In mid-2019, I was flying on the American Airlines shuttle from Boston to New York. Soon after takeoff, we hit a flock of geese.

The pilot declared an emergency, and we landed 11 minutes later back at Boston Logan airport. As soon as I deplaned, I shot from the terminal window a photo showing blood and feathers on the nose and windscreen of the plane. Then I posted it on my Twitter¹ and Instagram feeds: “A first for me in something like 4 million air miles. We hit a goose on takeoff and the skilled @americanair pilots brought us back for an emergency landing.”

About 30 minutes later, American Airlines tweeted back to me: “We have some of the best captains in the business! Thanks for hanging in there with us today.”

While I was pleased to see American Airlines get back to me in real time, I never imagined that my photo would soon become famous.

I’ve learned that the news media continually tracks air traffic control chatter. When our pilot declared an emergency, news editors around the world instantly knew something was happening. The word “emergency” gets their attention. Instantly, reporters began scrambling for information, anything that could help tell the story.

Because my tweet used the word “emergency” and I tagged American Airlines, a real-time search let members of the media know we had landed safely. My tweet also provided a photo of the plane with blood and feathers on it, ready for news outlets to publish.

Throughout the day, I received requests to use the photo from CBS-TV, NBC-TV, ABC-TV, WBZ-TV, WPIX, Boston25, The Weather Channel, USA Today, the New York Post, and others. And after eventually landing in New York, I did a television interview for ABC-TV that aired on World News Tonight, the U.S. network’s national evening news.

Fortunately, our air emergency was handled skillfully by the American Airlines pilots. Nobody was injured—except the poor geese, who never had a chance.

When we landed back at Logan Airport, American Airlines readied another airplane, transferred our bags, and re-boarded us. The ground staff did a fabulous job getting us moving again with minimal delay.

As the adrenaline of the emergency wore off, I reflected, as I often do, about the power of instant communication. Think about it: The pilots instantly got the support they needed to make an emergency landing, news editors were notified of the emergency as it happened and connected with resources for reporting it, and yours truly happened into a chance to appear on national network television and in national newspapers. Friends and clients around the world saw that, and it grew my reputation as somebody who knows how to get noticed online. That marketers can tap into this power represents an incredible opportunity to grow your business.

Real-Time Marketing and PR

In a world where speed and agility are now essential to success, most organizations still operate slowly and deliberately, cementing each step months in advance and responding to new developments through careful but time-consuming processes. Most companies cannot respond quickly to an opportunity because they are operating under the old rules of controlled engagement planned well in advance. But the Internet has fundamentally changed the pace of business, compressing time and rewarding speed.

Real time means that news breaks over minutes, not days. It’s when people watch what’s happening on social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube and cleverly insert themselves into stories. Real-time urgency is also important in customer service, where organizations fix issues instantly rather than taking the typical days or weeks to respond to a complaint. Real time means companies develop (or refine) products or services instantly, based on feedback from customers or events in the marketplace. In all aspects of business, anyone who sees an opportunity and becomes the first to act on it gains tremendous advantage.

The idea of real time—of creating marketing or public relations initiatives as well as responding to customers right now, while the moment is ripe—delivers tremendous competitive advantage. You’ve got to operate quickly to succeed in this world. These ideas are the subject of my book, Real-Time Marketing & PR: How to Instantly Engage Your Market, Connect with Customers, and Create Products That Grow Your Business Now. This chapter highlights some of the tactics that you can use to instantly engage your buyers when they are eager to hear from you. If you’ve read Real-Time Marketing & PR, you might want to read on anyway because the stories here are not in that book.

My first job was on a Wall Street trading desk in the 1980s. I witnessed real-time technology transforming financial trading into a game where instant information informs split-second decisions worth millions of dollars.

Traders desperately search their real-time newsfeeds and analysis tools for an angle, any angle. Who’s the president meeting with today? Is there any disruption in the energy markets, perhaps because of unrest in the Middle East? What’s happening in Japan? Germany? The United Kingdom? As they pore through data and news, the traders are poised, ready to commit huge sums of money when the moment is right.

