Gregory Segall from One Pica discusses how companies can use social media strategies to build buzz.
Boston Business Journal - August 24th, 2007
Drew Atkin's workday doesn't seem all that different from time he'd spend goofing off in his dorm room.
The bulk of Atkin's internship at Watertown-based Pangea Media involves trolling around on the hugely popular social networking site MySpace, jumping onto online discussion boards and posting the company's short, quirky Quibblo quizzes for others to pass around.
"It's a weird mix," said Atkin, a Northeastern University sophomore who goes under the username "Quibblo" on MySpace. "Generally you do this anyway, but it's not like you're on the site for yourself."
If unusual, Atkin's job is increasingly popular.
As commercial ventures move to capitalize on the popularity of social networking sites, there are a lot of people who are not on MySpace for themselves. Indeed, companies are trying to use these sites to build buzz around products or services.
To do so, they are employing erstwhile ordinary users -- often college students -- who know their way around a Facebook profile and keep large cadres of online pals.
"College-age kids are often the people most in touch with the newest technologies and big social networks, which allows us to capitalize on their knowledge and expertise," said Seth Lieberman, president of Pangea Media.
Said Greg Segall, president of Boston-based One Pica Inc., "What we're trying to do here is infiltrate this social networking scene." One Pica is in the process of recruiting four "influencers" to spend between 25 and 40 hours a week promoting a music-related client on various social networking sites.
Once on staff, these employees will spend their days hunting for discussion groups that focus on music, starting chats and covertly creating hype for One Pica's client.
Typical pay for this kind of task is around $8 to $12 an hour.
The allure for a client is obvious. A campaign can range from $5,000 to $25,000 depending on its length and intensity. That's well below a traditional word-of-mouth marketing campaign, which can easily average more than $100,000, industry experts said.
As for reach, MySpace attracted more than 114 million visitors in June 2007, and rival Facebook saw more than 52 million visitors that month, according Internet metrics company comScore. And there are dozens of clones on the Web.
Some companies hire armies of college students to go out and secretly invade social networking sites and message boards, said Ben Campbell, CEO of Chelmsford-based OurStage Inc., which operates an online music contest site. Those same companies face serious backlash from the sites' users if they're found out, he said.
OurStage has two interns dedicated to pushing the company on MySpace, but they always identify themselves as representing the company. Even that kind of disclosure, however, is not enough for some in the industry.
Adam Salacuse, CEO of Boston-based marketing firm Alt Terrain, said he's phased out the practice of forming "online street teams" to blend in among blogs, chat rooms and social networks. "We still get the requests, but we steer clients to other offerings," he said. Though the tactic often brought good results, there's been an industry shift from "getting the word out there at any cost to doings things in the right context," Salacuse said.
Transparency has its problems, since most people on social networks will ignore or complain about businesses that attempt to join in. There's also concern that, as commercially minded users flood the sites, it will create an air of suspicion. "It does start to get people more skeptical about things because then they have to ask, 'Are you getting paid for this?' " said Walter Carl, a communications professor at Northeastern and an expert in word-of-mouth marketing.
In spite of the controversy, One Pica said it's not opposed to hiring stealth-mode marketers disguised as eager fans of a client -- so long as their enthusiasm is genuine. "If they don't believe it then they're not right for the job," Segall said.
For the college students hired to build buzz on social networking sites, the job doesn't have to end after summer break. Said Atkin: "It's definitely something that I'm going to keep doing, because when school starts I can just do it from my dorm room."
