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