It has taken decades, but the impact of the real-time revolution is now being felt in all industries, including marketing and public relations.

We can react instantly to what’s happening in the news, just like a bond trader. We can engage members of the media on their timetables, precisely when they are writing stories. But we’ve got to develop a business culture that encourages speed over sloth. The MBA-style approach of working from spreadsheets that predict what to do months into the future is no help when news is breaking in your industry right now.

As financial market players know, advantage comes from being the first to react to market opportunities. The same thing is true for all companies. If you’re first to engage the market, people notice, and your offering gains valuable attention. If you react early and connect with customers as their concerns arise, they see you as thoughtful and caring. And the mainstream media are always looking to cover the latest trend or fast-moving company, so you’re likely to get much more coverage if you operate in real time.

John Green Thumps Tom Cruise

Tom Cruise was everywhere on television the first week of June 2014. He was promoting his new megabudget sci-fi spectacular, Edge of Tomorrow. Cruise deployed the tried-and-true method in which the film’s star goes on the entertainment television shows and late-night talk shows.

Cruise used old marketing and PR techniques to promote his big-budget film.

Meanwhile, The Fault in Our Stars was released that same weekend.

John Green, the author of the New York Times bestseller of same name, rallied his fans to become #TFIOS brand ambassadors. These #FaultFanatics talked up the film on social networks in a big way. They drove the small-budget film to number one in the box office on opening weekend.

The Fault in Our Stars earned an estimated $58 million at the box office (against a film budget of $12 million), crushing Edge of Tomorrow, which generated about $29 million (a poor opening weekend against a $178 million budget).

John Green fans, who loved The Fault in Our Stars book, drove the real-time box office success. And it was thanks to Green’s dedicated online outreach.

Throughout the year leading up to the release, Green communicated to his fans as insiders, providing all sorts of details on the process of creating the film version. Whenever anything important happened in production, Green shared the news in real time.

Green had already sold the film rights and told fans that he had no financial incentive in ticket sales. He talked up the movie because he liked it. Through his Tumblr blog, Twitter account (@johngreen), video channel, and websites, Green made fans feel a part of the process.

“I think a big thing is John acted like us, the fans, rather than as a celebrity to promote the fandom involved in the movie,” my daughter Allison explained at the time of the release. “He encourages people to make art and music and responses to his book. Some of those he reblogs on Tumblr. He is very open in communicating with his fans like they are his equals, which fosters community.”

His video of the movie premiere is a great example of how Green brings fans along on the real-time ride. In the video you are with him as he arrives, walks the (not) red carpet, and mugs for photographers.

Rallying the fans works for any business. When your better-funded competitors are focused on traditional marketing and PR, why not bypass them and talk directly to your audience instead? Get in the moment and communicate instantly. Share what you’re up to as it happens, in real time. You can thump your competitors, too—even if they have a lot more money.

Develop Your Real-Time Mind-Set

When I speak with people about the ideas of real-time marketing and public relations, they understand that our access to today’s communications tools means we can communicate immediately. Twitter allows instant dialogue with buyers. Blog posts help you get your ideas into the marketplace right now. And monitoring tools like Google Alerts and TweetDeck provide up-to-the-second knowledge of what people are saying about you, your company, and its products. However, while people do generally understand the situation, many have difficulty adopting the personal and corporate mind-set and habits required for success. Too many individuals, and the organizations they work for, take the cautious and careful approach: Always wait and see, and always check with the experts before acting on an opportunity. Unfortunately, this typical behavior will lose you the advantage.

