The Michigan Business and Professional Association (MBPA) has named Shazaaam!/Buzzphoria LLC as one of Metropolitan Detroit’s “101 Best and Brightest Companies to Work For,” marking the fourth year in a row that the agency has been named.

“We are proud to receive this high honor once again,” said Adrienne Lenhoff, Shazaaam!/Buzzphoria founder and president. “We take special care in making our workplace a creative and fun place to work for our employees,” she added, “and the results show in both our work for clients and the dedication that our staff shows every day in accomplishing their goals.”

Shazaaam!/Buzzphoria and 100 other businesses in greater Michigan will be honored at an awards luncheon on Wednesday, September 22, 2010, at The Dearborn Inn, a Marriott hotel located in Dearborn, Mich.

Shazaaam!/Buzzphoria, Novi, Mich.-based businesses, have also received numerous recognitions from Crain’s Detroit Business named as a “Cool Place to Work.” The selection of Shazaaam!/Buzzphoria, along with other winning companies, affirms to its employees, clients, vendors, and to the business community at large, that it is committed to being one of the Best and Brightest companies to work for.

MBPA qualifies companies using independent research that evaluates company communication, community initiatives, compensation and benefits. The organization also reviews other categories such as diversity and multiculturalism, employee education and development, employee engagement and commitment, and work-life balance.

“Because the companies selected have created impressive organizational value and business results through their policies and best practices in human resource management, we believe it is important to recognize their accomplishments, especially at a time when all businesses are being challenged in ways never before seen,” said Jennifer Kluge, MBPA executive vice president and chief operating officer.

Metro Detroit’s 101 Best and Brightest Companies to Work For is sponsored by AT&T Michigan, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, Corp!, Magazine, Davenport University, DTE Energy, Pepsi Bottling Group, Douglas Marketing, The Designate, Strategic Staffing Solutions, WJBK Fox 2, HRAGD, the Detroit Athletic Club and McGraw Wentworth.
About Shazaaam!/Buzzphoria

Founded in 2001, Shazaaam! (shazaaam.com) is an award-winning, independently owned, group of affiliated communications companies headquartered in Novi, Mich. Shazaaam! Public Relations, Social Media Marketing Agency Buzzphoria (buzzphoria.com) and experiential marketing company Promo Marketing Team (promomarketingteam.com) specialize in traditional public relations, social media marketing, product sampling and street-level marketing promotions and events, respectively, on a national level. Specialties include media and public relations, guerilla marketing, online viral marketing, electronic and new media development, mobile tours, product samplings, social networking and event coordination and management.

Since the beginning of the Internet, a wild-west mentality has prevailed with people anonymously blasting articles and blogs with caustic comments. The authors and bloggers are stunned and left shaking their heads wondering about the anger and venom they’ve suffered.

For decades the Internet hasn’t held users accountable for reckless comments. But that may be changing in two ways. First, social networking sites, such as Facebook, are requiring participants to use their real names. In addition, lawsuits are also being filed against anonymous Internet users for slanderous comments or posting vital information about crimes.

Many would (and still do) argue that online anonymity will not fade away. Just imagine the sound of keyboards declaring that Internet users deserve their first amendment rights- FREEDOM OF SPEECH. So, the question is, does the first amendment cover a person who hides behind a false name only to harm others or add fuel to the fire? The answer is NO.

Consequences: It’s widely known that unruly or harsh comments associated with a person’s real persona could cost them a prospective job, clients and reputation. Hiding behind a fictitious name does not provide real protection, as digital fingerprints are easy to track.

Take for example the non-ethical behavior of companies who have asked their employees to provide glowing third party comments to impact stock price or sales. The courts have simply called this type of corporate behavior, fraud.

Here at Buzzphoria (www.buzzphoria.com), we respect the disclosure of identity standards from the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, WOMMA, which requires members to disclose their relationships or identities with consumers when they may influence a customer’s buying-decision. Our rules of the worldwide-web begin with an introduction of who we are, the name of client we represent and our purpose for responding to the blog or article. That is just the way we do business.

