The Tendo View

Social media—the Web variety—presents a new buzz-building opportunity like no other, with its interactive and personal nature, wide variety of self-publishing vehicles, speed, and global reach.

Whereas traditional media was controlled by the networks and the corporations that paid money to advertise on them, with social media, the platform and the content are controlled by the audience. Anyone can praise or punish your brand to a global community. Instantly. Social media is not only a two-way medium, but also a multi-direction medium with many voices—voices that can have strong sway over how the masses gravitate toward or away from your brand.

What Is Social Media Buzz?

While pre-social media buzz might have been two airlines blitzing the TV networks with ads during a ticket price war, or an over-the-top Super Bowl commercial generating water cooler buzz, the tactics today are more varied. Social media buzz could be a blogger advocating your brand, a link to a YouTube video zipping around the Web, or a contingent of Facebook members so smitten by your product that they’ve created an affinity group around it. Given the variety of social media, let’s look at the different types and how buzz can be uniquely carried out with each.

Social Networks

Popular networks like MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn serve as powerful buzz agents by allowing companies, politicians, or organizations to virtually hang out with prospects, customers, or constituents. This allows you to join the dialogue and make your presence known and felt, not just as a marketer.

Trendy retailer Target aced its first foray into social media with a back-to-school campaign on Facebook called “Dorm Survival Guide.” Anchored by a Target-sponsored Facebook page designed to help students overcome the anxiety of moving into a small room with strangers, the campaign aimed to provide valuable advice to students and give them a place to interact and share information—they offered design advice, recipes, and a personality test for furniture. The campaign also included banner ads on Facebook that drove traffic to the page.

According to Target’s ad agency, the campaign succeeded by closely researching the Facebook community to understand the “conversation” taking place. They used that information to position the campaign, speaking with students in their language and focusing on advice, not brand promotion.

The results? The “Dorm Survival Page” generated more than 7,000 members, 37 discussion groups, and lots of positive dialogue. Target’s back-to-school sales were 6.1% higher in 2007 than in 2006.

Blogging

Blogs offer one of the most direct ways to engage and generate buzz with your customers, partners, or employees. Blogs allow you to hold a personal and candid dialogue without the filter of a marketing message, which tends to hinder any efforts to engage customers. Blogs also give customers a voice by allowing them to post comments and responses of their own. But in order for blogs to work, they have to be consistent and unscripted. If you neglect a blog or just recycle marketing communications jargon, you’ll lose readers in a hurry.

When Jonathan Schwartz became CEO of Sun Microsystems in April 2006, he simultaneously became CEO of the largest company who also maintains an external blog, a status many say made him a trailblazer among CEOs.

Schwartz believes the transparency and openness of his blog will become a competitive differentiator. He thinks customers appreciate candor and authenticity so much that his “tell all” blog will strengthen customer loyalty and presumably lead to more business. Although it’s difficult to link Schwartz’s blog to Sun’s financial performance, it receives more than 400,000 visits per month. At minimum, he’s maintaining a real dialogue with his audience. And in a post-Enron world that abhors corporate secrecy, that says something.

YouTube

We’re giving the wildly popular and irreverent video sharing site its own category. YouTube is part social network in that individuals can create profiles, post and share videos, and rate and comment on content. It’s also part video network where one can access and view thousands of videos across multiple channels and genres.

What makes YouTube such a powerful buzz platform is that anyone can use it to post virtually any kind of video. YouTube videos can be shared easily, and the process and standards for posting videos are far less cumbersome and restrictive than a TV network. As a result, companies can take much bigger chances with the kind of videos they post, reach a large audience quicker and more cheaply, and the videos themselves can easily morph into viral campaigns, as people send the video to their friends or link to it on other sites.

Take this quirky video from Honda featuring its popular Element SUV carrying on with a crab at the beach. The Honda Element is, in essence, part of a comic video rather than the subject of a promotion. This offbeat video began as a series of commercial spots, but its popularity snowballed when it was uploaded to YouTube; the videos garnered more than one million views, according to Wikipedia. In this instance, YouTube helped a company get more mileage out of an ad campaign and connect with a demographic that may not have seen its television ads.

Try to Keep Up

The opportunities to create buzz with social media are as wide and varied as the different types, and new technologies and applications are popping up all the time.

To stay on top of what’s happening in the social media space, keep an eye on these sites: www.socialmediaworld.com (focused coverage on social media); www.technorati.com (aggregates a range of user generated content); and www.imediaconnection.com/social media (social media news, strategy, best-practices).

Then consider this: How will you begin building buzz with social media?

Note: For more on this topic, check out our blog post on hybrid social media and a site that’s bridging the Web and human interaction.