As an example of one organization that has developed the mind-set required for success, consider the GolinHarris approach of what the company calls “The Bridge”—a network of real-time storytelling centers staffed in the Americas, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. This Wall Street trading room approach is exactly what I’ve constantly talked about, and I’m excited to see it being implemented, so I connected with Jim Dowd, executive director of national media for GolinHarris International, a communications firm and part of the Interpublic Group, to learn more. “We use The Bridge as a listening outpost, but we are doing it a little differently because we have the mainstream media folks and the digital folks working side by side,” Dowd says. “So we are not just looking at social media, which is obviously the flavor of the day. Digital and mainstream are literally sitting next to each other and they are coming up with ideas and are pitching media together, and that is where we have seen just terrific traction.”

For example, on the day that then first lady Michelle Obama announced a new food pyramid called MyPlate, the GolinHarris team watched the press conference live on CNN looking for ways to get their clients into the emerging memes. “We are watching all the activity online and took an idea to Hartz to create a food pyramid for dogs,” Dowd says. The client loved the idea and reacted quickly, and the team generated some attention as a result.

With most clients working at a glacially slow pace, requiring lengthy legal and PR client-side reviews, I wondered how GolinHarris is able to get speedy sign-offs on ideas generated from The Bridge. “Yeah, approval is always tricky, particularly with legal departments,” Dowd says. GolinHarris works with clients to develop topics ahead of time in anticipation of potential stories so that they can work quickly. “With clients like McDonald’s we have general topics that we predict, like if something comes up about the Happy Meal. McDonald’s have preapproved that we can have certain conversations about Happy Meals with language we can go out with.”

The Bridge is set up just like a 24-hour Wall Street trading desk, with three regions—Asia, Europe, and North America—passing the work around the globe. “We are truly doing it globally,” Dowd says. “We are 24/7 so we will scour the landscape the first few hours of the day here in New York, then we will pass all of our results and insights on to Chicago and Chicago to L.A. And, you know, the whole notion of offices and cubes may go away. It’s exciting to be able to walk in The Bridge and literally see what is going on.”

When you have a real-time mind-set and the tools of a facility like The Bridge, then newsjacking becomes second nature. (Newsjacking is inserting your ideas into a breaking news story by writing a real-time blog post or shooting a video to interest reporters and generate coverage. I discuss newsjacking in detail in Chapter 21.) “Our client Autotrader.com challenged us to make them the leader in all of the post–Super Bowl auto commercial coverage,” Dowd says. Autotrader did not advertise during the Super Bowl but wanted to generate a bunch of attention anyway—a classic newsjacking strategy.

Autotrader’s analysts worked with GolinHarris to create data on consumers’ real-time search patterns during the Super Bowl. They used data from the Autotrader.com site and correlated that to the times auto commercials aired, looking for lift (how much of a boost in search activity each vehicle got in the hour after its ad appeared). They provided the resulting data to the media, who used it in stories like “Acura NSX Won Big with Super Bowl Spot, Survey Says,” which appeared on the Wall Street Journal site.

“There are lots of clients who love the notion of The Bridge and real-time marketing and what we are doing but aren’t jumping on it out of fear—fear of the unknown, fear of the new,” Dowd says. “A lot of our clients are still quite old school and traditional.”

There’s nothing like success to break down the fear barrier. Dowd cites Dow Chemical as a noteworthy GolinHarris real-time success. The company is very careful with stories related to such topics as chemistry or chemical engineering or stem cell research, but that doesn’t mean it can’t engage in real time.

“We were in The Bridge tracking that President Obama was going to give the Teacher of the Year Award and we were watching live on CNN,” Dowd says. “And it was a chemistry teacher who won that award so we immediately got approval from Dow Chemical to go ahead and offer up public congratulations to the teacher, and that resulted in some nice coverage. Even with the trickier clients there are always topics that will work.”

The real-time mind-set recognizes the importance of speed. It is an attitude to business (and to life) that emphasizes moving quickly when the time is right.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying you should focus only on the now and not plan for the future. Developing a real-time mind-set should not feel like an either-or proposition; you can and should do both.

Real-Time Blog Post Drives $1 Million in New Business

Imagine that you’re among the first to know that a huge company is about to acquire one of your competitors. What would you do right now?

Not tomorrow. Now!

