How AI turns social spikes into targeted campaigns, before trends fade

When I bring up using social trends to trigger CRM campaigns, I hear one of two things: "Is that even possible?" or "We've tried. We can't move fast enough."

A creator posts about a product. A meme takes off that aligns with your brand. A trend spikes. "Very demure, very mindful" sends modest workwear sales soaring. The Oasis reunion sends 14 million fans scrambling for 1.4 million tickets. The “Albanian Riviera” goes viral and tourism doubles overnight. Canvas tote bags go from grocery sacks to status symbols and sell out in minutes. Your catalog has exactly what people want. The demand is there for the taking, often for only a brief moment. But acting on it is slow or impossible for most CRM marketing teams. 

Social is where customer attention lives. But it sits outside the way CRM marketing works. Systems are built to organize known data and execute against predefined logic. They're not designed to capture what customers are responding to right now, or why their behavior is changing.

That makes relevant messaging harder. Social activity, emerging fashion, cultural shifts, new events influence customer behavior immediately. Long before they show up in your CRM. By the time they do, they've been flattened into historical attributes or lagging indicators. And without a way to connect live context to your first-party data, you can't connect a trend to the customers who care about it.

So the pattern repeats. Your team spots a trend, files a data request to check relevance, waits on SQL or a ticket to build the audience, then another 48 hours to brief creative. Within a week, you're ready. But the moment is gone, or at best, you show up too late to seem relevant.

Trends can emerge in hours. Campaigns move at the pace of planning cycles. Observing a trend is not enough if you cannot quickly answer:

• Is this moment relevant to our customers?
• Do we have a product or message that fits?
• Who actually cares?
• What should they see?

Most teams either miss the moment entirely or blast everyone with a generic message, hoping for the best. Noise, not relevance. 

Introducing Social Moments

Simon AI™ Social Moments enables timely, personalized marketing by detecting viral social media trends and cultural moments that matter to your customers. It pinpoints relevant trends, breaking news, weather, and local events, then automatically surfaces the customers most likely to be interested. 

How moment-driven activation works

Detect. Simon AI Moment Agents monitor social media signals for spikes that indicate emerging relevance, then match them against your customer data and product catalog. They evaluate how quickly engagement is accelerating to catch trends as they rise. When a signal crosses a threshold you set, the system generates an AI Moment, a structured trigger specifying what's happening and why it matters.

Identify and Assess. Affinity Agents take AI Moments and match them to customers using AI Personas to score relevance, even for customers with limited purchase history. You get engagement-ranked audiences with relevance scores and predicted metrics, including CTR, conversion rate, and average order value.

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Activate. Automation Agents route high-relevance audiences directly to your engagement platform (Braze, Iterable, Attentive, etc.) with content and product recommendations ready to deploy. All this happens without traditional manual setup, segmentation tickets, and scheduling delays.

In practice, you see a ranked list of emerging trends matched against your product catalog, with audience size. Click into a trend to see customers scored by likelihood to engage, ready to sync directly to engagement platforms. No data ticket. No SQL. You're live the same day.

Social Moments playbook

Trend-aware abandoned cart

Turn a stalled cart into an opportunity. That forgotten item became the thing everyone wants.

Trigger: A product in abandoned carts starts trending on social.

Audience: Customers with the trending item in cart, prioritized by Affinity Score.

Activation: Enhance your existing abandoned cart flow with timely context.

Personalization: Trending SKU highlighted, plus complementary products based on cart contents.

KPIs: Recovered carts, AOV lift, time-to-conversion improvement.

Trending event digest

Same weekly send, now it feels handpicked. Each fan sees the events that match what's buzzing for them.

Trigger: Scheduled send combined with real-world trend signals.

Audience: Full send list, with events personalized by Affinity Agents.

Activation: Your existing recurring campaign featuring trending artists and surprise tour announcements matched to each customer.

Personalization: Each recipient sees the events most relevant to their profile.

KPIs: Engagement lift vs. baseline, CTR improvement, ticket conversion rate.

Viral hero SKU flash

A product is spiking. You have hours. Reach the customers who'll care while the trend is rising.

Trigger: A creator post or social mention drives sudden demand for a specific SKU.

Audience: Customers most likely to engage, scored by Affinity Agents.

Activation: Flash campaign across email, push, SMS and website while the trend is still rising.

Personalization: Variant and creative chosen based on relevance. VIP customers get early access.

KPIs: Time-to-activate, CTR to conversion, sell-through rate.

Trend-powered re-engagement

Bring back lapsed customers with a product that's trending right now.

Trigger: A pop culture moment or viral trend aligns with products in your catalog.

Audience: Customers who haven't purchased in 60+ days, especially seasonal or gift buyers, whose past behavior suggests affinity for the trending theme.

Activation: Re-engagement campaign featuring catalog items matched to the moment. No new creative required. The trend is the hook.

Personalization: Each recipient sees products matched to both the trend and their individual purchase history.

KPIs: Reactivation rate, revenue per re-engaged customer, engagement lift vs. generic winback.

Ship your products while the trend is spiking

Social Moments shrinks the time between spotting a trend and acting on it. Detection, audience scoring, data prep and activation happen in a single workflow, so your team launches faster, with relevance that enhances your brand. 

Behind Social Moments, AI agents work continuously on your live customer data via the Simon AI Composable CDP. Personalization is built on your first-party data. The guesswork and data requests that used to slow you down are handled autonomously. 

Ready to see how it works? We'd love to talk through Social Moments use cases for your brand.