Social Media Monitoring - Part One

I have chosen a small business and a brand associated with it. I found out that the name of the owner happens to be their brand name too. Cake Boss called also Buddy Valastro or simply Buddy is an Italian baker from New Jersey, second generation immigrant who is a proud owner of Carlo's Bakery shop in  Hoboken, NJ. He gained his popularity by being a star of a very popular weekly TLC TV show featuring his bakery inner life. He is known for making humongous cakes which require not only baking skills but also design skills.  Buddy Valastro and La Famiglia didn't earn a reality TV show dedicated to his life by

making simple cakes.

At the pick of his social media trend in July 1, 2011 ‘Cake Boss’ Buddy Valastro presented a seriously detailed creation for Chevrolet at the New York International Auto Show . The TLC cable reality show aired the episode this week that chronicles Valastro and his crew from Carlo’s Bake Shop of Hoboken, New Jersey, making and delivering the bright yellow Camaro topped with the action flick’s Bumblebee Transformer emerging from its roof.

"For his son Carlo's first birthday, he made a huge mountain-shaped Candy Land cake with a chocolate waterfall. For a special event, a nearby church got a three-tier confection covered in "stained glass" images made of icing. And for the 125th birthday of the Statue of Liberty, Valastro and his team created a detailed, scaled-down version of the statue that was carted to Liberty Island in pieces and assembled there.

When making such complicated cakes, a significant amount of effort goes into engineering the framework that will support various elements of the design"

According to my research so far, Buddy Valastro has a huge presence built into social media channels.

He has his entry in Wikipedia  and a Facebook Page.

Between the time I started monitoring Cake Boss on Facebook on October 2nd, he had 4.8 million likes, till 10/23 he had  already 4,919,228 likes so about 119,000 likes within 3 weeks. From 10/23 to 10/25 so during two days he gained 2427 likes which makes circa 1200 likes a day. In the pick times he was able to gain as much as about 4000 a day, the most popular day was July 22. Comparing to let's say Old Navy which is a big corporation, and just reached five million fans recently, this small business has a lot of fans.
Again from 10/23 to 10/29 he gained 6827 likes which is about 1137 likes a day.

Facebook  typical post 10/22/12- Today is the last day to reserve our discount tickets to the CAKE BOSS Buddy Valastro show at the Lowell Memorial Auditorium. Show date: Friday, November 23. Seats: $43 each. Regular price for the same seats is $45.75 plus handling fees!

People definitely visit Buddy's Facebook page and leave many positive comments, mostly about his wonderful cakes, and how they love him.

I found 78 pages of Google search entries starting with Cake Boss

 A website for Carlo's Bakery is well presentable with high quality cake pictures, order page, book by Buddy Valastro about Italian cooking, cake decoration tips, and directions.

Blog page by fans of cake Boss with timeline and pictures. In the blog there is a post about trivia questions from October 2nd -  Cake Boss Unscramble Game that shows his fans have to have a "deep" knowledge about his family details and secrets.. From there we learn about his plans for the nearest future, and his present campaigns. Below are few leading points of his present campaigns, the most important one being his Holiday tour around the country.

1.      "Right now I'm filming for the new season of 'Next Great Baker,' " Valastro said in a telephone interview last week. " 'Cake Boss' is done for this year [but] we come back full-force in January. I film all the time. Usually during my off time I love doing this tour."

2.      The tour of which he speaks is "Buddy Valastro Live! Homemade for the Holidays," which will be making a three-week trip around the East Coast and the Chicago area later this year. On Dec. 9, the show will stop at the Salem Civic Center.

3.      Valastro, 35, said his favorite part of doing the live show is pulling audience members up on stage to participate. But fans in Southwest Virginia will be able to get in on the action a bit early by taking part in The Roanoke Times autumn cupcake decorating contest.   The best-looking cupcake will be selected by Valastro, and the winner will get a pair of tickets to the show and a meet-and greet with the Cake Boss himself.

   

You tube displays many episodes of Cake Boss covering at least 4 years since 2009 when the TV reality show started. This is the last episode from October 2nd, 2012. The subject is mama's disease,  very personal for Buddy, so I guess this is why he is a little withdrawn from social media recently, because his mother got sick. I also think that the way Buddy portrays his family struggles as well as victories is very personal and human and that is why so many people relate to him the way they do.