How about writing a blog post about it in real time?

That’s what Eloqua CEO Joe Payne did when he learned that Oracle, a software giant, was to acquire the assets of marketing automation company and Eloqua competitor Market2Lead. A colleague mentioned the acquisition, and as soon as Payne confirmed the news on the Oracle website, he started working on his blog post.

The Oracle announcement,² which was located in a difficult-to-find part of the company’s website, contained only a terse one-paragraph announcement: Oracle has acquired the intellectual property assets of Market2Lead, a provider of demand generation and marketing automation software. Market2Lead’s technology helps companies improve demand generation to increase sales and marketing effectiveness. Oracle plans to integrate Market2Lead’s technology into Oracle CRM applications. The financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

Payne realized that there was a tremendous opportunity right now to write a blog post. He figured that if he hadn’t known about the acquisition, then others probably didn’t know, either. “The announcement was buried on the Oracle website,” he says. “No one else had found it yet.” Payne had a unique opportunity to define what the deal meant to the market.

In his post “Oracle Joins the Party,” Payne wrote, in part: I expect Oracle’s entry to make a major difference in the attention paid to this sector. It’s going to open marketers’ eyes, and, as a result, expand the market. This is exactly the type of movement this industry needs. You see, the potential market for lead management systems is less than 10 percent penetrated.

Payne chose to write a high-level blog post that talks about what the acquisition meant to the market for this kind of software. “We needed to give people information they could sink their teeth into,” he says. “And it was picked up very quickly by the media because of what I wrote. News organizations immediately wrote their own stories and blog posts, and they quoted my post as if they had done an interview with me.”

Can you see what Payne did? Oracle announces an acquisition but provides almost no details. The media are hungry for something to say and someone to quote. Bingo, a Google search pops up Payne’s post, and now reporters, analysts, and bloggers have an authority to cite in their stories.

As a result of this real-time market commentary, Eloqua became an important part of the resulting stories published in outlets that included Bloomberg Businessweek, InfoWorld, Customer Experience Matrix, PC World, and Customer Think.

But Payne and the Eloqua team didn’t stop there. The next step in this real-time outreach was to alert existing and potential Market2Lead clients to Payne’s blog post. “Eloqua salespeople who had lost a deal to Market2Lead immediately sent emails to each customer, linking to the blog post,” he says. “In many cases, we broke the news to those clients that their marketing automation company had been acquired. We outlined what the change would likely mean to them. That gave us credibility with the clients and hurt Oracle and Market2Lead, because they were not the first to describe to their buyers what the deal meant.”

The Eloqua sales team then offered a money-back guarantee to any Market2Lead customer who wanted to switch to Eloqua. “We wanted to take away the friction of moving,” Payne says. “The tone of the offer was designed to be helpful and informative, to let people know ‘We’re here, and we would love to have your business.’” And the guarantee meant that if customers were unhappy with the switch, Eloqua would give them their money back.

Eloqua salespeople began hearing back right away. “Market2Lead clients responded by email and said things like, ‘We didn’t know this—thank you very much’ and ‘Hey, we should talk.’” Soon these Market2Lead clients were engaged in discussions about moving their business over to Eloqua.

Payne says that within two weeks, Eloqua closed a deal with software company Red Hat that was worth more than $500,000 over two years. It also closed with TRUSTe, a major Internet privacy services company. The half dozen new Eloqua customers gained from this real-time communications effort combined to generate just under $1 million in business—all business directly related to Payne’s real-time blog post. “There are other intangible benefits you can’t put a price on as a real-time marketer,” he says. “We got tremendous credibility in our industry for being a trusted source of news and information. People like that we are straight shooters.”

Because Payne’s post and the resulting media stories are all indexed by Google and the other search engines, people looking for information about the transaction even months later still found Eloqua in the thick of the discussion. If you’re an analyst combing the marketing automation industry, or if you are evaluating marketing automation platforms, Eloqua moves to the head of the pack.

