Real-Time Marketing & PR: How to Instantly Engage Your Market, Connect with Customers, and Create Products that Grow Your Business Now

Chapter 3. Laying Down Some Real-Time Law

Now that we find ourselves in a real-time revolution, businesspeople are feeling their way forward in search of new truths. The laws have changed. The road signs are gone. It's like trying to drive across America with a map made in 1950, before the Interstate system. On the ground you can hardly find a trace of Route 66!

That's what this book is about. It's an aid to navigation designed to take you into unmapped territory. It digs into how companies, nonprofits, government agencies, entrepreneurs, and even jobseekers can reach their goals by getting the first word in every conversation with customers and clients—responding to what they say as they say it.

Clearly, consumers understand that saving time is a key advantage of the Web. One quick Google search now delivers in seconds the research that used to take hours in a library. Where comparison shopping used to be local and required driving all over town, or thumbing through the Yellow Pages, today, it's global and instantaneous.

Note

The Internet has fundamentally changed the pace of business, compressing time and rewarding speed.

It is much harder to find evidence that business has grasped the gravity of this shift and adapted internal processes to the new pace. In fact, marketing, PR, communications, product development, and customer support now look much like 1950s cars on a modern expressway, crawling along the slow lane at speeds for which they were designed.

Let's resist the temptation ...