Telling the truth –It’s not only the right thing to do- it takes courage. For example Activision Blizzard Inc., one of the world’s largest videogame companies, boldly set guidelines for users’ online posts.

The company placed a requirement that gamers list their real names to post messages in online forums, just in time for the change to be applied to its first forums of the company’s highly anticipated “StarCraft II,” which was released in late July.  The purpose of the policy was to deflate the sometimes-nasty discussions amongst gamers.

Sadly, the policy collapsed after a widespread backlash from game users. The service is based on paid-subscriptions, and the company was concerned a revolt from consumers could mean a drop in sales.

But what is to be said about online sites that are not held at the mercy of consumers’ demand? Are they more willing to allow users to post factitious names without being held accountable for any wrong doings? A growing number of legal decisions are making it easier for lawyers to use legal proceedings to have online users’ names disclose. A move that hints the guidelines for Internet postings may shift for safety reasons, and to control unruly and malicious users.

One infamous case, the Lori Drew MySpace trial, made international headlines as the court reviewed evidence that a St. Louis suburb mom established a fake online identity to bully her daughter’s rival, who eventually committed suicide. Although the court eventually threw out the case, the judge threatened to criminalize the act of creating a fake persona online. The publicity surrounding the case echoed through the Internet community.

For now, users still have the right to their online anonymity. But based on the string of legal cases and Internet company reactions, there may soon be a major change to Internet users rights. In the meantime, users should be careful about their content, and the possible damage it may cause.

The simplest rule to follow is- use your name and stand behind your words. Why would so many users fight this?

As with all marketing mediums, there’s a lot of dialogue and discussion on how to measure the success of a campaign or marketing initiative.  Within the social media space marketers, companies and brands have been trying to figure out the holy grail of social media measurement.  For many, they try to say that the logical metric is the number of fans or followers that a brand or company accumulates across platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.  We beg to differ.

At the end of the day, any campaign, whether it be in the social or traditional marketing space lives, breathes and dies based on how well it ultimately moves the sales meter.  While from an analytic standpoint, it’s nice to have cost per impressions and reach costs, we also need to understand that today’s consumer has “constant partial attention”.  So, while you may be reaching them with impressions, or having them click on a like button or a follow button - are you really reaching through the clutter of marketing messages and noise that are competing for that consumer’s attention?

In reality, many consumers will click a like button or a follow button because a friend of a friend of a friend of the marketer reached the consumer and told them to click.  They’ll click and never look back.  So, at the end of the day, you’ve got a false population of fans/likes/followers who could care less about the messages they’re being blasted via Twitter, Facebook and the other platforms in which the brand is trying to engage their attention.

From our standpoint, the real measurement of both traditional and social media marketing success is multi-layered and lies between the actual engagement of those consumers — are they becoming evangelists?, are they engaging with your brand or company?, are you having viable dialogues that bring value to the consumer (and to the brand)?, and - most importantly - is there a positive impact to your brand or company’s bottom line???

How are you measuring your current campaign success?  We’d love to hear your thoughts…

Do you know what your employees, past employees and stake holders are saying about your company and brand?  While many brands and corporations are focusing their social media efforts on consumer/customer dialogues; many fail to monitor what their internal audiences are saying.

We’ve been seeing repeated patterns among employees of companies, both publicly traded and privately held…Does your company fall into this pattern?

At Buzzphoria, we use proprietary software to measure what’s being said about companies, brands and their competitors across all social media and web-based communications channels.  When we first begin working with clients, we run historic searches to provide a benchmark for where they are in social electronic conversations - who’s talking about them, what’s being said, where it’s being said, what’s the tone, sentiment, relevancy of the conversation (ie., how many people are monitoring that particular conversation and what is the level of influence of the sites, platforms and individuals who are having those conversations, etc).  This Social Media Reality Check, as we call it, provides valuable insights that shape our recommendations, strategy and implementation of our clients’ core social media outreach.