I’m constantly amazed at what a real-time blog post can do. In this case, it generated a million dollars’ worth of new business! When everyone else is pitching the media using traditional methods, why not frame the discussion happening right now with your own well-placed commentary on the news?

There’s an interesting footnote to this real-time story. Soon after, Oracle acquired Eloqua in a transaction worth $871 million. Based on the market valuation of the company and annual revenue, that one blog post was worth an extra $10 million to the sale price. Not bad for one real-time blog post.

The Time Is Now

As you develop your own real-time mind-set, be on the lookout for ways to engage your marketplace when the time is right. There are many ways to communicate instantly, and the tools and strategies will be different for each situation. Let’s take a look at some of the ways you can engage in real time.

Snapchat for Business

Live-streaming and short-form video applications for smartphones have become exciting new ways to share interesting aspects of life and business and gain new followers and customers as a result. The most popular applications include Instagram video, Twitter video, Snapchat Stories, and Facebook Live. You’ll learn more about Facebook Live in Chapter 17.

These applications are used to share with the world what you’re seeing right at this moment, so others can experience it with you in real time (in the case of the streaming apps) or nearly real time (in the case of short-form video). These apps can turn anyone into a citizen journalist. And for marketers, they open up the possibility of sharing all kinds of information that can serve as marketing content. A live operation at a hospital, a tour of a home for sale, a peek backstage at a rock concert, a coach’s pep talk before the big game, or a product design meeting at company headquarters all become shareable in an exciting and intimate way.

Snapchat has exploded in popularity since its launch, surpassing 150 million daily active users. The company went public in March 2017 with a $30 billion valuation. This free iOS and Android mobile app can send video, images, and texts between friends. The Snapchat app offers similar features to Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, but with a twist: The messages disappear immediately after viewing. Snapchat is a way to chat with people without creating any lasting evidence of the discussion. The Snapchat logo is a ghost because it is ephemeral—now you see it, now you don’t.

While the basic Snapchat service is interesting as a real-time communications tool, it doesn’t work for marketing and PR because of its one-to-one limitation. However, Snapchat Stories has emerged as a fascinating way to communicate with a market in real time. Snapchat Stories allow you to string video Snaps together to create a narrative, which becomes available either to your choice of Snapchat friends, to a customized group, or to all Snapchatters. The Snaps can be built around photos or short videos. You can choose from a variety of filters to modify the photos, and you can add text or draw in several colors as well.

When you add a Snap to your Story, it “lives” for 24 hours before it disappears, making room for new content. Your ongoing Snapchat Story displays these moments in the order you experienced and shared them, so it essentially becomes your personal feed of things that have happened to you in the past day. You can continually add to your Story, creating a rolling update in which older Snaps disappear after the 24-hour limit is reached. Or you can simply create one-off Stories for special occasions.

Because Snapchat Stories disappear after a day, there is much more of a real-time feel to the service. With video sharing on other services, your videos live on. That means there’s no incentive for people to view them right away. Snapchat Stories hark back to the old days of television before VCRs and DVRs. If you didn’t watch live, you’d never be able to see the show.

Rebecca Korn is a financial advisor and business strategist with Northwestern Mutual who uses Snapchat to generate new business. On Snapchat she’s @Brkorn and goes by the wonderful handle Financial Fashionista. “When I first got started on social networks, I used ‘Financial Fashionista’ because I wanted to hide behind something just in case I totally messed it up,” she says. “But inadvertently I created this personality for people to identify with, and it made finances less intimidating.”

Korn makes a point of asking her clients’ kids what the popular social networks are and then she gives them a try. That’s how she got started with Instagram and Snapchat several years ago. “For a while I just couldn’t figure out how to use Snapchat specifically for business because I could see a lot of my friends posting things like pictures of their kids,” she says. “But then I started using it to show people that being a financial advisor is not sitting in an office all day and going home at 3 p.m. and that’s it. Some nights, I stay here until 10 or 11 at night. I’ve been here on Saturdays, and my clients follow me on Snapchat and they say, ‘Oh my gosh, I had no idea how much dedication it takes to be a financial advisor.’”

