception of reality bydistorting it, allowing escape from it, andenhancing it — all at the same time’.12

Webopedia defines AR as:

‘… a type of virtual reality that aims toduplicate the world’s environment in acomputer. An augmented reality systemgenerates a composite view for the user that


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is the combination of the real scene viewedby the user and a virtual scene generated bythe computer that augments the scene withadditional information. The virtual scenegenerated by the computer is designed toenhance the user’s sensory perception of thevirtual world they are seeing or interactingwith. The goal of augmented reality is tocreate a system in which the user cannottell the difference between the real worldand the virtual augmentation of it. Todayaugmented reality is used in entertainment,military training, engineering design,robotics, manufacturing and otherindustries’.13

Analysts predict that the AR market willgrow from roughly US$181m in revenuesin 2011 to nearly $5.2bn by 2016.14,15 By2017, more than 2.5 billion mobile ARapps will be downloaded to smartphonesand tablets annually; 3.5 times the numberof ‘Angry Birds’ downloads in 2011.Anticipated market growth and trendinginvestments have led the Harvard BusinessReview to predict that AR will soon havean impact on everything from advertising,to location services, to healthcare, torelationships, to the very nature ofknowledge.16

According to a recent press release fromGartner, ‘augmented reality is the real-timeuse of information in the form of text,graphics, audio and other virtualenhancements integrated with real-worldobjects’ and will become an importantworkplace tool.17 In the words of TuongHuy Nguyen, principal research analyst atGartner: ‘AR leverages and optimises theuse of other technologies such as mobility,location, 3D content management andimaging and recognition. It is especiallyuseful in the mobile environment becauseit enhances the user’s senses via digitalinstruments to allow faster responses ordecision making’.17

Gartner believes ‘AR technology hasmatured to a point where organisationscan use it as an internal tool to

complement and enhance businessprocesses, workflows and employeetraining’.17 Gartner believes that ‘ARfacilitates business innovation by enablingreal-time decision making through virtualprototyping and visualisation ofcontent’.17

Wearable AR devices such as GoogleGlass ‘allow users to access standardisedsets of instructions for a particular task inreal time, triggered by environmentalfactors and overlaid on the user’s field ofvision’.16 ‘AR allows for improved sensesand memory through the capture andenhancement of the user’s perspective. Byrecording audio-visual information,capturing images and removing elementsthat obscure the senses, AR technologyallows users’ eyes to act as cameras, andcan enhance the senses in ways notavailable naturally, such as night vision orthe ability to zoom in on far-awayobjects’.16

AR uses location-based data fornavigation, overlaying digital maps anddirections on real-world environments.17

Through the lens of an AR device, a usercan receive visual guidance based on GPStechnology.17 AR services generally fallinto one of two categories —‘location-based or computer vision.Location-based offerings use a device’smotion sensors to provide informationbased on a user’s location.Computer-vision-based services use facial,object and motion tracking algorithms toidentify images and objects’.16

AR’s benefits include the ‘potential toimprove productivity, provide hands-onexperience, simplify current processes,increase available information, providereal-time access to data, offer new ways tovisualise problems and solutions, andenhance collaboration’.16

Augmented reality has many potentialapplications in the gaming and hospitalityindustry. While some potential applicationsof AR might currently seem like science



fiction, they are in fact within today’srealm of possibility, and would indeed takethe concept of personalisation to anotherlevel. The gaming industry, for example,might be one of the few industries todevelop AR applications, as it not only hasthe financial muscle and the need forin-memory computing platforms, but alsohas the databases of patron informationnecessary to make this complicated andholistic system work.

The article, ‘Augmented reality andhospitality … the next generation ofhotels?’,18 lays out a very interestingscenario for AR in a hospitalityestablishment, whether that be a hotel or acasino property, namely providingfront-desk staff with Google Glass toconnect them to the company datawarehouses. These systems would be ableto provide staff with real-time patroninformation, empowering them to greetand interact with a patron on a trulyintimate level. The hotel clerks would haveaccess to all of the patron’s past historyand, perhaps even be tipped off about therecent news headlines associated withthem, ie, the recent triumphant box officenumbers of a movie star’s latest releasecould be commented upon. This type ofengagement would bring the concept ofcustomer service to a whole new level,one that would be unlike anything thesepatrons had ever seen before — a rarething in an industry that can treat VIPguests like royalty.