In addition to consumer/customer communications, we also spend a great deal of time working with our clients to identify the social media discussions that are taking place by stake holders within their organizations.

From an internal corporate communications standpoint the pattern that we’ve been seeing:

1.  Most of the clients we’re called in to work with (both private and public companies) do not have a blog/twitter/social media strategy policy related to employee communications.  Many have been calling us in to a) see if they need a policy, b) run a baseline to see what’s being said and c) craft a policy for them that is easy for employees to understand, is easy to monitor and enforce and is respectful of protecting proprietary corporate information while also being respectful of the employees’ personal rights…

2.  It has been more of the rule, rather than the exception, that we’ve found multiple employee run groups on social networking sites (not just business sites such as LinkedIn and Plaxo; but also more generalized personal sites such as Facebook).  The groups and pages we’ve uncovered have by and large been using the corporate logo, have identified themselves by the corporate name and have encouraged and have been populated by both present and past employees.  In nearly every instance, the corporation hiring us was unaware that these groups existed.

3.  In addition, for each of the corporations that we’ve done this for, we have also uncovered both employee blogs and Twitter accounts.  While the bulk of the Twitter accounts and blogs we’ve found have been for personal use, we have found that in nearly all instances, the employee with these accounts is also sprinkling their personal conversations and communications with corporate information.

Since one of Twitter’s best uses is as a content aggregator, we’ve found that most Twitter accounts held by corporate employees has also been programmed to aggregate Twitter communications onto multiple social networking and blog platforms the employee possesses (for example - they send a Tweet on Twitter and the tweet is updated to their Facebook, Linkedin and Blog pages).

Some specific examples of information we’ve seen that can be damaging to the corporation:

-   employees conversing about new clients they’re going after

-   employees conversing about job and company dissatisfaction

-   employees conversing about looking for new jobs

-   employees conversing about problems (product failures, forthcoming earnings statements, possible recalls)

-   employees conversing about product development initiatives

Most of the time, the employees are not even aware that their conversations could potentially be having a negative impact on the corporation.

4.  For the majority of publicly traded companies we’re working with, we’ve found that both media and analysts are conversing on multiple platforms (Twitter, blogs, discussion groups, social media pages, etc) and that our clients were unaware these conversations were taking place.

Do you know what your employees and stake holders are saying about your company and or brand?

In our last posting, we talked about how we’ve made ourselves our own best case study by putting our own brand on the line to illustrate how we can help you protect yours.

As we discussed last time, there are unscrupulous individuals and groups who are hijacking brands for both sport and profit.  In our case, a hijacker registered and began impersonating the Buzzphoria brand on Twitter.

The first step in defending your company and brand when a hijacker hits it to verse yourself on your rights within terms of service for the social media platform or site in which your brand has been compromised.

Below is a screen shot from Twitter’s Terms of Service:

Twitter Terms of Service

Notice that the Terms of Service clearly state that:

1. You must not abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate other Twitter users.
2. You may not use the Twitter.com service for any illegal or unauthorized purpose. International users agree to comply with all local laws regarding online conduct and acceptable content.
3. You must not, in the use of Twitter, violate any laws in your jurisdiction (including but not limited to copyright laws).

Twitter General Conditions - Terms of Service

Please note the following:

1. We may, but have no obligation to, remove Content and accounts containing Content that we determine in our sole discretion are unlawful, offensive, threatening, libelous, defamatory, obscene or otherwise objectionable or violates any party’s intellectual property or these Terms of Use.
2. We reserve the right to reclaim usernames on behalf of businesses or individuals that hold legal claim or trademark on those usernames.