But usually his shows are about his crazy cakes

Carlo's Bakery Demographics versus Cake Boss show demographics:

There is a slight difference in target audience for Carlos Bakery, which is a popular place for fans to come visit, order a cake, and see Cake Boss in person, and the website for LTC TV show.
TV show interests people in age range between 25 to 64, with no college education and slightly more college educated mostly males with children who browse website from work. The Bakery draws in older people, again males but in their 50s and 60s. The results are surprising for me since I thought his audience is women and children.

Social media Google and Ice-rocket trends show a steady growth of popularity from 2009 till now with a pick in July 2012 (92). I started monitoring trends on October 2nd. Ice-rocket Trend tool shows the same results when comparing the trend from 2009 till October 2012. The pick interest showing July 22nd, 2012.
when the Chevrolet event took place and caused public interest to grow.

Comparison of the trend worldwide in 2012 again pick interest in summer 2012. Interest over time for the last two months shows same growth, with pick social media engagement in September 2012 and decline in interest in October 2012. Interest over last 7 days for October 5th and 6th, shows slight growth which continues throughout my project. Ice rocket tool for the month of September below shows the pick interest in the end of September month, while in October interest declines significantly. On October 26, the Google trend is 93, it shows the interest builds up again probably because of the impact of the planned tour.

People are constantly talking about Cake Boss related topics on Twitter. On October 26 one of the fans refers to Buddy's mom's disease 

On October 18th Buddy V prepares cake for for the Kyrillos fundraiser. Kyrillos, a Republican, is running against Democratic incumbent Sen. Bob Menendez. Menendez is seeking his second full term in the U.S. Senate. Maybe he lost a lot of his fans who are democrats because his social media mention looks worse at the end of October.

In social mention he seems to lose some results from the beginning of October and the last few days of October. His strengths came down from 29% to 0%. Sentiment went down from 10:1 to 6:1, passion went down , and reach stayed pretty much the same. 

10/28/12

10/29/12

Buddy Valastro knows how to use his talent to draw attention in social media, and he knows how to use the buzz to boost his business which is booming. As a result of his celebrity fame, he opened new bakeries in a couple of other states, and is currently selling his cakes in grocery chains around the country. 
Adictomatic:

 I have used the Intelliwell  to get updates about Twitter posts.It has completely clogged my e-mail, but there is a lot of mention to follow on Twitter from Imtelliwell.

Out of control

As much as the companies plan their engagement with social media and their campaigns with careful consideration through several months to a year, the hard fact of life is that the groundswell is a " little" unpredictable as far as the results of those meticulous plans go. In the book " Groundswell" by Charlene Li, and Josh Bernoff we read in chapter 11 how the connection with groundswell transforms their companies in a good way usually, and how the marketing departments learn from their mistakes like in the case of the company that tried to engage their executives in blogging. The executives refused simply because they were not immersed in social media yet, seeing little or no value in blogging. The second concern of the executives, and more important for me here was that they feared about the loss of control over the marketing message, and feared that negative comments could reflect badly on the company and lead to loss of sales. The authors of the book give this example to simply illustrate how the company executives finally embrace the groundswell.

I see that as far as the fear goes, the executives may never have actually let go off this fear completely, and I believe the marketing teams themselves are never free of  fear that social media will go out of their control and a certain twist can change the best advertising plan into a total disaster.Social media campaigns always contain a measure of risk, where responses from users cannot be controlled

In January this year, McDonalds launched a Twitter campaign using the hashtag #McDStories. McDonald’s asked users to post nostalgic stories about their experiences on Happy Meals. Sadly for them, the #McDStories campaign quickly took a whole different turn  as users started using the hashtag to instead share horror experiences and shock tales. From poor work conditions to appalling food quality, McDonald’s campaign turned negative attention back to itself.
Here are just a few examples of the tweets on the #McDStories Hashtag:
 
There are many disaster stories happening to big brand companies in social media channels, and the executives and marketers have the right to be afraid of the media going out of control. But in my opinion the companies that experience those mishaps are often those who are already on the black list of the customers. The invitation to talk like this just allows the customers to get out and openly voice their opinions that are already shaped by popular believes.There is a lot of controversy around Mc Donald's and fast foods in general, and by asking for stories from the customers Mc Donald's is asking for trouble. Don't they know they have a terrible opinion anyways?

