Many people are excited about “real time”. Technologists get excited by updates in real time, news in real time; marketers get excited about customer feedback in real time.
But what is real time?
I’d argue that when we think about real time, we should be thinking more holistically about how people form memories and brand perceptions. People’s memories are based on their aggregated experiences over time. We should not lose sight of this as we get excited about measuring feedback in seconds and nanoseconds. Real time can be measured in days, weeks and months. People form brand perceptions over time - over a period of weeks and months of product use.
We’re in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Responded quickly to customer feedback and adapting your offering is great, but let’s remember that sometimes people grow to love things. When I first heard In Rainbows by Radiohead I didn’t like it. Thankfully Radiohead didn’t re-write the album based on my initial feedback. It’s now in my top 10 favourite albums.
Feedback measured after months of product usage is real time too.
on Sep 16th, 2009 at 8:29 am
Very true, everything I read these days is sold as being “real time”. Half of the techcrunch50 apps this year offer “real time” something or other.
For some niche businesses real time is the only time. For example, our product Exceptional would be useless if it only gave aggregate information about “errors in recent months” - it has to be live. For some websites, their analytics have to be in real time too. A 6 hour delay is enough to miss the boat entirely.
Anything where the brand/company/person should respond rapid needs real time. However, as you said, making strategic decisions (e.g. “Lets change our pricing model”, or “that press release caused negative feedback, pull it”) based on 2 hours feedback is crazy.
on Oct 9th, 2009 at 9:47 pm
Completely agree Des. “Real time” and its other buzzword friend “social” are not new concepts. We’ve been social since humans figured out how to procreate and hunt together. And every second of every day, we all live our lives in real time. Real time has long existed in business too, technology is just catching up. Imagine a newsagent that didn’t operate in “real time”.