Previously I posted about growing brand buzz organically. In addition to focusing on aspects such as product performance and customer service, it is important to leverage your brand website. Company websites are among the most trusted sources of information about a brand. According to a survey by Nielsen Online, 53% of consumers seek information about a product by researching information posted to a company website.
Consumer Generated Media (CGM) also emerges as an important component. 26% of consumers review Internet comments and ratings when researching products online, while 17% of individuals post specific questions to a forum to acquire information.
To get consumers buzzing about your brand website and encourage pass-along value, the site needs to be useful, relevant, current, dynamic and engaging. Here are a few items that any company should consider including:
- Updated regularly: Consumers are not going to share old news; make sure the content is timely and current. Answer consumer questions, offer advice, respond to threats and promote the benefits of your brand. Pay attention to what consumers search for or which pages on your site get the most traffic to inform the content you create.
- Solicit feedback: Encourage consumers to provide feedback directly to you. Prominently place “contact us” buttons throughout the site. The easier it is to find the feedback portion of the site, the more likely consumers will use it. Trends may emerge through feedback and can inform the content you post.
- Consumer testimonials: Embrace CGM by enabling consumers to post product reviews directly to your website. Consumers trust the opinion of their peers and this action lends credibility at the point of purchase.
- FAQ: You need to highlight your Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) tool; ensure consumers are one click away from the answer they are seeking.
- Site is searchable: Make every effort to ensure that consumers can easily find the answers to their questions. Add a search function so they can locate information quickly and easily.
- Pass-along enable everything: Make it easy for consumers to share information from your website. Any cool apps, videos, podcasts, games, etc. should be easily sharable.
Tags: buzz, cgm, website
There are two types of word-of-mouth occurring online: conversation resulting from natural interactions between consumers regarding a brand experience, and conversation resulting from a specific campaign or event that encourages it. WOMMA classifies these two types of conversations as Organic versus Amplified word-of-mouth.
As a long-term strategy for building brand buzz it is important to focus efforts on organic word-of-mouth. According to a Nielsen Online survey, the majority of consumers state that they post information online because they use the product and either like it or don’t. In general, organic WOM stimulates 78% of consumer messages online while 22% stem from marketing activities (amplified WOM). Accordingly, to grow buzz it is essential to focus on the consumer’s brand experience. This can be done by enhancing product performance, employee training and customer service.
Tags: buzz, WOM, word of mouth
Brett Favre and Manny Ramirez made headlines and generated buzz in July/August 2008 via high-profile trades. Since these two athletes are still making buzzworthy plays - Ramirez is a key player credited with helping the Dodgers advance to the playoffs, and Brett Favre continues to give record-breaking performances with the Jets - I was curious to see how much buzz they were generating.
Clearly, nothing has been quite as buzzworthy for Favre since he shunned retirement and made the move from Green Bay to New York. Smaller buzz spikes in September indicate online enthusiasts have been talking about his performance in the first few weeks of the NFL season.
Discussion volume for Ramirez - who has been hitting home runs, making incendiary comments about his time with the Red Sox, and generally engaging in typical “Manny being Manny” behavior, is surprisingly low. I thought more people would have been talking about some of his accomplishments and controversial behavior since he was traded from the Red Sox to the Dodgers. His overall skill, evident in his contributions to the Dodgers’ advancing to the NLCS championship playoffs, is duly noted in more recent but smaller buzz spikes. However, he still falls short of Favre in terms of buzz volume.
There is another athlete that recently made a big splash - literally, as well as figuratively - with Olympics-related buzz. This athlete is Michael Phelps.
Though Phelps did not generate as many messages as Brett Favre on a single day, buzz about his record-breaking performances in the 2008 Summer Olympics was more sustained. More recently, his hosting an episode of Saturday Night Live in mid-September generated an additional buzz spike.
Not only did Phelps win many gold medals as well as the hearts of many Americans, he also edges out Favre in terms of overall buzz volume since June. Maybe it’s the swimsuit…
Tags: buzz, favre, phelps, ramirez
Attention marketers and brands. Did your idea generate major buzz? Nielsen Online is partnering with Adweek Media (a unit of The Nielsen Company) on this year’s Buzz Awards to celebrate innovative promotions, campaigns that caught fire and concepts that went from video to viral. Don’t let your efforts go unrecognized.
The deadline for submissions is August 18th, so enter your campaigns here. We’ll award prizes across seventeen categories, ranging from viral marketing, radio and print to wireless promotion, public relations and social media. The Grand Prize winner snags a spread 4/c ad in Adweek, Brandweek and Mediaweek profiling the winning effort (valued at $64,100). Enter the 2008 Buzz Awards today.
Tags: adweek, buzz, cgm
Last Friday news broke that the Drudge Retort received notice from the Associated Press (AP) to discontinue citing its content because of provisions regarding “fair use” in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The story was met with protest and outrage by the blogging community which felt the AP was unfairly serving the Drudge Retort.
The two issues that drove the discussion are from opposing viewpoints. On the one side, you have the AP who wishes to change how the Drudge Retort posts and possibly pays for AP content. And on the other, the bloggers counter that the AP should consider adhering to its standards of quotation. Many bloggers, including well-known tech blogger Michael Arrington, have called on their peers to boycott the AP’s content in response to the story.
Boycott chart
*updated on June 23, 2008
I first heard about this story last week when it showed up in my Twitter stream. As the day passed, the conversation grew. It was a topic of chatter on Techmeme (an aggregator of tech news), Arrington of TechCrunch proposed a boycott and it was Dugg more than 2,000 times on Digg, another popular news aggregator. Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine (post) wrote a post about the AP and traditional media, urging them to adopt standards of citation put forth by bloggers. But did the outrage and calls to action matter? Would it impact how often the AP is cited or the behavior of millions of bloggers unaware of the issue? As of today, the answer is no, but it’s still early in this story.
AP Chart
* updated on June 23, 2008
As of the June 19th the discussion of the boycott has dropped off and the buzz is almost back to pre-Friday levels. As one can see from the AP chart there hasn’t been a large impact on AP references in the blogosphere, so the question is; what would it take for a blog boycott? Is calling for the boycott of news too much to ask for a publishing medium that is totally reliant on news? I think the answer today is yes, but we’ll have to see how this story shapes up and what happens to citing in the future.
Now if we could only get those auto-play audio banner ads boycotted…
Tags: blogs, buzz, copyright
