I’m taking the time to write this blog post up real quick because I know that an email I sent this morning to one of our advisors about an urgent matter has been opened and read. A great service called BananaTag emailed me to tell me he opened it on his iPhone. Now I know he knows about the question I’m asking for help with and I can go do something else until he responds. (Thank you, Marshall, you rock!)

I love knowing when people open my emails. Thanks to Blake Robinson, who’s taught me about many things over the years, and who turned me on to BananaTag. I saw over his shoulder, by the way, that BananaTag data indicates Blake has an incredible email open rate. And he’s a cool guy, too.

This weekend Hubspot’s new app Signals told me, in real-time, about two key people visiting our website at Little Bird. Everybody knows that the best time to connect with someone is as close as possible to when they express interest – I think you can carry that out all the way to real time. I got great responses from both people I reached out to this way and I made a little podcast about one of them.

I’ve been paying attention to real-time technology for years, usually as a way to track news sources to report before anyone else. That’s how I got the job as the first hired writer at TechCrunch, I used an RSS to SMS alert system to get notifications in real time when a key vendor made an announcement on their blog. I was able to write it up before any of the other blogs and one day Michael Arrington called me up, saying “I don’t know how you do it, but you keep beating me to stories. I want you to come write for me at TechCrunch.” That was just one of many ways I used real time technology to build my career as a journalist. And now here I am. In a different stage of my career and exploring how to use emerging real-time tech for sales and marketing. Pretty exciting!

Hunter Walk says that you shouldn’t blog to show how smart you are, you should blog to convene a group of smart readers to discuss challenges together. So please, smart readers, share with us any thoughts, ideas or experiences you’ve got with real-time technology impacting the way you do business.