As you can imagine, we’re working hard to firm up the final details of the program for our October 14th Realtime Marketing Lab. (Haven’t registered yet? You can save 20% off your ticket with promo code RLTMtr!)
Today I got confirmation from our closing speaker, Betabrand CEO Chris Lindland, for the title and description of the talk he plans to give–and realized that it will truly be the perfect way to end the day.
The goal of the Realtime Marketing Lab event is to let marketers and communications professionals get hands-on experience with the latest realtime marketing tools and strategies. Realtime marketing is still a young discipline. The technologies are just now beginning to be mature enough to enable marketers to scale from realtime marketing campaigns to building ongoing realtime marketing strategies. Most brands are just beginning to think about the realtime business use cases that make the most sense for them.
Realtime Marketing Lab is designed to help you with all of that: you’ll be able to test-drive technologies for yourself, see how leading brands approach the tools, and hear case studies on different aspects of realtime marketing–everything you need to craft and implement the realtime marketing strategies that make the most sense for you and your clients.
But at the end of the day, Chris will challenge all of us to take our thinking beyond all of that. You see, Betabrand doesn’t just do realtime marketing.
Betabrand is a realtime brand.
What? Consider this:
- You might call them a clothing company. But on Betabrand’s YouTube page the company refers to itself as “an online clothing laboratory.”
- The company designs, manufactures, and releases new inventions every week. Yes: EVERY WEEK.
- Betabrand is a clothing retailer, but it has raised funding from firms that typically invest in tech start-ups.
- In 2010 (the year it was launched), the company launched its Model Citizen campaign, designed to encourage its customers to send in photos of themselves in Betabrand garb. Today, more than 10,000 user-generated pictures have turned “ordinary folks” into “instant fashion superstars” — and created enormous word-of-mouth and user engagement from hipster types who hate being marketed to.
- It open sources its product development, asking customers to participate in its Disco Open Source Project and organizes Brand Hackathons to crowdsource new apps for its customes.
- And now there’s even a Betabrand Think Tank — which introduces a Kickstarter-type approach to developing new products based on how many customers are willing to “fund” them. Oh – and of course customers can submit product ideas of their own.
At Realtime Marketing Lab, Chris will deliver a session titled Beyond Realtime Marketing: Become A Realtime Brand. Instead of figuring out how to convert fans into fan-ambassadors or fan-advocates, he will tell us how to turn them into fan-designers. He’ll share the results from the latest brand hackathon that he’ll be hosting in Las Vegas the weekend before the event. He will push us to go beyond realtime marketing, and challenge us to figure out how we can start thinking like true realtime brands.
I just ordered my Disco Hoodie – will anyone else be wearing one to Realtime Marketing Lab on October 14th?
