As previously mentioned, I am at DMA:2011 in Boston with David Meerman Scott and he was the featured guest at our executive dinner this evening.  We invited marketing executives attending this conference to have dinner with the best-selling author, who will also present in the Thought Leadership Series tomorrow at 1:45pm.

Our guests included marketers from the US, Canada and Europe and from a range of industries.  Each brought unique perspectives from their industry that made for very interesting discussions.  One agency executive with a large automotive manufacturer client explained how large an impact the dealership network has on establishing (or unraveling) long-term customer relationships.  Another great interchange was sparked by the comments of a credit company executive raising issues about airline affinity programs and issues with customer relevancy.  I very much enjoyed the interaction among our guests, as well as the way that David facilitated the discussion by adding his own perspectives.

He incorporated parts of his latest best-seller Real-TimeMarketing and PR in ways that kept the discussion focused on the overall real-time marketing theme of DMA this year.  Interesting tidbits he included from his book include:

• Seven times more sales can be driven by responding to website inquiries in 5 minutes versus 24 hours.

• Of 100 leading companies he analyzed, only 28% were engaged in real-time marketing.  The stock price of those companies went up an average of 3% in the last year versus all other companies, whose stock price declined 2%.

When asked about his thoughts about prospects in the coming year, he replied that he’s never seen a better opportunity than right now for smart marketers.  Those that understand we’re in a real-time, data-driven world are the ones that will succeed.  When asked what advice he’d offer to companies who are looking to adopt a real-time approach to their marketing, David offered two tips:

1. Take more steps to understand what people are saying about you and respond to them immediately.
2. Make your website real-time friendly – understand what’s happening on your pages and have real-time triggers to events.

It should come as no surprise that in both his views on prospects for the coming year and his advice for marketers, my mind immediately made the connection to the role played by social media analytics, customer experience analytics and real-time decisioning solutions in enabling marketers to understand, predict and respond to rapid developments online and in social media.

One thing I think we can all agree on – real time marketing is a mindset that needs to be encouraged because our markets are now happening in real-time, and customer analytics will enable the operationalization of  real-time marketing for the enterprise.

It’s an exciting time to be a marketer, indeed.