Besides showing the behind-the-scenes reality of how a financial advisor works, she also shares valuable information that people can use. “I use little tidbits like ‘the three top reasons when you should speak to a financial advisor’ and create a Story around that. People’s attention spans are very short these days, and I find that creating a short little Story generates interest. Social networking is all about value. I can teach you how to read a financial statement so you can learn about rates of return and what that actually means for you over the next 30 years of investing. If you watch my Snap Story, I revisit that often. It provides extra value. And even if you’re not my client, I want to make sure you’re okay.”

Korn says that she never actually sells from Snapchat. Rather, people who watch her Story sometimes ask her a private question. She always replies, and that sometimes leads to them asking about her services. “I just give them my phone number and we go from there,” she says. “One of those was someone I would call an elephant, because he had about $1.5 million in assets that he brought to me after we met on Snapchat, so that’s pretty huge. I have clients who are business owners and physicians that also came through Snapchat, which is very surprising. I think that people underestimate Snapchat because they think it’s all millennials, but the median age that I’m experiencing is about 42. They have families and many are on Snapchat because of business.”

Crowdsourced Support

I followed with interest the terrible flooding situation in and around Brisbane in Queensland, Australia, several years ago. And I also followed the remarkable story of Baked Relief, a crowdsourced support group that emerged to help those affected.

Baked Relief is a movement of thousands of people who bake and cook. They provided home-prepared food to people directly affected by the floods, as well as to volunteers, emergency workers, and the military. The Baked Relief movement was started by Danielle Crismani. “I was just watching the stuff on the news,” she says. “I thought, ‘Oh gosh, all these people are sandbagging. I wonder what I could do.’ I can’t go and sandbag, but I wasn’t going to sit around.” So she tweeted to tell her followers that she was about to take cupcakes to the volunteer sandbaggers working near her home.

The next day, she used the #bakedrelief hashtag on Twitter and was surprised that many others started to use it as well, building on her idea of helping those affected by offering their own support to the volunteers and emergency workers. A real-time movement began, which Crismani then poured all of her energy into. “I got onto Twitter and said, ‘Hey, if you’re stuck at home and you can’t go to work, how about you bake for the SES [State Emergency Service] and take some stuff down to the people that are sandbagging?’ Then I got on Facebook and did the same thing,” she says.

Several days later, #bakedrelief was so popular that it was the second-highest-trending hashtag (the second most popular topic discussed at the time on Twitter) in Australia, with #qldfloods (the hashtag used for general information about the floods) in the number one spot.

Things happened quickly, and it soon became apparent that matching thousands of people who were willing to help with those who needed it was too difficult to manage on Twitter alone. “There were a lot of people who wanted to get more involved,” Crismani says. “We needed a base to be able to record lots of information every day. So instead of people constantly contacting us through Twitter asking, ‘Where do I take my three batches of biscuits?’ we needed somewhere to link to and say, ‘For this morning, this is where the food needs to go. Come back at midday, and we’ll update the blog and this is where the food will need to go then.’”

Once the need was identified, a bakedrelief.org site was developed extremely quickly using a WordPress platform. “Kay, one of the women who worked very closely with us, just did the site up. She called me and said, ‘I’ve got a surprise for you. Have a look in your inbox.’ When I got to my inbox, there was the link to the bakedrelief.org [site]. She said it took her like 45 minutes to do it up. We made a few changes over time and added a few things, but we needed something simple.” I love that the site was made so quickly. Most people, when considering a new website, imagine months of work, but this took just 45 minutes. The site provides details for those willing to volunteer and those in need. It also accepts cash donations from people (like me) who are far away from the devastation and cannot donate food.

Crismani launched an “.org” site to communicate quickly in this time of crisis. When important news affecting your organization breaks fast, sometimes the best way to connect with customers and the media is to quickly build a new website in real time. An “.org” domain name is an excellent option in this case because it has an inherent reputation of trust, integrity, and credibility.

