The QSR industry (QSR stands for Quick Service Restaurant, if you aren’t aware) in particular seems to have a big opportunity here, as many people are already quite fond of their brands.

In fact, the tactics they can take don’t have to be anything crazy and could be quite simple, especially if there is pent-up demand for their presence in the social space.

Everyone is marketing web products like crazy online.  Physical products are used by people online too, and the realization that most reading this already know is that those active on the web don’t see a difference between interacting on and off the web.  It’s a big missed opportunity here not to join the conversation about your own brand.

Purely having a website and static presence isn’t enough to engage your true fans, they crave a deeper interaction.  Not having a social presence on the web is analagous to going to your own birthday party and then standing in the corner, ignoring everyone who is trying to talk to you, or is talking about you.

Follow Popeyes on Twitter

Popeyes Chicken is using Twitter in a positive way to interact with their fans in this space.  If you search for Popeyes on Twitter, you’ll quickly notice there is plenty of positive feedback about the brand.  It was a smart choice for Popeyes to enter this space and they seem to be doing well interacting here.

They aren’t capitalizing on social media like they could though.  It feels a bit disjointed to me to purely participate in microblogging without having their own blog to document their experiences in Twitter and tell deeper stories about the brand.  That’s great that they are using one tool, but microblogging is just an “outpost” to what your web presence could be in it’s most optimized state.

Then, there are others in the QSR industry (and plenty of other industries) who set up shop in Facebook/MySpcae:

Jamba Juice has setup a Facebook fan page that easily amassed 47,000+ fans on the site.  That’s a great indicator of the popularity of Jamba Juice in the social space, although the page seemed like it was a bit thin on information about the brand.  Merely has a few lines about the company overview.  They didn’t even add any product photos to the page.  Facebook is a great place to have a presence, and their logo now sits on 47,000+ profiles next to those fans.  But again, seems like a missed opportunity not to build interactions with those people who have opted in to receieve their messages on the network.

Popeyes and Jamba are using the tools, sure.  But what I’m getting at is these tools could be used as outposts to draw traffic into somewhere with a deeper interaction and converting the people to subscribers of their brand.

Let’s look at how a web professional uses outposts successfully to draw traffic and interest to his blog and build community.

This is an image from Darren Rowse at ProBlogger representing how he uses outposts (the social networks on the chart) to draw traffic to his blog, ProBlogger (the logo in the middle represents his blog).  He uses them to:

• add content
• build relationships
• test ideas
• grow a profile
• listen
• experiment
• make connections
• try to be useful
• play

Read Darren’s whole post here.

Essentially what Darren has is a consolidated place on the web that he can call his home base, the place he wants to draw people to become subscribers of his content and continue to interact daily.  Your home base cannot be a static website, at least not if your goal is sustained traffic building.  It needs to be something social that is frequently updated with content people will actually care about.

The goal here is not one-off traffic.  Your goal should be to build consistent, loyal traffic that is going to spread your brand and build your business.  People don’t return to static websites, or even interactive websites that are really still the same each time you visit.

Everyone has stories to tell, not merely bloggers.  Brands potentially have even more stories to tell about what they’re doing.  Using social media services here is just one part of the puzzle.  You need an integrated approach with a home base on the web (a blog is the perfect platform) where you’re building return, loyal traffic and providing those people value, community and connections.

This matters for the QSR industry and really any industry looking to boost their exposure and traffic on the web.  Ultimately more traffic, more share of voice and more interactions on the web equals greater business and sales off the web.

Related posts from The Future Buzz

10 Reasons Why Organizations (And Individuals) With Audiences Win

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QSR Industry And The Social Web is from The Future Buzz, a Blog Covering Digital Marketing

With that said – previously I wrote a case study on building buzz in the blogosphere regarding a viral campaign I implemented for Joffrey’s called “Joffrey’s Java Beta Test”.  With the help of Wake Interactive for web design(they do fantastic work by the way, I cannot speak highly enough of them), we were able to make a lot of people happy and bring together a plethora of bloggers for something really fun.

Some highlights from the beta test were:

• 1500+ blogs participating
• Thousands of mentions for the campaign throughout the Web
• Hundreds of links to the beta site and to Joffreys.com
• Nice spike in traffic to Joffreys.com
• Hundreds of comments, responses and feedback from bloggers and the Web community
• Coverage on 150+ blogs, including Technorati top 100 sites.
• Coverage by traditional media including Entrepreneur Magazine (I’m still buzzing that in the article Chris Alden, CEO of Six Apart, called the beta test a great idea – if you’re reading this – thanks Chris, that means a lot)

Well, building upon the success and buzz of this campaign and the incredibly positive response of the blogosphere and web community, we took the feedback from bloggers into consideration and took it a step further.

