Buzzworthy Social Content

If you read my last posting – Facebook’s Identity Crisis – you already know that I am not a fan of the most popular social site. As in any business case you may have created or reviewed, it all boils down to value to the individual consumer or enterprise customer. There are a number of ways value can be defined and measured but when it comes to the social media, one theory that is starting to emerge is to measure the buzz-iness or buzz-worthiness of the social content being generated or pushed by this new media channel/outlet.

The typical human being craves attention and likes to be quoted or discussed in a positive light. Brands are no different since they too want to be the center of all conversations in their specific category of product or service. We constantly look at ways to improve our “personal” brands whereas companies look for ways to enhance their corporate brand equity, awareness, recall, and value. Getting people to notice you, know you, admire you, emulate you, imitate you, follow you, etc. is one of the primary motivations for you to becoming part of a social network like FB. So the most logical ROI worthy metric to track here would be how often, how much, and in what light are people talking about you or your product/service? This needs to be tracked and measured not just at the primary location (like FB, Twitter, etc.) but also in secondary and tertiary locations like blogs, news/journals sites, conferences, malls, airports, schools, etc.

Let’s not kid ourselves – after spending all that time taking pictures and posting them, writing things that you consider funny or shocking or useful, and targeting people to follow you or become your fan, you would like them to talk about you (or your content) and recommend you (or your content) to their network. In the marketing circles, this phenomenon goes by WOM (word of mouth) or Viral marketing. Companies want to leverage the network effect of these social media outlets and spread the word about their wares. The momentum generated by a combination of a powerful message and a powerful network is second to none. The quality of the momentum generated here is direct proportional to the quality of the message as well as the quality of the network. What these messages and networks help generate are interactions and transactions that can eventually result in revenue and market share growth that companies are hoping to achieve via the New Media.

So going back to my issue with FB’s value proposition - FB (and for that matter other social sites) needs to invest in innovative toolkits and best practices to help their paying customers be able to generate/publish content that results in valuable interactions and transactions within their network. Content needs to be buzz-worthy, i.e. it needs to be compelling enough for the consumer to remember, it needs to stand out from all the other content that is being peddled to the consumer (in that category or segment), and it needs to be recallable, reproducible, and reliable. There is an opportunity here for FB and its customers to potentially collaborate and come up with a BSC (Balanced Score Card) to measure the performance of their social media investments and link these investments all the way to the desired business outcomes (like loyalty, profitability, productivity, etc.).

As always, would love to hear back from you on my ideas. Let me know if my blog posting is buzz-worthy!