Digital Insight: Five Elements for Real-Time Engagement

By Gina Gretchko, Annie Elzey, Nick Lucido and Bill Mrazek Senior Account Supervisor, Account Supervisor, Senior Account Executive and Assistant Account Executive, Chicago

Real-time engagement efforts are at an all-time high for brands. While it’s difficult to predict the unpredictable or prepare for the unknown, there are many strategies brand teams can utilize to best adapt to changes in social media.

These five considerations will help organize a brand for real-time engagement:

1. Compatibility Between the Opportunity & Brand Objectives
   Evaluate the event or trend in the context of your brand. Can the brand add value to the conversation or offer a unique position? Does the opportunity fit within the brand’s content and engagement strategy? Just because the topic is generating a lot of buzz doesn’t mean it’s relevant to your brand’s audience or warrants involvement on behalf of a brand.
   
   
2. Building the Real-Time Engagement ”Dream Team”
   Pick your players wisely. Day-of, your real-time team should reflect back to your objectives for the program, ensuring every player has a deliberate purpose. Take account of the resources needed to achieve your desired results, and consider various scenarios that could come into play. Carefully arrange the right team of disciplines – from strategy and creative, to legal and brand representatives, to community management – and confirm how much support is required from each. Then, work to ensure the assigned players have a clear picture of expectations and their roles, understanding how each might affect one another. At the end of the day, an integrated approach will avoid missteps in execution and be critical to your success.
   
   
3. Planning with Fluidity
   Eighty percent of the work should be done before the moment takes place. This includes identifying the value your brand can bring to the conversation and how to deliver that value with content. It is possible to produce skeleton creative templates, such as an image that can be quickly manipulated for real-time publishing. The team must be able to adjust pre-planned content to adapt to unforeseen situations, audience reactions and emerging trends. For example, if a Twitter hashtag emerges, a brand team should consider how it fits within the conversation, while adding value. On the contrary, efforts can quickly decline in quality when brands try to force relevance. Successful real-time engagement relies on planning and instinct. In both cases, processes should be put in place to allow for double-checking of plans and instincts before moving forward.
   
   
4. Persistent Measurement
   It’s essential to consider ways to measure your efforts from the get-go. After setting objectives and goals for the activation, consider what the key performance indicators look like. Determining this framework and ensuring you have the people and platforms necessary to obtain this data will help your analysts pull the proper figures in real time. After the activation is complete, consider developing a recap report that includes benchmarks for future activations to help more accurately determine success.
   
   
5. Transparency & Stakeholder Communication
   It goes without saying that brand teams need to constantly communicate changes in strategy and newly discovered opportunities, but it’s crucial to take that a step further and maintain communication with all stakeholders involved (partner agencies, client contacts, brand influencers, etc.). Maintaining communication and transparency throughout activations will ensure a consistent brand voice and messaging, not to mention allows everyone involved to make adjustments when a tactical audible is called.  

These steps will help a brand prepare for real-time engagement opportunities and unearth any unforeseen weaknesses or opportunities.