During the beta test, an open-ended question asked bloggers: “If you could create a new flavor of coffee, what would it be?”  The most popular answers were some incantation of a highly caffeinated, extra strong, bold blend of coffee, which inspired Joffrey’s Coffee & Tea Company to create a new energized blend.  But, what to name it?  One clever blogger:  Eric Friedman, who blogs at Marketing.fm, submitted the suggestion “Coffee 2.0,” and the name stuck.

Image of Coffee 2.0 one full pound bag:

Check out the product yourself at:  Coffee20.Joffreys.com

Joffrey’s Coffee 2.0 java update includes:
•    Feedback incorporated from 1,500+ bloggers
•    Upgraded flavor and taste featuring smooth caramel and smoky overtones
•    Increased focus power for less distraction
•    Faster, more efficient mental processing
•    Amplified energy for blogging, coding or gaming output
•    Regular drip coffee and espresso capabilities

As a thank you to the blogosphere for inspiring a new flavor, we recently shipped 1,000 US beta testers a sample along with the following flyer.  Can you guess what the inspiration for the flyer design was?

Oh, and the java…it’s delicious.  Don’t take my word for it though, read what the web is saying.

Check out PR Week’s wrap up of the campaign.

Also be sure to view the SlideShare presentation of this campaign.

Related posts from The Future Buzz

Geeks:  The New Influencers

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Crowdsourced Java: Joffrey’s Coffee 2.0 Inspired By 1,500 Beta Testers is from The Future Buzz, a Blog Covering Digital Marketing

Amazon comes to mind as a site that does this extremely well.  When making a purchase (which is pretty frequently as I’m addicted to reading) I always read the consumer reviews there, especially when it comes to new authors.  The consumer reviews always tell the real story about the product.  And everyone knows it, I am willing to bet a heat-map of an Amazon product page shows consumers spending more time reading reviews than the publisher copy someone painstakingly drafted.

Why is this?  Simple – we know the publisher copy is going to gush praise.  While it is worthwhile in getting someone’s attention and providing them an intro, what provides real value in a consumer site that is unfamiliar territory with a potential new visitor is other consumer’s opinions and thoughts.  It is social proofing.

Use the tools available to work for you…connect and empower your customers on your site

Consumers are smart, and can tell authenticity from a mile away — when looking at ad copy online they are skeptical.  And who can blame them, they are interacting with something nebulous.  In a physical store a product is tangible.  On the web, user reviews and social proofing for your product or brand are what create a digital sense of tangibility.

Injecting authenticity into the mix through giving your customers a voice is both disarming and empowering.  It’s also a way to provide tangible value and build trust with your biggest fans while helping new ones get into your brand.

Amazon goes a step further than most and shows you not only the most helpful positive review but also the most helpful negative review.  Have a look at this example from Richard Dawkins book:  “The God Delusion” (I chose this because it is a highly controversial book – I knew there would be strong opinions for and against it):

This shows just how much Amazon cares about informing the customer, in fact the fact that there were a slew of negative and glowing reviews says to me the book is probably worth reading, if nothing else to see what everyone is talking about.

Showing the negative review next to the positive review makes it more authentic.

This is all well and good for Amazon, they are the 800 pound gorilla. How do you get thousands of reviews on your site?  How do you even bring people to your site in the first place?  The answer is not advertising, at least not if you want sustainable, organic growth.

Getting into the conversation off site…

This is where you’ll have to get creative and where the time commitment comes in — the real opportunity for an emerging e-commerce site is to take the conversation out of the store and into the social web.  That’s how popular blogs are built, that is how popular online services are built and that’s how sales are ultimately made.  You may have a remarkable product, but what good is it if no one is talking about it.

The web is not a broadcast medium, it is a communications medium.  When you merely broadcast messages, you’re never viewed in as authentic a light as competitors who are actually communicating.  Your brand will have less personality than competitors who are a part of the conversation if you choose to ignore it.

Lessons from popular social media sites and bloggers

For bloggers, there is incredible power of building word of mouth buzz, links and posts for your blog external of the blog itself.  This is obvious and is how blogs grow and get popular.  What are you giving to a blog?  Time, the absolute most precious resource.

