Real-Time Mindset.

Today's Marketing Cookie is about being focused on NOW.

At a recent conference, David Meerman Scott said, "If you are spending all of your time looking at the past or planning for the future, what happens is, you forget about right now... and NOW is when things are happening. This instant." David is talking about a mindset. A real-time mindset is trained to identify "right now" opportunities and is fine-tuned for immediate activation.

When Mr. Scott said to look at the NOW, I don't believe he is reprimanding marketers who look at past performance to establish benchmarks, or scolding well-intentioned marketers who like to develop marketing plans. On the contrary, I believe he is asking marketers to be willing to ignore their plans and be ready to run, jump, and even pounce on opportunities before the competition has a chance to see them. I would suggest marketers with a real-time mindset, who get into a consistent practice of capitalizing on real-time opportunities, are likely to produce better results than what anyone might have predicted. When they experience this success, their next marketing plan could become perhaps nothing more than a set of keywords they plan to target and capture.

Can you imagine writing a marketing plan that consists only of keywords?

Our agency is a Certified Google Partner. This means we manage millions of dollars in AdWords for our clients, we're expert users of Google's wide range of tools and we have passed two grueling three-hour exams. These exams consist of hundreds of multiple-choice questions, where all four options are correct. We must read the question and select the answer that is the most true. As you can imagine, with the way the exam is designed, it is therefore ironically impossible and useless to try and use Google to cheat on Google's exam. They are so smart!

Anyway, I told you that, in order to tell you this...

In the first moments after Michael Jackson passed away, it was reported that there were twenty-seven thousand tweets per minute on Twitter and three and a half million posts per minute on Facebook. People were hunting for information about his death, but the mainstream media hadn't published anything yet. As a result, when people searched Google, they found plenty of high-quality sites about Michael Jackson and his music, but compared to social media, very little could be found through search about his death. So, people went to Facebook and Twitter where they could find the real-time information they wanted.

Many years ago, Google gave the top ranks to websites that were well optimized with META tags and other such tactics. As webmasters figured out how to game the system and optimize their way onto page one, Google then turned down the volume on META tags and began rewarding websites with the highest content volume. This ushered in a new era of content marketing, content generation, and excessive blogging.

If you had the basic optimization on your site, as well as the highest volume of content, you might find yourself on page one of Google. Rather than giving the top spot to keyword spammers, Google's adjustment rewarded websites for the hard work they were doing to generate more content than their competitors. In the minutes after Michael Jackson passed away, however, Google had so much emphasis on content volume, that social media became a much better source for real-time content.

It didn't take long for Google to add a new dimension to their search algorithm, which I call "content freshness". I'm sure by now you've seen dates next to most of the results that come up on Google. So, in addition to META tags and content volume, the metric Google has been using to determine rankings is the calculation of the recency of content.

Google's focus on NOW only accentuates the importance of having what David calls a "real-time mindset". When you see the results that a focus on NOW can deliver, it may even convince you to write your marketing plans based on the top keywords you plan to target. Or better yet, perhaps your plan will be to identify and capitalize on opportunities as they come along. If you adopt this mindset, you will see that future plans are usually based on the knowledge you have from yesterday. If you want to take your marketing beyond what you could have predicted, you must follow the advice of today's fortune, "Never mind tomorrow, TODAY is the day."