Even for the mass premium side of thebusiness, a guest who had previously stayedat the property would be immediatelyidentified and all of his or her preferencesand necessary patron information couldappear on the Google Glass virtual screen.

‘The guest could be checked in before theyeven reach the door. The extent goesfurther as restaurants could identify guestsallergies or preferences, orders would berecognised by dish then linked to the table

and guest images shown to see who hasordered what so the food is served to thecorrect person’.18

Birthday or anniversary greetings could beoffered up without having to research apatron’s profile. Many of these thingscould be triggered right from the CRMsystem and relayed to the hotel staff, butall of this requires ‘research, time and agood long memory, which not everyone isblessed with’.18

The one glaring drawback that mightmake this scenario difficult to implementis the fact that facial recognitiontechnology is still unreliable. However,facial recognition technology might not beneeded at all because most people arealready carrying around a very powerfultracking device with them already — theirmobile phone.18 The above scenario couldbe realised today if telcos or an OTTservice provider like WeChat pushed thephone and location data into the casino’sdatabases, where it could be matched witha patron record before being surfaced tothe front-facing hotel staff. This kind ofdata pull could, with in-memorycomputers, happen almost instantly.

For the patron, AR could enhance theon-property experience considerably. Bysimply downloading the casino property’sAR app onto their mobile phone, thepatron could be checked in virtually andgiven personalised directions to his room,where hotel staff members could greethim appropriately. A free bottle ofchampagne or Lafite wine (andaccompanying Sprite for those Chinesehigh rollers who like to mix afive-thousand dollar bottle of wine with aone dollar soda) could be awaiting him.The casino’s general manager could appearin a video to offer a personal greeting aswell.18

Continuing with the patron’s ARjourney, he could go to one of theintegrated casino resort’s restaurants and,


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upon seeing an appetising meal beingbrought out from the kitchen, he couldwhip out his mobile phone, snap a pictureof the meal, quickly scan it on the hotel’simage restaurant database, discover that itis a dish of beef wellington, and then,potentially, place an order for it.18 Ifinterested, the patron could even pay forthe dish on his mobile device, possiblyusing his patron points to cover the bill.

After dinner, if the patron is interestedin going to one of the hotel bars, a quickscan of the line of people waiting to getinto the bar would reveal the wait time. Ifthe AR system connected with the hotel’spatron system (which would reveal that hewas a high-roller whose casino patron cardallowed him to skip the line), the patroncould be advised that he could jump thequeue. If the patron did not have such avaunted status but did not want to wait, hecould be shown the name and location ofthe hotel’s other, less crowded, bars.18

The AR app could also help with hotelmaintenance. As a user scans his or herhotel room, the app could record anyminor maintenance issues. These issueswould not be highlighted for the user, butwould be relayed to the appropriate hotelmaintenance departments so that theycould be fixed.18 This, of course, does raiseprivacy issues, but they are nothing a goodlawyer could not overcome.

Continuing on the patron’s AR journey,if he liked to play golf, a quick scan of thecourse with the AR app would reveal theaverage par shots. If he chose to play, theapp could even track the score. Localstructures could also be explained so thatthe patron could discover nearby areas ofinterest. Discounts on services could alsobe pushed out and, if coupled with adynamic pricing system, these discountscould help sell what might otherwise beempty seats in a concert venue or arestaurant.18

For sports betting websites, AR couldbe used to offer live odds on players

during a soccer match, a basketball gameor on a horse being paraded before a race.A punter could point his mobile device ata player on a soccer pitch or on abasketball court or on a television and seelive odds on that particular player to bethe next goal scorer or to be named the‘man of the match’ or the game’s mostvaluable player. Bets could be made in oneeasy click and odds would be updated livethroughout the game or just before ahorse race goes off.

