Engaging the world, in real time

It started as a trending Twitter conversation about fast food and became a marketing win for fast-food giant McDonald’s and its public relations agency, GolinHarris, in a matter of hours.

Team members in GolinHarris’ real-time monitoring centre at their Los Angeles office noticed the topic #fastfoodaddiction trending on Twitter. Staff in Dallas analysed it and learnt that McDonald’s accounted for more than half the conversations when people talked about fast food they loved on #fastfoodaddiction.

This data was then shared with their colleagues in Chicago, who quickly produced and posted an infographic on #fastfoodaddiction. A few hours later, a second infographic was posted on the same stream highlighting the most popular McDonald’s product on #fastfoodaddiction – French fries.

The result? These small exchanges – meant as virtual “thank yous” to their fans – helped McDonald’s engage people, create new connections and boost its reputation online.

Said Mr Jonathan Hughes, president (international) at GolinHarris: “These kinds of activities – where a community feels a brand is engaged rightly – engenders a far more loyal and positive brand perception than anything else.”

Welcome to the world of real-time marketing, where a PR firm’s responsiveness is measured in hours and minutes, instead of days and weeks. This change has been driven to a large extent by changes in consumer behaviour brought about by the popularity of online platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. It’s partly in recognition of this that GolinHarris has decided to break with the traditional model used by many PR agencies for years.

The new approach – which GolinHarris calls the g4 model – was first launched in its offices in the United States and United Kingdom last year.

Essentially, workers no longer have to be what the firm calls generalists – people who can do a bit of everything – and instead specialise in one of four areas.

Catalysts, people who secure partnerships and discover new opportunities, are at the core of the model. Strategists are business analysts who look at what will affect a client’s future. Creators are storytellers who produce content, while connectors use various media platforms to reach out to target audiences.

Said Mr Hughes: “Where we’ve done this in London and North America, we’ve seen a huge improvement in the quality of the thinking we’ve done for clients.

“The area of real-time marketing is where we’re seeing the biggest kind of impact. By that I mean the ability to look at what’s happening both in the mainstream and print and broadcast media and what’s happening in the social space.

“Because the two now cross so quickly, we can see what’s trending in one side or the other and see how we can put a brand, comment or maybe a particular promotion or something that is relevant, directly into that conversation.”

And the real-time marketing possibilities don’t just end there. Discount websites like Groupon and location-based services mean it’s possible to offer customers discounts on an item at a particular location – based on a conversation that’s trending online. It isn’t as far-fetched as it may sound.

Many retail companies already have computerised databases, which would make it possible to re-price items relatively easily.

Supply chain: ERP

Over the past decade, technology has transformed the broader world of business and consumer applications. Workers interact through mobile devices and social media, with applications increasingly connected over the web. But many ERP deployments remain static in spite of these changes.

According to research by Forrester, “approximately half of ERP customers are currently on releases that are two versions behind the current release, which may be four years old or more.” It’s hard to believe that an outdated, five-year-old ERP system can be relevant to a business in the modern world in which last year’s smartphone is passé and a business like Groupon can grow from a start-up to $700 million-plus in revenue in just a few years.

Today’s speed of change places stresses on business process. Worker expectations have changed on how they want to engage with business systems, and customers have changed how they want to engage with businesses. Running an ERP system that is only upgraded every four or five years (at best) is simply not sufficient to take advantage of change and maintain competitiveness with your peers, especially in an uncertain and volatile market. Business and technology are now moving so quickly that even if you do invest six months and 500k in an ERP upgrade, the end result will likely be out of date by the time it’s completed. Worse still, old ERP systems are fundamentally incompatible with the way companies need to be structured for success today.

The key to knowing how aligned your ERP systems are with your business imperatives is measuring how much of the IT budget is devoted to innovation rather than maintenance. Analysts from Forrester to Gartner measure this closely, and have found maintenance spend ranges from 50 per cent to more than 90 per cent of a typical IT budget.

Simply changing the equation and reallocating the IT budget from maintenance to innovation is almost impossible with old, on-premise ERP because every costly upgrade, patch and fix equals money and time that isn’t spent on tailoring ERP to meet the needs of the business.

New regulatory changes are increasingly common today, whether for data protection, financial regulation or information security. Out-of-date ERP systems struggle to cope with these changes, typically requiring time-consuming patches or additional manual processes.

The web enables business to go global instantly—reaching many millions of customers in a year or two, whereas it used to take a decade or more to make that type of progress.

Groupon stands as an example of the kind of disruption that the internet enables. Labelled the ‘fastest-growing company in history’, it grew to revenues of $700 million-plus in 2010 from $30 million in 2009—a stunning growth rate of 2,241 per cent. This would have been unthinkable just five years ago. Furthermore, with the dramatic growth in emerging markets, businesses are looking to quickly tap opportunities in the space of months, not years— before their competitors get there. Outdated ERP, unable to react to and take advantage of change, restricts the agility that is crucial in our increasingly online world.

According to Forrester, up to 50 per cent of businesses will increase the number of mobile applications available to employees, customers or partners as part of their upcoming IT priorities. Our computing time is spread across any number of devices and platforms—an iPhone or Android device in the morning, a PC and tablet in the daytime and maybe a MacBook in the evening. We’ve transitioned to what Steve Jobs called the “post-PC era,” with powerful mobile devices offering anywhere, anytime web access.

Using outdated ERP means either completely giving up on accessing your information from anywhere outside of your office or enduring sluggish client-server experiences over virtual private networks (VPNs). It also means having no visibility into business operations when on the road, or having to drive into the office to approve a sales order. The result is that employees are simply less productive than they could be, and important business decisions cannot be made as efficiently.

Businesses as a whole are becoming more distributed. A June 2011 survey by McKinsey illustrates the trend: more than 50 per cent of companies anticipate a rise in part-time and temporary workers, 25 per cent a rise in telecommuting and more than 20 per cent expect growth in offshoring and outsourcing.

Old ERP forces you into an expensive centralised structure, unless you can afford to dispatch IT teams to every corner of the globe. It means maintaining desktops at multiple locations, upgrading clients and dealing with information fragmentation across local clients.

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