Social Media Monitoring - Part Two

I have been monitoring a name and brand of the TV reality show "Cake Boss" since October 2nd till November 4th. I have chosen Cake Boss because he is a small business owner who enjoys popularity of a big corporation. How does he energize his fans so effectively?
He is officially a baker, but in reality he is a great designer and engineer who on top of that is able to enjoy great popularity for displaying good old fashioned family values. This trait alone plus his highly energetic public persona, gives him all the social media attention he needs to get to the top. Buddy is famous and his TLC TV reality show is his main marketing vehicle for obtaining a status of an internationally recognized celebrity (Wikipedia- list of all episodes). Buddy says he is in a "dream business" making his customers' dreams come true. He has a very long list of famous people who ordered cakes from him. Hoboken, NJ became a popular tourist destination partly because of Cake Boss.

He writes a book about his family and begins selling it in October. His cakes are now sold nationwide, and just made their way to the stores like Big Y, Price Chopper, and BJs in October. October was the month I was monitoring Cake Boss in social media.

I was monitoring Cake Boss on several social media platforms and noticed his steady popularity growth.
You Tube and Netflix has all the episodes of his TLC TV show featuring Carlo's Bakery and La Famiglia.

He has at least three campaigns open during my time of monitoring him. Also two events that I would call "organic events" that seem to influence his popularity on Google trends and in social mention. One of them is his mom unfortunately being diagnosed with a rare disease, and family coping with ALS. The other event was Hurricane Sandy affecting his town Hoboken, NJ.
The campaigns in October:
1. live tour "Buddy Valastro Live"
2. cake contest "Who Takes the Cake"
3. Cake Boss's book in stores (Stories and Recipies from Mia Famiglia)
4. Cake Boss cakes in stores nationwide

My final monitoring results show his steady growth in social media presence.
Facebook: From October 2nd till November 2nd, Cake Boss got 137.274  likes on Facebook. For comparison sake the most famous cake baker in Boston Konditor Meister Inc. has 4092 likes all together.Buddy's Facebook which is very interactive and displays all the upcoming events proves to be used in an excellent way here.

Twitter: He had 9853 more people talking about it after my one month monitoring him. He seems to thrive on Twitter too. Buddy had 10.500 more followers on Twitter in October alone. People seem to be interested in what he and his family is up to. He has average 328 followers a day. It is as much as you can get.

Blogs: I found that Cake Boss is very good in energizing his fans so that they write blogs about him. I found several blogs written on regular basis about him by his fans like:
http://theoriginalcakebossblog.blogspot.com/  
http://blogs.discovery.com/tlc-cake-boss/  
http://cakebossfan.wordpress.com/;
http://blog.passion-for-parties.com/2011/06/cake-boss-party-part-one.html. 

Cake Boss has growing social media trends and more mentions in the end of my monitoring session.
In Google trends and Ice-Rocket tools the results are showing growth too. The line is up and down in October with ups and downs in between 60 to 100 points in Google trends, but it never gets too low, and always bounces up.

in social mention his strength went up and down too from 29% to as low as 1% on October 28th back to 26% in the end of October, beginning November as a result of Hurricane Sandy. His sentiment stayed steady around 10%, passion for Cake Boss was rising about 13%, and reach went down at first significantly from 62 to 35, then went up a little to 48%. 

 

As far as the target audience is concerned, I found out that the show has a little different demographics than Carlo's Bakery audience, but mostly it is a young audience for the show and older one for bakery.The show is very popular with young females 18-24 and males young and old 25-64.
Carlo's Bakery draws males between 25-64, and females 18-24 according to the source Alexa web-side.

My final conclusion is that Cake Boss has a great social media presence for small business category. He is very clever in listening, talking, energizing, supporting his fans, and building community around his brand.

I would recommend that he keeps doing what he is doing to further expand his business which is already very well established and growing fast.

Latest summarizing  results on Google trends from, today 11/28/12

what about small business and social media

One of the biggest challenge of  the business today is staying on top of new constant changing technologies and introducing successfully new ways of marketing communications through social media.
As we read in the book Groundswell approaching the final chapters, companies struggle to embrace social media, some with more success than others. Companies which are successful in social media, thrive and expand their business, companies that stay behind the trend, are also losing profit.  Old ways of marketing are gone, leaving companies no choice but to adjust to two way communication with no control over the audience. A two-way communication has dominated the social media, and companies have to get used to the fact that they can no longer monitor and control what customers are saying and doing using social media platform. Big companies are already engaged and immersed in the groundswell, having communities built around them.
 

“The groundswell is a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions, like corporations.”
- Charlene Li & Josh Bernof


This book is a breakthrough guide for corporate world and teaches how to properly engage in social media, but it does not really say much about small business.  In a review of the "Groundswell" by Jason Keath, the author is saying:  "Groundswell is written to corporate America more than smaller businesses and entrepreneurs. It suggests some of the most expensive options out there to build social technology solutions and track your brand online. But there are tons of free, open source solutions that are much more realistic for most of the people that will read the book.". Basically what he suggests is that somebody should write a similar book for small business owners with tips for using free solutions like that.

During my monitoring process of one small company and its brand, I have noticed that the same rules apply to small business as to big corporations, except that small companies do not invent strategies and use expensive monitoring techniques, they just engage in social media without all the research, and some of them, like my monitored client are able to achieve a great deal of success. It appears that my client, Buddy Valastro, Cake Boss is using social media effortlessly and gains a lot of attention, but in his case the main vehicle driving his success is his TV reality show. For all other small businesses without TV presence, the task of getting out there and be noticed and talked about is more difficult.

According to Forbes magazine, small business owners do not have time to engage in social media.They performed a study surveying about 500 small business owners about their social media use.
It turned out that the small business owners are also embracing social media just like big corporations, but they do it differently and less effectively than big companies. Of course a big factor here is less money and less time for engaging in the groundswell. Big firm has money to pay people to do social media marketing, and they have money to pay for expensive campaigns.
Small business owners too, spend more time and money on social media than before. Nearly half of respondents spend over six hours a week at it, and another quarter spend six to ten hours posting to various social-media sites.Most of them have a Facebook page, and concentrate on that, but because they don't have time, they usually operate in marketing vacuum not tracking the results.They mostly do Facebook updates uploading pictures and specials sometimes on Twitter too, two-thirds are regulars on Facebook. About half are regular users of Twitter according to Forbes source.

The biggest problem facing small business owners is lack of quality content for blogs. Only just over half the owners reported having a blog. They just do not have much to write about.
The bloggers were saying they spend hours on their posts — 45 percent said one to three hours a week, and 16 percent more than three hours. Finding a good content to write about was definitely a challenge to many.
Some businesses may be missing the point by posting pictures of pets and downloading cute videos, which has no impact on their business ROI . Most small business owners have no idea what their ROI really is as a result of their engagement in social media.

The biggest problem of small entrepreneurs seems to be lack of time and lack of tracking results of their social media campaigns. A lot of information for incorporating social media into small business is available on the internet. As far as I know there is no book written about it yet..

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