Are the "good" companies also victims of social media going out of control or maybe if a company is perceived as positive among customers, they have nothing to fear. Maybe not quite that simple, but for sure how the company "behaves" and how it conducts its business will have a tremendous effect on its image in social media. We still have to witness if the big buzz about the unhealthy foods will finally kill the giant companies like Mc Donald's

Social media can be a great way of increasing brand awareness, customer engagement and long term loyalty and generating a  boost in sales, but it’s also a potential tool for failure and in the worst case scenario can end up with a fiasco like in case of Mc Donald's. Even a global restaurant giant, can not control conversations on the internet. Companies like Mc Donald's and their executives have a lot to fear from social media, and I don't really think they are able to embrace the groundswell.

No company can rest assured that they will be perceived as "good guys" on the groundswell, or that their particular campaign will take an expected good turn, so there is always an element of fear unless the company decides to let go of its controlling instincts and provide the best possible product or service they can, clean their act and go with the flow.

Companies who have hidden issues or are trying to push their product on customers, will meet resistance on the groundswell like Toyota did, trying to promote Camry on Twitter in a way that customers found invasive.

Engaging

 The idea of engaging, talking to customers as co-creators of the product is not a new idea. In 1997, Steve Jobs was already talking  about customer experience and innovation at the Apple WWDC (worldwide developer conference). Already before the age of social media, this corporate visionary was aware of the trend that could not be ignored, and eventually made its way to flourish in social media times. The whole business world changed. "the mobile web, social media, gamification, real-time have forced us to rewire the way we think about and run our businesses".
From 1997 till now there was a revolution in how community and social media changed communication in business.

There are many reasons why some companies are successfully using social media and some fail. In a series of the interviews last year,  Brian Solis, the author of a  book, "The End of Business as Usual" asked many top managers of the famous brands how and why they decided to engage in social media in the first place. In those interviews all of the representatives of the big brands claimed that they just had no choice but engage because the marketing that used to be one way communication suddenly changed into social marketing and not engaging in two way communication would be like a suicide. A lot of those interviews were made last year, when the companies were just starting to observe how their social media campaigns were playing out. Some companies nailed it, some made mistakes. The bottom line is they all had their individual approach to engaging in the groundswell. Eleftherios Hatziioannou, former Global Social Media Manager at Mercedes-Benz was talking about how the company recognized how important the dialog is as opposed to one way marketing, and how they started to listen to their customers, draw conclusions, and implement new marketing strategies. Another approach was described in an interview with Bianca Buckridee, AVP, Social Media Engagement at SunTrust Bank, who pointed out that their engagement with social media started from her reaching out to already existing Twitter customer's forums, and responding to them which triggered a huge change and a real dialog. These were the accounts of the very beginnings of engaging.
                                  

In 2012 this is already another stage/era of social media. Now all big brands are already deeply submerged in the social media trends. Now branding is about successful social media presence, and campaigns that work...or don't work.  Now we can read case studies of the successful and unsuccessful engaging campaigns, and learn from them.
We have already created a social media history page for everyone to learn from in the form of case studies.
There is no better way to learn how to make your company/brand media campaign engaging, than to learn from real life examples like the ones in the articles 30+Engaging Social Media Case Studies, or Case Studies & White Papers.
There are many sources and examples of success or failure in companies engagement in social media.
Engaging customer base is the goal of every company and very important part of social media. In order to be successful and count on long term growth, every company must build a relationship with their fans, customers, and even their opponents. IBM is one of the companies who took the engagement with their customers to higher level. They do understand that the old way of doing business is all gone. The fundamental change in relationships with the customers is to show them that the huge company like IBM has a human face, that the business is not only about making profit, but also about giving to community. One of the problems that big companies are facing nowadays is the general public lack of trust in their proper conduct.

IBM is trying to portray the company as transparent. The customers have the right to know everything about the product, how it is made, where it is made, who is their employers, how they treat the employers etc..
The IBM makes it clear that they make all the information available to the public, that they have nothing to hide. The companies in social media had to make this transition and become transparent.

Another condition that cannot be underestimated to engage successfully  in social media is building an ecosystem around the company,  which is explained in detail in the article from  January 10, 2012  by SanjayShetty . The main motto here is : “The presence of a community that complements a cause fosters endurance.” – Guy Kawasaki, Enchantment.
So it is all about building a community around your company/ brand, doing it effectively and on the daily basis. "In today’s social world, it’s about building an ecosystem around your company and it’s social media, brand advocate and community program."