(…) HP (…) recently ran a campaign with more than 20,000 ad permutations. To do this, said Catherine Paschkewitz, director of demand generation, HP Direct, “you need to take the time to think of your testing framework and the different things you want to test. It’s having an up-front process as you’re launching and refreshing campaigns.” (…)

Another challenge for brands is that consumers now expect instant gratification when it comes to customer service, which is why marketers like Apple, Bank of America and Overstock.com now provide live customer service on their sites. Kevin Kohn, evp of marketing at LivePerson, which worked with BoA and Overstock, said this is nearly a requirement in a real-time world. (..)

Consumers also expect marketers to respond quickly no matter the issue. Take the now infamous Domino’s saga. In April, Consumerist pointed to a video of two employees doing gross things to the food. Within a day, Twitter was alive with demands that Domino’s address the matter. (…)

For corporations, this requires new strategies. It means, for instance, bypassing the normal layers of sign-off to get information out to quell customer revolts, Jacobs said. (…)

via Real Time: The Web’s New Prime Time.

What it means: as I wrote in my “I have seen the future of local media” blog post, we now clearly understand the format users are expecting when looking at real-time content/feeds but we’re just starting to see what impacts it will have on businesses. The fact that Facebook and Twitter have both struggled at monetizing their feeds is an example of how early we are in terms of feed business models. I will address this in details in future blog post.