Marketers need to be “always on” nowadays. After all, if you abandon your community, they’ll likely abandon you. But they also won’t reward you just for showing up — especially when a fleeting viral phenomenon is at play.

When “The Dress” phenomenon took the media by storm, for example, many brands and news outlets sought to ride the tailwinds of the cultural zeitgeist with real-time content. Some of these attempts were drastically more effective than others.

BuzzFeed was timely in breaking the mega-viral dress debate on their blog and social media channels. The blog post below reaped 66.6K interactions, 11 times greater than BuzzFeed’s running average engagement per blog post.

As the data from the TrackMaven platform show, the lion’s share of distribution for this post came on Twitter, with over 64,000 shares.

BuzzFeed was equally successful in getting the story into market across their social media channels. The breaking Facebook post from BuzzFeed below reaped 11X their average engagement.

BuzzFeed even nicely melded the weeks’ two top trending topics (llamas + the dress!) into one clever, real-time tweet that racked in 14X their average Twitter engagement!

Mashable also successfully covered the story of “The Dress” through to its conclusion (including where to buy it and at what price)…

…while MTV blended in the power of celebrity-fueled content with this post, which reaped 24 times more engagement than their average blog post.

But for each of these real-time marketing successes, there are dozens of examples of brands that jumped on “The Dress” bandwagon and fell flat.

When Real-Time Marketing Goes Wrong…

All of the brands below tried to bend #TheDress fanfare to their brand’s value proposition. The resulting content, however, saw engagement far below the brand’s average.

While marketers are quick to dive headfirst into the latest cultural craze, many ultimately waste time, money, and resources creating content that fails to drive brand engagement.

As AdAge’s Jeanine Poggi notes, when it comes to viral sensations, “marketers just can’t help themselves,” but many should learn to practice some real-time marketing restraint:

“If there’s a TV event, major news story or pop culture phenomenon being discussed on social media, brands want in. In 2014 there were the usual tweets we’ve come to expect during events like the Super Bowl, Oscars and Grammys. Then there were some more unusual conversation starters. The hit podcast “Serial” got its fair share of brand tweets, marketers jumped on Apple’s iPhone announcement in the fall and some even toed the line during times of remembrance like Sept. 11 and Martin Luther King Day.

For the most part, these tweets either got lost in the flurry of conversation, bordered on insensitive or missed the mark altogether.”

So before you try to jump on the latest trend with a real-time marketing play, remember to stop and ask:

• Is this trend relevant to my brand, product offering, or overall mission?
• Is my point-of-view on the trend unique enough to cut through the noise?
• Does this content provide value to my target audience?

As our Director of Customer Success, Blaire Kotsikopoulos, noted in her explanation of the distinction between newsjacking and real-time marketing, “brands shouldn’t be clamoring for the next “black out moment” or the next royal birth.” Rather, “brands need to look for the “real” moments happening now that embrace their overall message for genuine human connection.”