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The Real-Time Revloution - David Meerman Scott (Bestselling Author, Strategist)

David Meerman Scott is an internationally acclaimed strategist, speaker, and bestselling author. David’s ideas on social media are popular around the world and in his Paper Napkin wisdom, he shares a few of the ways business can and should use social media to their advantage. David’s Paper Napkin visually represents the way a news story of any size breaks in the marketplace. If you understand the cycle of a story arc, he says, you can use it to your advantage. A news story usually starts to break on social networking sights before it’s picked up by mainstream media. Generally it follows a sort of bell shaped curve where the news, over time, grows in interest as the number of people talking about it and sharing it rise until it’s no longer news and the story begins to wane. If you know how that arc works and you pay attention, says David, you can “newsjack”. “Newsjacking,” says David “is the art and science of injecting your ideas into a breaking news story.” Through employing this method, you can garner attention from media outlets and/or increase your ranking in search results for that particular topic. This free publicity spreads public awareness of your company and can increase your revenue through a larger presence in the market. Every day, David goes to Google News and looks to see what the breaking news stories are and thinks about how he might be able to use them. He also monitors Twitter as you can frequently find out about something happening on Twitter faster than you can on mainstream media. Generally with newsjacking, David says, you fail more than you succeed. He equates it to working as a Venture Capitalist. You might succeed dramatically, you may have minimal success, or nothing may happen. That’s just the nature of it. However, with such a low cost and high potential gain, it’s entirely worth the endeavor. Newsjacking is part of trying to act in real time. This doesn’t necessarily mean keeping your ear to the ground 24/7, but it does mean you have to be conscious about what’s going on in the world. Real time mindset is a valuable key in business that David believes is being neglected. Most business and MBA business types are taught to proceed cautiously, but in a world of such quick communication and information spread, it’s important to be able to move quickly to be able to do things like newsjacking. To do that, you need to have a culture in your organization that factors in speed when it comes to creating content in real time. The world is now capable of communicating instantly but few businesses are developing a real time mindset approach to take advantage of that social perspective. David says that we are living in the midst of the biggest communication revelation in human history. He thinks it started in 1995 when Netscape went public. “I believe this revolution is even more important than the invention of the printing press,” he says. [Tweet "I believe this revolution is even more important than the invention of the printing press."] With the availability of internet accessibility and technology we find ourselves in a world with more mobile phones than people; there are mobile phones in places without running water. The ability to communicate quickly and widely means that businesses have to be prepared to work in real time. The company that triumphs will soon be the company that both meets the customers’ needs and reacts the most quickly. David has seen this philosophy do huge things for businesses that embrace it, what might it do for your company? Listen to the conversation with David here:

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About Me

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I help people feel empowered so that they feel and act with resilience in the face of challenges.

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This can give people the confidence and clarity they need to see their way through something they thought was impossible. 

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