Buzz words

So Google Buzz went live 2 days ago, and I for one wanted to try it immediately.

My last blog post about Google's entry into Twitter's turf was a bit skeptical, but I've learnt to accept Google's many forays because it does on a very large scale what most marketers should always be doing:

Testing.

The questions I had - and was answering in my head anyway - were what if Google fails on this, and what if it succeeds, or even better: what if it trumps its own social network site: Facebook?

In the end, the one answer I got was: so what? Either way, Google wins because despite it acting like a kid with a large lego set constantly creating either great works of mechanics or something your robot-dog dragged in, people talk about it.

And you ALWAYS want people talking about your brand.

Coming to the product: I like Buzz. I think Buzz has potential.

Is Google God? Or just a new China?

So here's the news from Techtree.com:

Google will tonight (February 9, 2010) launch an initial version of its rival to Facebook.

Counter-productive? Counter-intuitive?

An extremely smart move to capture the silent market?

Is Pepsi trumping Coke on new media?

First, it was a brilliant viral+CSR campaign by Pepsi to embrace social media with their new website.

Then, they give up the multi-million dollar-costing, multi-multi-million viewer-reaching campaign after 20 years and instead are investing all their marketing efforts in social media.

If the world's most competitive brand embraces social media this way and in the process has already beaten its arch rival and world leading marketing firm in this area, learn from it.

I'm not going to argue that Social Media is here to stay and blah blah blah, because no one argues anymore that email is here to stay.

Its a given.

What remains to be seen is how many people still call it a fad.

Facebook has more users than that entire population of the United States, and there are more video-hours uploaded onto YouTube in one day than have been created by NBC, ABC and MGM in their entire history of filmmaking.

Chew on that.

Burj-eoning cliches...

Its hilarious how the marketing industry works most of the time.

When patronising something, go all out, but if the subject you're patronising suddenly becomes the object of ridicule, go all out ridiculing it, and once its the darling of the masses again, patronise once more.

Burj Dubai was the darling of the masses - and hence marketing folks - in Dubai and worldwide for the better part of 4 years. Enter Mrs. Recession, with her excessive shopping on credit which she never intended to pay back since what she was buying never existed in the first place.

Burj Dubai became the muse of pipe-dream stories attributed to the Emirate of Dubai. Everytime there was a new story about old loans related to Dubai, the image in the news article would inevitably be of the Burj.

You could spin it any way you want, but the atmosphere was evident: people loved hating Dubai, and Burj Dubai was their bulls-eye.

Enter January 4. Shaikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum unveils what can easily be described as the greatest opening ceremony in construction history. It was as if Babel was built once more, and succeeded. Naming it the Burj Khalifa was even more of a marketer's dream and PR guy's worst nightmare, but it worked.

Overnight, every article on the planet would - even if it couldn't say a nice thing about the Emirate itself - drool on the Burj and its opening.

And then, the facebook status.

Without naming the executive of Publicis in Dubai who did it, the status was simple: 'Burj Khalifa, Dubai's middle finger to the world'.

This status, from a single facebook entry, became the hottest status on the planet related to Dubai, and even entered the Financial Times' editorials. It began a tweeting frenzy, and countless others copied it. It trended like hell. Got folks talking, became the new Dubai buzz.

One status changed the mindset of millions.

Marketing at its best. And free at that.