A punter at a horse track could pointhis or her mobile device at a horse andget not only the odds for that horse towin, but also a plethora of other bets,including such exotic bets as exactas,trifectas, daily doubles or pick 6 wagers.Once the tote pool closes, the systemshould be able to generate a projectedpayout on such types of complicated bet.Sophisticated analytical systems couldgenerate odds on the fly, even on suchcomplicated hypothetical bets as afour-way multinational parlay on the SanMiguel Beermen of the PhilippinesBasketball Association to beat the San MigSuper Coffee Mixers (real team names, bythe way) coupled with a greyhound racein Crayford, England, with a third leg thatcontained a scorecast bet on WayneRooney to open the goal scoring in a 4–0rout of Aston Villa, to a 2/5 lay on MannyPacquiao losing his next welterweight titlefight in Macau. Currently, in-memorycomputing systems could, theoretically,handle these kinds of bettingcombinations, as well as produceon-the-fly risk assessments for the sportsbetting company making those bets,which would allow them to instantlytweak their odds to cover their liabilities.

SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORINGIn 1999, ‘The Cluetrain Manifesto’warned: ‘Reviews are the new advertising’.Today, this is truer than ever. A multitude



of platforms allow users to rate arestaurant, a retail establishment, a hotel, acasino property or even a local handymanor plumber. Used properly, reviews can bethe new advertising currency for acompany’s marketing department.Companies such as Dell, Cisco,Salesforce.com, the American Red Crossand Gatorade are creating social mediacommand centres that monitor the socialconversations about them. These socialmedia centres enable company employeesto monitor conversations from the socialweb on channels such as Twitter, Facebookand YouTube (among others) in an attemptto keep track of the health of thecompany’s social brand.

In December 2010, Dell became one ofthe first companies to launch a socialmedia command centre. Based at companyHQ in Round Rock, TX, 12 full-timeemployees monitor conversations aboutDell and its products around the globe,responding via @DellCares or forwardingthe post to the right internal team.19

Through Dell’s Social Media Listening andCommand Center, Dell aggregates andculls through the 25,000 conversationsabout Dell every day (more than 6 millionevery year).19 ‘We’re monitoringconversations in 11 languages 24/7, andeach one is an opportunity to reinforceour brand’, explains Karen Quintos, DellCMO. 19 She adds:

‘With the tremendous amount ofinformation being generated, we can trackbasic demographics, reach, sentiment,subject matter of the discussions, the siteswhere conversations are happening, andmore. We leverage these analytics to identifycustomer support needs as they happen,influence product development, insertourselves into conversations with ITdecision makers and connect with peoplehaving the most impact on theseconversations’.19

Scott Gulbransen argues that:

‘To do the command-centre model right, asetup has to envision a real-time workflowempowered to take action on all of therelevant content being analysed, whether itbe insights derived from real-timemonitoring, opportunities to respond, orgreat discovered content to feature thatelevates you and your fans’.20

Gulbransen also recommends breakingdown a command centre into thefollowing critical functions:

• identify trends and insights: track not onlythe key themes, but also how theyevolve over time;

• review the content: monitor a widevariety of terms that are meaningful tothe brand and assign employees to sortthrough the responses, deciding whichones warrant a response, and whatmight interest the community at large;

• curate the best stuff: leverage the greatcontent that is being said about thecompany and champion those greatcontent providers; and

• listen and respond: this is a two-wayconversation — listen and respondquickly and accordingly.

CONCLUSIONIn 1999, Levine et al. stated that ‘Marketsare conversation’ and, over the past decade,a plethora of social media listening toolshave come online to prove those wordsprescient. These platforms can track usersentiment on social media networks likeFacebook, Twitter, RenRen, WeChat,Weibo, YouTube, Jeipang and Foursquare,among a multitude of others — and thenumber of new platforms coming onlineis growing by the day.

