Real Time Web and Marketing Automation

I am reposting graphic from earlier post but applying to marketing automation. Although quite generic and almost ancient history (2008), it surprisingly pertains I think. But Real Time Web is People-to-People and so is B2B marketing.

Traditional marketing automation concerns itself primarily with managing campaigns (landing pages, etc) and scoring, routing and nurturing marketing leads or, more generically, contacts. Making real time means:

• 1:1 marketing - letting customers find and communicate with marketers while actively engaged. And vice-versa.
• Meaningful bidirectional notifications - keep customers informed based on their interest and marketers informed of customer actions and, critically, relationships
• Viewing marketing and sales process as well as a series of events - behavioral events, conversion events, inquiries, transactions
• Searching lead and other internal marketing data for contact, lead, prospect and customer actions - or of those in their business network. On demand and continually. So while customers are googling you or more usually solutions to their problem or deals, marketers can be looking for them.
• Correlate events and data across prospect network to uncover hidden triggering events.

Real Time Web Architecture

Kind of an eye chart, but here is an architecture for real time web apps, a possible reference architecture.

Note the inclusion of CEP (like Apama, Streambase or Esker) and Data streaming (like Cometd) along with traditional web and mashup servers. I think that is where the future resides - being able to handle both client pulls (dynamic and static) as well as real time data feeds. Real time data feeds traditionally have been feeds (like securities prices) that are limited to certain markets but increasingly they are broader, mass market feeds - such as Feedburner, Facebook, Twitter and phone/sms - integrating both system-generated and human-generated messages.

Programming languages will be all over the map (from compiled C#, Java, etc) to open web scripting (Python, Javascript etc.) to messaging and proprietary optimized event processing languages like StreamSQL and Apama's monitor script.

Depending on feedback, I hope to describe these components in more detail in future posts and also keep this updated to reflect technology and market developments.