The only way you actually gain a subscriber on a blog is by being visible, by being talked about, by being shared, and then ultimately providing something of value the visitor can’t get anywhere else.

Your online store needs to do all of these things too to ultimately be successful.  Conversation and community really help here.  They are what make Digg, a social media site no one had even heard of a few short years ago, consistently more popular than USA Today (and more hip, relevant and influential):

Digg’s influence extends far greater than this graph tells too.  The traffic numbers are just one piece of the puzzle — the fact that Digg has created a product tens of thousands of content providers salivate at the prospect of being a part of is another piece.  So is the amazing, tight knit community that thrives on spreading Digg as a brand and culture on and off the web.

The fact that USA Today now even has Digg buttons on their stories shows you how much they want to be a part of a product which in a few short years has built greater community than their brand ever could.  Reddit may be flirting with the future of social news, but today is Digg’s day in the light.  A monolithic, national influencer of American society has been eclipsed by a few passionate tech wizards in their garage.

Your e-commerce site has the same opportunity…

The innovators dominates the old players in a fresh landscape

I would argue Digg is even more influential than any other singular media outlet on the web, if only because they have injected a part of themselves next to millions of stories and conversations.  In many cases, they are the conversation itself.  Digg is ubiquitous, and when the early adopter crowd thinks social bookmarking, Digg is probably the first thing that comes to mind.

The best social media and social networks cultivate culture and personality with incredible precision.  Your online store needs to as well.  When people think social bookmarking, Digg comes to mind.  When people think buy shoes online, Zappos comes to mind.  When people think online books, Amazon comes to mind.

You have to take the opportunity to fill this:  when people think -insert product here- your e-commerce store comes to mind.  If it’s books, you’re facing an uphill battle.  If it is mystery books, you have a real opportunity.  Niches win.

When you think visual communications blog, what is the first thing that comes to mind?  To me, it is Smashing Magazine, and I bet to a lot of you it was too (read about their tipping points here).

What Digg and Smashing Magazine, Zappos and Amazon have successful done:

• Carved out a niche
• Reached critical mass in the conversation, which built their popularity in a self-reciprocating format
• Gave a compelling story to tell, have a sharp personality and a strong brand
• Never gave up, persevered no matter what
• Have remarkable, unique and functional site designs
• Engage their fans through community building and gave them all a voice, leaving them empowered

Why I am comparing e-commerce, blogs and social media:

Hopefully you’ve read this far and I can tie this together.  Studying blogs and successful social media sites is vital for people running online stores because gaining an RSS subscriber to a blog is actually more difficult than getting someone to make a purchase at an e-commerce site.  Getting a new active, loyal user to a social media site like Digg (at least, in the beginning) is also more difficult than getting someone to make a purchase at an e-commerce site.  Oh, and neither of those two charge anything to that visitor.

Yes, you read that right, it is harder to give something intangible away free than it is sell something tangible.  The only way it gets easier for the intangibles is if they persevere and don’t give up.  The same is true about tangible products too.

Don’t think so?  Go ask a new blogger or the people at a new social media startup what their conversation ratios (or bounce rates) are.

Time is a deeper commitment than money…

Selling someone that your blog content or is worthwhile interacting with for hours, potentially days in aggregate is a deep decision, deeper than purchasing a product.  Yes, it is free, but the opportunity cost of that time is high.

The ratios of visitors to subscribers to even the best blogs looks to be well below that of e-commerce sites.  Darren Rowse has had nearly 10 million visitors to his blog, ProBlogger — probably far more, as I do not think he started the site-meter monitoring from the beginning.  Yet he only has around 50,000 RSS subscribers.

That is a mere .5% conversion ratio by a blog with some of the best, most useful content on the web, read by people who are well aware of what RSS is.

Is this due to poor content?  Not enough subscription options?  No, it is the time commitment someone knows they have to make when they subscribe to a blog.

The industry average for e-commerce conversions is around 2%.  In other words, 4 times greater than the ratio for Darren’s blog.  But he’s highly successful, despite that paltry half a percent of visitors who actually subscribe and he has built a tight knit, loyal community around his site that will do his marketing for him and keep loyal fans coming back for more.

**Side note:  readers who have blogs, I would love for you to comment on the ratio of RSS subscribers to unique visitor numbers on your site to see how some other numbers stack up.  

