First up, full disclosure: Joffrey’s Coffee & Tea Company is a client of mine…
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:

image credit: dbarefoot
Continuing my series on documenting social media power users and influencers, this week I’ve got five more wonderful people to share with you.
Again, these are in no particular order and I am taking the time to write on not only the big-name players, but perhaps even more interesting I will tell the stories of power users in the long tail also.
If you missed last week’s entry, start by checking out:
Social Media Power Users And Influencers: Part 1
Now that you’re caught up, let’s get into part 2: Continue reading...
Agencies or people that offer SEO services, yet have a site that scores poorly in free SEO tools like Website Grader and have dismal traffic rank in Alexa.
Web professionals who you Google and find they don’t have their own blog and a large digital footprint.
Marketing companies or individuals that do blog, but don’t inspire traffic, links or comments on their site.
Are you weary of these things? I certainly am.
What chance does a company or person that can’t deliver real results for themselves have of delivering real results for you? Continue reading...
Read a great post recently at Twist Image on selling 2.0 - letting the customer do the communicating. Mitch writes on the great strategy used by e-commerce sites for empowering consumers to be vocal about products and what they like and don’t directly on the same page as the product.
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. Continue reading...

image credit: fred cavazza (click image for high resolution version)
A major aim of The Future Buzz (as seen in the tag line at the top of this blog) is helping you create buzz on the web. If you’re reading this, certainly one of your goals is to become a power user of social media or high profile blogger, and/or learn how to bend the network to your advantage.
As such, it is prudent to learn what others have done/are doing successfully at the edge. Studying how social media power users (or influencers, same thing) create and share information, ideas and trends with the world and their interactions with their carefully built networks is vital to becoming one yourself. Continue reading...