The key with bakedrelief.org was to get the new site up very quickly, right at the time when people were eager to locate credible information on the breaking issue.

Many people blogged and tweeted to spread the word, and soon Australia’s national mainstream media picked up on the movement. Even people outside the area jumped in to help, with some driving for hours to deliver food. One group, Funky Pies, drove up from Sydney (about 1,000 kilometers, a 12-hour drive) to deliver their pies to volunteers, people working at Queensland Police, and an evacuation center.

During this period of time, Crismani was working 20 hours per day on Baked Relief. “I was going to sleep for four hours or so and then waking up and doing it all over again every day,” she says. “I hadn’t properly eaten with a knife and fork for two weeks.”

The Australian government got involved in the movement when Deputy Prime Minister and Federal Treasurer Wayne Swan started talking up Baked Relief. “There was bakedrelief.org on the homepage of his website,” Crismani says. “You’d click on it, and it’d give you all the information. And whenever you’d call his office, they would answer the phone with ‘Hi, you’ve reached the office of Treasurer Wayne Swan. If you’re phoning about Baked Relief . . .’ We had a big laugh. He called me up, and he said, ‘How do you like the treasurer working for you?’ That was funny.”

Soon after, Anna Bligh, the premier of Queensland, used Twitter (her Twitter ID is @theqldpremier) to set up a meeting with Crismani to discuss community recovery and assistance for families of those affected. “The premier wanted me to meet with her team to tell them my ideas,” Crismani says. “That meeting happened with the head of the Department of Communities and the premier’s director-general, and the concerns of the residents of the Lockyer Valley and in the cyclone areas of Far North Queensland were expressed by me during that meeting. All coordinated via Twitter!”

One person with an Internet connection and a Twitter feed started a movement by communicating in real time. Her efforts helped thousands and were recognized at the national level in Australia. That’s power that you have, too. “You can motivate other people; your reach is far broader than you think,” Crismani says. “I think it is pretty amazing, and I’m really proud of what’s happened. It has taught me the power of social media. I will not be so blasé about it all now!”

This story is a great example of the power of real-time crowdsourcing using social media. No traditional advertising, media relations, or marketing techniques were used. The entire effort was crowdsourced in real time.

Crowdsourcing involves taking a task usually performed by one person or a few people and distributing it among a crowd of people—outsourcing it to a crowd—via online social networks and in real time. There are many ways that organizations are tapping the crowd to perform tasks more quickly or cheaply than by using traditional techniques. During live broadcasts, programs like American Idol and Britain’s Got Talent get audiences to evaluate performers by calling a special phone number or texting their votes. The best example of an enormous crowdsourced project is Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that anybody can add to or edit.

Or consider the revolution in Egypt that toppled the Mubarak regime in 2011 after 30 years in power. The protest movement was crowdsourced using a Facebook page called “Kullena Khaled Said”—initially administered anonymously by Wael Ghonim, a Dubai-based Egyptian citizen—to organize people and direct them to the places where demonstrations were to take place. “Kullena Khaled Said” eventually grew to 2.6 million likes, and posts on the page during the early 2011 protests routinely had a million views and thousands of comments. Ghonim’s fascinating 2012 memoir Revolution 2.0: The Power of the People Is Greater Than the People in Power: A Memoir is well worth checking out if you’re interested in learning more about the role of Facebook in the Egyptian revolution. Ghonim, who at the time was employed by Google, was eventually arrested and spent more than a week in prison. His book reads like a spy novel as he describes the ways he hid his identity and had people help him with the Facebook page even when he was unable to administer it.

Just think—if crowdsourcing is powerful enough to bring together tens of thousands of people to help during a natural disaster or even force a government out of power, it has tremendous potential for any business.

Real-time marketing and public relations deliver a decisive competitive advantage to those organizations that engage quickly. It doesn’t matter what business you’re in; these ideas can work for you, too.