The Buzzphoria End Game — We Are Our Own Best Case Study
In our last post, we talked about having the end game in mind when you enter your brand or company into the social media stratosphere.
We figured the best way to illustrate what brands and corporations often do wrong (without pointing fingers at brands and corporations that are doing it wrong) was to create a case study and example.
Congrats to journalist, blogger and social media guru Scott “Social Media” Allen for revealing typical bungles brands make and special thanks for also illustrating our point about the dangers many companies don’t realize when they embark on the social media journey. Naive mistakes, they make, but that’s what happens to the naive.
Numerous studies estimate by 2010 there will be over 1 billion blogs worldwide.
According to Reuters, many people see blogs as alternatives to the mainstream media. Reuters goes on the say that many bloggers do so as a hobby rather than as a vocation, with 77 percent of them saying they post to express themselves creatively rather than to get noticed or paid.
Reuters pointed out these specifics:
37 percent of bloggers cited their life and experiences as their primary topic, while politics and government came in second at 11 percent.
About 34 percent see their blogging as a form of journalism.
Just over a third of bloggers said they engage often in journalistic activities such as verifying facts and linking to source material.
More than 40 percent of bloggers said they never quote sources or other media directly.
11 percent said they post corrections.
61 percent said they rarely or never get permission to use copyrighted material.
55 percent of bloggers write under a pseudonym.
Nearly 90 percent invite comments from other readers.
Four out of five blogs use text, while 72 percent display photos and audio links play on 30 percent of blogs.
82 percent of bloggers think they will still be blogging in a year. 3 percent say they have quit.
We especially appreciate Scott Allen’s help in communicating an important message to our clients by dissecting many of the things we intentionally did wrong or left incomplete. (See his blog posting published March 27 @ http://scottsocialmediaallen.com/index.php/buzzphoria-social-media-reality-check/)
But Mr. Allen never called the subject of his critical story prior to publishing it.
Had Mr. Allen — who admits in his post about Buzzphoria that he had contact information (it is after all posted on our website), contacted us he would have learned the end game strategy around our public launch.
In fact, we reached out to Mr. Allen via email through his blog and received a response in less than 24 hours.
The good news is that Scott Allen is an exception to the complete point we were looking to illustrate.
After our reaching out to him and letting him in on our end game, he’s turned out to be an amazing good sport.
Mr. Allen makes the #1 point we needed our clients to realize: many bloggers feel no responsibility to contact the subject of a critical story . . . at all!
Thank you Mr. Allen. You helped us achieve our end game…generating social publicity for us and reinforcing the many points we evangelize to our clients about the dangers of lack of proper planning and the potential irresponsibility of bloggers and journalists who do not properly fact check. This is EXACTLY why our clients hire us and why we generate such great results for them.
Watch for posts over the coming days and weeks as we reveal more of our end game…
Tags: adrienne lenhoff, adrienne lenhoff wise, blogging, brand hijacking, brand launch, branding, brands, bungles, buzzphoria, doubt, freedom of speech, public relations, publicity, reuters, scott allen, scott social media allen, shazaaam, social marketing, social marketing agency, social media, social media guru, social media mistakes, social media planning, strategy, twitter
April 8th, 2009 at 5:43 am
As I told Adrienne, I feel played…in the best possible way! I think this is a brilliant campaign — daring and bold — on the part of Buzzphoria. I’m impressed.
I will make a couple of points “in my defense” that I hope will offer readers further insight into dealing with bloggers:
1) This was probably a once-in-a-lifetime case that what I observed was deliberate. In the other 99.999% of cases, I would have been completely correct that this was simply an incredibly poorly executed launch. Kudos again to Buzzphoria for finding exactly the right point where it was pretty much as bad as it could possibly be without being obvious that it was being done on purpose. I had a tiny hair of suspicion (see the end of my post referenced above), but not enough to act on it.
2) I felt no obligation to call and find out what the story was, and I stand by that decision. If I had to do it all over again, I’d probably do the same thing.
Why? Because it was done in public, and I was observing it directly. I wasn’t going on hearsay from some other blog, in which case I would have felt the need to call and verify, or at least observe and verify.
Journalistic standards call for reporters to be “fair and balanced”. Most bloggers in my experience certainly don’t feel the need to be balanced in what they report (frankly, the willingness to take a strong, even extreme, position is much of what is appealing about blogs vs. the watered-down centrist views fed to us by traditional media). Most would regard fairness as highly subjective. I think most of us do, though, want to be accurate.
So when you engage in social media, be prepared that bloggers and Twitter users aren’t going to contact you for the back story. If it’s observable, or if someone even has a screen shot, it’s accurate.
Furthermore, social media is based on the spirit of public conversation. My post was a challenge to Buzzphoria to respond. They could have easily commented on my blog, as well as used their own blogs to tell their side of the story. Had they been monitoring their brand (we’re talking the hypothetical “bad” launch - in reality they were monitoring it closely), they would have been able to respond within hours, even minutes, of my post.
But that, I’m sure, is part of the case study too.
April 8th, 2009 at 6:03 am
[...] turns out the folks at Buzzphoria have actually been planning this thing for more than a year. See The Buzzphoria End Game — We Are Our Own Best Case Study. I’ve left my original post below in its entirety. If you haven’t already, you really [...]
April 8th, 2009 at 11:48 am
Oh, bollocks!
“I was just trying to see whether you’re paying attention” is the oldest teacher trick in the book when called out on a mistake.
“You helped us achieve our end game”? - oh please!
April 8th, 2009 at 2:58 pm
Mr. Voirol illustrates yet another point we were looking to discuss within this case study — transparency and authenticity. When playing in social media waters, brands are going to encounter those who disagree or want to disparage their reputation. It’s human nature. Currently we have our comments set so that we monitor every comment prior to it being published to this blog. As such, for many companies, the inclination would be to delete a comment such as this. But, that would not be authentic, would it? Social Media is about the sharing of ideas, the generation of communication and freedom of speech and opinion. For brands looking to enter these waters, beware that to play this game you have to have the stomach for both the positive and the negative. We salute you Mr. Voirol for participating in our end game.
April 9th, 2009 at 9:49 pm
Hi Joni,
Great question! As mentioned in my comment back to Nick the Twitter ID was open when Scott Allen published his post. In his post, Scott essentially had a call to action for someone to hijack our name. Name hijacking and name squatting hits companies and brands on a daily basis. In our case, the twitter id and several others have been hijacked. The individual posing as Buzzphoria on twitter has no relationship to us whatsoever. They will however be the subject of a forthcoming post, at the appropriate time, titled “What Happens When Your Brand Gets Hijacked”.
April 15th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
If you have to do it, you might as well do it right
April 16th, 2009 at 6:05 am
Incredible site!
April 16th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
Nice work! I’ll have to do a cross post on this one
September 4th, 2009 at 6:18 am
BIG Thanks
September 4th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
really-really thanks!
September 5th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
Work unbeatable. It makes us become your admirer.
Thank you!
September 6th, 2009 at 5:06 am
Thank you!
September 6th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
you have a great blog!!1
September 7th, 2009 at 6:37 pm
Hey, thanks for this…
September 8th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
I bookmarked this link. Thank you for good job
September 10th, 2009 at 7:02 pm
Thank you lol I’ve been searching for this everywhere >_<
September 13th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
Good Job!!
September 15th, 2009 at 6:57 am
thx !