Conclusion

Great bloggers build a relationship with those few who subscribe over time.  This leads to increased traffic due to building value and mutual reciprocity with those people and in turn more subscribers, even if the ratio is small (some people have figured out clever ways to inch this up, I am sure).

The same strategy can work for e-commerce with even higher returns as the conversion ratio is clearly higher.  Just like blogging, however, you have to stick with it, be in it for the long haul, and have the patience, passion and drive to outlast your competition.

Have you read Kevin Kelly’s essay on True Fans?  You should, there are key lessons in it for bloggers and online stores too, not just artists.  RSS subscribers are the true fans of bloggers.  Loyal customers are the true fans of your e-commerce site.  They are your vital visitors.

People who are serious about e-commerce could learn much by studying the blogosphere and consumer tech startups and how they build audiences and conversations.  With US eCommerce and Online Retail sales projected to reach $204 billion, an increase of 17 percent over 2007, there is good reason to learn what the web’s power users and influencers are doing right.

Related posts from The Future Buzz

10 Reasons Why Organizations (And Individuals) With Audiences Win

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Use The Brand Building Strategies Of Bloggers And Social Media Startups To Grow E-Commerce is from The Future Buzz, a Blog Covering Digital Marketing

Smart organizations and individuals across industries are building their brands through gathering organic audiences and encouraging dialogue.

By organic, I mean people who have opted-in to receive messages.  And, encouraging dialogue not only between individuals and the organization, but also between fans of their brand as well.  When you function as a connector, you become even more valuable to your audience than merely providing content.

Blogs function great as connectors because they publish not only a reader’s name but a link to their blog or website when they comment.  So, when someone posts an interesting comment, it not only adds to the conversation on-site, but it allows the readers of that comment to potentially connect with the writer.

Several organizations come to mind that have developed strong community around their brand.  SEOMoz is one – they have built an entire community of SEO professionals around their site, while also selling their own products.  TopRank Online Marketing is another, who have built a huge following of marketers around their blog, while also selling their own marketing services.

These are just two examples and brands that I am personally a fan of.  They also both have blogs with tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of unique visitors monthly and are in the 5-digit range of RSS subscribers.

After building an audience, the possibilities opened up to your business are incredible.  By not having a platform to build an audience (along with an audience acquisition strategy, of course) you slip behind your forward-thinking competitors daily.

Let’s go through 10 reasons why organizations with organic audiences win to help make the case why you should consider building one.  These are reasons for both individuals or businesses to build an audience.  One of the best and most efficient ways to do this currently is through blogging.

Anyway, without further adieu, here they are:

1)  Instead of actively looking for customers/clients, they will stumble-upon you

Companies spend so much time cold calling, advertising and throwing money at traditional marketing methods.  If you can build an audience, you can communicate with people in anticipated, relevant ways and spread your messages to people who want to hear it.  Wouldn’t it be nice if your customers or new clients came directly to you?

2)  When you publish something interesting, your audience will share it with others

The social web is all about sharing content.  Right now, people are actively sharing the content your competitors are producing.  And, if you’re not producing anything of your own, then there is unfortunately nothing people can share surrounding your brand.

3)  Having an audience allows you to carve out a voice in your industry and be seen as the “go-to” company

Carve out an audience in your field for the niche you really want to fill, and you can dominate any competition by being the “go to” company for that niche.  If you’re already seen as the best, everyone else’s marketing messages will fall flat.

4)  You will cultivate the best talent

The best talent is hard to find and keep, and smart people are motivated by passionate companies.  The only way you’ll build an audience in the first place is by demonstrating your passion.  It’s a natural by-product that you’ll also attract great talent this way.

5)  Your expertise will be on display in black and white

If you build and maintain an audience, that’s a pretty strong endorsement.  All other things being equal, if I was looking at two potential vendors for something, and one company had an active blog with 20,000 subscribers to their RSS feed with incredible content, and the other merely had a few static pages with sales copy – it would be a no-brainer who I would hire.

6)  You won’t have to rely (as heavily) on others to publish your news

I’m not saying you should ignore PR, certainly the endorsement of others is a strong sell for whatever it is you’re doing.  But, when you have your own audience built, it is a lot of pressure off needing others to publish your messages.  And after you have built an audience, the media opportunities you’ll have increase exponentially, as your organizations visibility and trust in the world will skyrocket.