Below, we’ve share the final section of Twitter’s Terms of Service - Copyright (What’s Yours is Yours):

Twitter Terms of Service - Copyright

Please note the following:

Twitter undertakes to obey all relevant copyright laws. We will review all claims of copyright infringement received and remove content deemed to have been posted or distributed in violation of any such laws. To make a claim, please provide us with the following:

1. A physical or electronic signature of the copyright owner or the person authorized to act on its behalf;
2. A description of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed;
3. A description of the infringing material and information reasonably sufficient to permit Twitter to locate the material;
4. Your contact information, including your address, telephone number, and email;
5. A statement by you that you have a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; and
6. A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and, under the pains and penalties of perjury, that you are authorized to act on behalf of the copyright owner.

At the beginning of the .com boom, it was squatters grabbing brand names they felt were valuable and holding them for ransom to corporations.  In the past weeks and months, it was employees at a Dominoes who disparaged the brand by posting YouTube videos, causing the company to go into crisis communications mode.  It hasn’t just happened to Dominos:  with the rise of user generated content, comes the crush of corporations being impersonated and spoofed across user-generated mediums, creating more publicity nightmares, crisis communications situations and expensive legal battles.

Equally as deadly and dangerous to brands, are imposters who grab brand names within popular social media platforms such as Twitter, MySpace and Facebook, to name a few…

Thus, the Buzzphoria case study continues… We too were a victim of brand high-jacking and the retrieval process to gain our brand back.

Within Scott Allen’s original blog post about Buzzphoria, he essentially posed a call to action for someone to high-jack the Buzzphoria name and identity within multiple social media sites.  Someone took him up on it and immediately grabbed the Twitter identity @buzzphoria.  The individual(s) then took elements of artwork from the Buzzphoria website and set up a branded page, representing themselves as our brand.  From our tracking, we witnessed the individual(s) populating the page with tweets representing themselves as us, sent to the followers the culprit(s) had begun amassing.

When we spoke to Scott Allen, he told us that the culprit(s) had reached out to him and had let him know that they would give us our brand back…if we asked.

Unfortunately, most corporations don’t see that level of generosity and kindness (I’m being facetious here…).  No…brand high-jackers do not usually reach out to a blogger or journalist to say - “hey, if you do talk to that company let them know I’d be happy to hand them back their brand…”

So, what’s the journey for a corporation or brand to retrieve its identity?  (without an expensive and protracted legal battle?)

Our next few posts will show you step by step how we were able to retrieve our identity from Twitter.

In our last post we talked about Buzzphoria being our own best case study. Our example was blogger journalism and some of the comments received helped to also illustrate other elements of our case study such as freedom of speech and brand hijacking.

As part of our case study we decided to illustrate the mistakes companies often make in thinking they absolutely have to have a blog…

Perhaps that’s why there are estimates that there will be 110 billion blogs by 2010.

See, so often companies feel compelled that they have to have a blog just because they have to have a blog.

They never ask themselves the critical questions:

- why they have to have it,
- how are they going to maintain it,
- what do they want it to achieve - what’s the blog’s purpose,
- how are they going to build a following for it,
- what voice do they want to set with it,
- what do they want to say,
- more importantly, do they have something to say?

Instead many companies rush to set up their blogs. They post a couple times, get side-tracked by other projects, lose interest and ultimately abandon the blog.

They enter into the blogging endeavor like Kevin Costner clones in Field of Dreams thinking all they have to do is say, “Hello World”

And they wait, and they wait and they wait…a long time. Like a tree falling in a forest, did anyone hear it fall?

Waiting…Waiting…For that one person to say hello back.

For most no one ever says hello back.

In our case we waited patiently for 5 months from the time we posted that blog page for the first hello.

In our case it came through five months later through a tweet by Jim “Genuine” Turner who was first to note that we had left the original Word Press message “Hello World” sitting out there.

This led to Mr. Allen. That led to tweets and blog re-postings and link backs chastising us for what these folks perceived to be our foolishness, a novice error.

Thank you gentlemen for proving another of our points to our clients:
You don’t need a blog just for the sake of having a blog. Only do it if there’s a reason why anyone would care…

And then maybe, if they’ve developed the right strategy, done the proper planning and knew what their end game was the pollination effect will begin to take hold.