‘For years, marketing professionals havebeen talking about creating a relationshipbetween brands and consumers. The missinglink has been realised in the rise of new freesocial marketing and social technology


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platforms that enable dialogue amongconsumers, peers, and brands on a globalscale’.2

That missing link has also been greatlyenhanced by the rise of sophisticatedmobile platforms and in-memorycomputing that allows for a singlerepository for consumer data and real-timeprofiling. These platforms have thecapacity to select and target consumerswith the right content at the right time,coupled with the power to deliverpersonalised marketing messages to anychannel of choice.11

To succeed, real-time, context-awarepersonalisation marketing should meet orexceed a consumer’s expectations byproviding proactive, contextually-relevantcontent, which should be based upon acustomer’s location, his or her most recentinteractions, and any potential overridingcustomer sentiment.11 Marketing channelsshould be aligned with consumerbehaviour and mobile and social mediashould be looked at as the most importantmarketing channels in the not too distantfuture.11 Collecting piles of data is onething, but a near real-time contentmanagement system can provide real valueto an audience, and, by association, to abrand or an organisation.20

As ‘The Cluetrain Manifesto’ soprophetically warned over 15 years ago,‘There are no secrets. The networkedmarket knows more than companies doabout their own products. And whetherthe news is good or bad, they telleveryone’.1 Today, we live in a real-time,24/7 world; a world where 140-characterTwitter messages foment politicalrevolutions; a world where marketersshould fear not the power of the pen butthe power of the critical tweet or thedestructive force of an inflammatory socialmedia diatribe that can encircle the digitalworld in seconds, laying waste in minutesto a reputation that might have taken years

to develop. Conversely, it is also a world inwhich an advertiser’s message can go viraland reach more eyeballs in less than anhour than a multi-million dollar televisioncommercial campaign can in a month.

These powerful new systems can be amarketer’s best friend or their worstenemy — that decision is up to you. Butbe warned, it will be made and, moreimportantly, judged in real time.

References1. Levine, R., Lock, C., Searle, D., and Weinberger, D.

(1999) ‘The Cluetrain Manifesto’, available at:http://www.cluetrain.com/ (accessed 24thSeptember, 2014).

2. Macy, B. and Thompson, T. (2011) ‘The Power ofReal-Time Social Media Marketing’, McGrawHill, New York, NY.

3. Wikipedia (n.d.) ‘Real-time marketing’, availableat: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_marketing (accessed 24th September, 2014).

4. ‘An over-the-top (OTT) application is any app orservice that provides a product over the internetand bypasses traditional distribution. Services thatcome over the top are most typically related tomedia and communication and are generally, if notalways, lower in cost than the traditional methodof delivery’. Such services are delivered caninclude text messaging, video, music, television aswell as other content. See: Techopedia (n.d.)‘Over-the-top application (OTT)’, available at:http://www.techopedia.com/definition/29145/over-the-top-application-ott (accessed 24 September2014)

5. Sharma, C., Herzog, J., Melfi, V. (2008) ‘MobileAdvertising: Supercharge your Brand in theExploding Wireless Market’, John Wiley and Sons,Hoboken, NJ.

6. Geofencing technology defines a virtual boundaryaround a real-world geographical area. In doing so,a radius of interest is established that can trigger anaction in a geo-enabled phone or other portableelectronic device.

7. Henschen, D. (2014) ‘Two approaches toin-memory database battle’, Information Week,available at: http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/two-approaches-to-in-memory-database-battle/d/d-id/1114088 (accessed 10th May, 2014).

8. Columnar compression technology is a ‘newmethod for organising data within a databaseblock. As the name implies, this technology utilisesa combination of both row and columnar methodsfor storing data. This hybrid approach achieves thecompression benefits of columnar storage, whileavoiding the performance shortfalls of a purecolumnar format’. See Christman, |G. (2012)

‘Hybrid columnar compression on exadata’,Oracle white paper, available at:http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/bi-foundation/ehcc-twp-131254.pdf (accessed22nd September, 2014).

9. Paredes, C. (2011) ‘Understanding disk I/O —when should you be worried?’, 10th February,available at: http://blog.scoutapp.com/articles/2011/02/10/understanding-disk-i-o-when-should-you-be-worried (accessed 10th May,2014).

10. Henschen, D. (2014) ‘In-memory databases, IBM,Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP are fighting to becomeyour in-memory technology providers. Do youreally need the speed?’ Information Week. 3rdMarch, available at: http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/big-data-analytics/in-memory-databases-do-you-need-the-speed/d/d-id/1114076 (accessed 24th September 2014).

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[ED1]Author name?


Pearson

AQ1