7)  You’ll build links, traffic and exposure for your .com and your business as a whole

Building your audience through a blog platform is the smartest way to go, as you’ll accomplish so many positive things simultaneously.  Purely building an e-newsletter audience is a mistake, because you miss out on people linking to you, and all the organic SEO of having your content on actual pages on the web.  Plus all of that archived content serves to create a deeper authority on the web for your business and trust in search engines.  E-newsletters also do not encourage dialogue with your fans and are, in my mind, (sorry for the cliche) a “marketing 1.0″ tactic.  Time to get up to speed and do things better.

8)  Speaking engagements, panel discussions, and conference leaders will come to you

By building an audience, you open up your potential network for all of these things and more.  Your content serves to establish your authority, and eventually if you work hard enough these opportunities will seek you out naturally.

9)  You can build community around your brand

I mentioned this in the introduction, and there is so much talk in blogosphere about this lately.  If you’re reading the same blogs as I am you may be sick of reading about this.  But, it’s so true and it’s the future the present way to successfully spread ideas and build influence on the web.  As the weeks and months go by, the audience around your brand will grow larger, and the community will grow tighter.  This builds your company high levels of influence and relevance.  You can’t put a price tag on either of these things, and prior to the web there were not many ways to accomplish it on a mass scale.

The fact that this is even possible now means it is something you should be jumping at the opportunity to do, not waiting to see what your competitors are doing.  Waiting here may prove more dangerous than diving in.

10)  When you have a great idea to spread, it’s as simple as clicking publish

When you have an audience already built, anything you wish to spread – whether it’s tips on your industry, a case study you created to share your success on a project or just some motivation for the day, the web couldn’t make distributing your messages to the world easier and more direct.  Plenty of smart organizations are using this to their advantage daily.  When your competitors have this ability, how can you afford not to not have this as an integral part of your communications arsenal?

Related articles from The Future Buzz

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10 Reasons Why Organizations (And Individuals) With Audiences Win is from The Future Buzz, a Blog Covering Digital Marketing

I receieve a decent amount of reader questions via email.  I always take time to give a response, as generally email questions are quick one-offs, and I’m happy to answer.

Once in awhile I get an email question asking for detailed, specific advice and seeking a more in-depth response.  When that happens, I give the writer two options:

1)  I can answer the question in an open-format for all my readers to see and get value from.  In this case I can either give detailed advice to your company if you’re willing to let me disclose your company name and issues publicly, or I can tackle the question from a general perspective and keep your company name private (unfortunately with this method, I can never be as thorough with an answer).

or

2)  If you’d like an ultra-high level of consulting and analysis privately, you can engage my services through the firm I work for.

I think this method is more than fair, and is the best way I can help everyone seeking my advice.

Today, I have a good question from the marketing assistant for a popular up-and-coming web brand which I will tackle from a general perspective, as they asked me not to disclose their company name.  For perspective, the website’s Alexa rank is around 50,000 (a decently popular site).

I edited out the specific name of the .com in the email, as well as the intro and will just show you the meat of their question:

We have several marketing strategies currently inplay, for example, we recently developed partnerships with several large online media blogs, which are sending us significant regular traffic (sites with readership comparable to the Huffington Post).

We also regularly run specific initiatives and target our network of bloggers, many of whom we have built good working relationships with.  For example, this week we created a campaign around a current event, marketed it through blogs, Twitter, comment boards and other social networking sites, all of which drive a decent amount of traffic.

Currently about half of our traffic is coming from search. We are participating actively in social media sites to build community, although are careful not to submit any of our own content. If we are submitted by someone else and get a popular article, then that’s a bonus, but it’s not our goal.

I would be really keen to hear any thoughts you might have around

a) How you think we could optimize our site for social media sites, and

b) Any specific tips you might have on building good karma and a good network on Reddit specifically.

I do wish they had let me tackle this specifically for their .com as have a few ideas targeted directly at their site.  No matter, we’ll tackle this as tips all of you can benefit from.

Let’s spin the first question to a more general perspective:

How you think a company can optimize an already popular .com for social media sites?

I’m going to approach this from a marketing/PR/branding angle, as that’s what this blog is about.  Let’s also break this up into strategies for service and content based sites.

Service-based sites, web applications, up-and-coming social networking sites, etc.

Service-based sites can spread in social media, sure, especially if the service is brand new and innovative.  But, after the first wave of exposure for a new service has happened in social media, that’s probably the biggest bump they will receieve.  Unless that brand cultivates some serious culture around it.

Gmail is a great case study to look at for this.  They have cultivated culture around their product in so many ways I can’t possibly list them all here.  They have done things like keep the Gmail development blog, which is truly deep and let’s users get a glimpse of what they are working on.  They have built support behind their brand among bloggers, social media users, and web professionals (read my post yestarday on why it’s such a great service).

Gmail inspires so much content to be created behind their brand because of their sheer dedication to the product.  You don’t see people creating videos like this for Yahoo mail or Hotmail:

[youtube qKAInP_tmHk]

You don’t see this many front page stories on Digg for Hotmail:

Check out 25 pages of front page Digg stories about Gmail.  Compare that with only 3 pages of stories about Hotmail (and there is a ton of negativity surrounding them – if you want to see what Digg users really think of Hotmail, read the comments in some of those stories).  It could not be more clear what service the early adopters favor.

Bottom line:  create raving fans around your product, and they will spread it for you through social media.  One great way this is done is by building up a culture behind your product.  How you do that, I leave to you.  Digg has built up an absolutely amazing culture behind their brand by putting dynamic people like Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson in the spotlight and hosting meetups and town halls.  Google opens up the creative and development process to let their fans have an insight into what makes them tick.  You have to do so in a way which makes sense for your brand.

Once you have a community of people living and breathing your culture as a web brand, you’ll enjoy an influx of people blogging about your service, sharing their personal experiences with your brand and spreading positive word of mouth buzz (the most powerful kind) across platforms.

You’ll end up highlighted in social media too, however it is an indirect result of building your web brand by creating community surrounding it.  It takes time and it’s not something all brands have the drive to achieve, but the results are cumulative.  It’s a strategy for a passionate brand, and in fact some brands seem to achieve it almost effortlessly.

Content-based sites

Content-based sites are different, as they are constantly updated with new content of all types.  There is always something fresh that can be shared around social media, and thus presents many opportunities to tap into that flow of traffic and users.

If you’re making content that vibes with a good amount of people, chances are it will end up on the many content sharing sites around the web.  Certainly, this is a great way to spread some exposure for your brand.

A quick disclaimer though in case any of you think this is a shortcut to popularity:  social media sites are not overnight king-makers for your content brand on the web.  They can help you along the way, but diversifying your traffic streams is the smartest way to go for sustainable results, not just spikes.

With that said, there are a plethora of sites devoted to helping you create content that has the best chances to spread across social media.  Here’s a few resources to help you get started:

37 Viral Post Ideas You Can Use Today (SkellieWag)

A 3 Step Approach To Strategic Content Development (CopyBlogger)

5 Rules Of Social Media Optimization (Influencial Marketing Blog)

6 Viral Seeding Must-Haves (Dan Zarella)

On Linkbaits, Socialbaits, and Viral Content (Daily Blog Tips)

How To Get To The Front Page Of Digg – 6 Ingredients Of A Successful Digg Campaign (ProBlogger)

Even for a content-based site, cultivating a strong culture behind your brand will help you long-term.

If it’s a blog your running, great – your personality is the defining characteristic behind the site.  If you’re an interesting blogger, this should in time build subscribers around your blog that reflects your personal brand.  It’s the law of attraction in action.

Question two was:

b) Any specific tips you might have on building good karma and a good network on Reddit specifically.

I would say become an active user on the network, and contribute to the network frequently with comments, submissions and voting.  Become a respected power-user of that community.

You should never attempt to game the system of Digg, Reddit or any type of content sharing site.  It is unsustainable, and you will ultimately get caught and thrown on display for the whole network to see.  Not that they asked about gaming the system, it certainly seems like this person wants to go about things in the proper way, I am just clarifying that for those who have thought about gaming the system somewhere.

Certainly, getting social is a great way to build new interest in whatever you’re doing on the web.  You can create a social networking personality across platforms as a brand, as long as you do so transparently.

The thing is, if you’re already at a tipping point with traffic (for example, if you have an Alexa rank of 50,000) and one of your goals is to increase social media exposure, you probably need to take stock of things from an internal perspective, audit the current level of social media traffic, mentions and interest, and ask yourself if what you’re doing is something that can realistically be shared across social media.

At a high level of traffic/subscribers, you will have a built-in audience of social media users who could potentially share something about your service on their blog, on Digg, through Facebook, on Twitter or any other channel.  You have to ask yourself the question:  what would actually inspire my users to share this?

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Influencing Social Media:  What Drives Digg And Reddit Users

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Cultivating Culture: A Vital Strategy For Building A Web Brand Through Social Media is from The Future Buzz, a Blog Covering Digital Marketing