Maybe you have seen this a lot on social media, celebrities posting paid-promotion content or celebrities giving paid reviews on products, but do you know what this strategy is called? Yes, this is called buzz marketing strategy. Simply put, buzz marketing is a viral marketing strategy that leverages fresh and creative content, interactive events, and community influencers to generate word-of-mouth marketing and anticipation for the product or service the brand is about to launch. This is a very effective marketing strategy that although it may cost so much, but you can get ROI for that. However, as a person who works at a creative agency that provides SEO services, web design and web development services as well as social media services, I know for a fact buzz marketing strategy has both benefits and drawbacks. I’m not going to list all the benefits and the drawbacks one by one, but I’m going to depict the real-life good and bad examples of buzz marketing so you can get a better understanding of it. Keep reading to find out!

Bud Light x Game of Thrones

Who doesn’t know Game of Thrones? GoT smashed HBO’s record for the 17.4 million the moment the last season was released. Even those who never watch it acknowledge its popularity. I may not one of GoT’s fans, but I know that fact. However, most people have been waiting for GoT’s last season for 20 months, and no matter how famous GoT is, they still need a little bit of PR and marketing strategy. And so they went and collaborated with Bud Light. Two months before the final season of Game of Thrones, Bud Light aired one of their Bud Knight advertisements during Super Bowl 53. However, half way through the commercial, audience immediately realised that this wasn’t just another hilariously witty Bud Knight ad. It was actually an intensely dramatic Game of Thrones ad. Since almost every Game of Thrones fan recommends the show to all their friends, which generates a lot of word-of-mouth marketing, the series doesn’t really need any influencers to promote it. However, that’s not the interesting part. What caught my eyes is the fact that Bud Light is so eager to share one of their most-watched ads of the year with HBO and kill off the Bud Knight, one of their most popular mascots, to endorse Game of Thrones and this tells me how much the Beer company truly loves the show. Even someone who hasn’t watched the show like me is starting to consider watching it someday. Well, from this, we can tell that this is the example of successful buzz marketing. Now let’s get to…

The backfire of the Fyre Festival

Just like almost everything in the world that is not perfect, buzz marketing also has its drawbacks if you are not doing it the right way. Let me tell you in the example from the Fyre Festival incident. In 2017, entrepreneur Billy McFarland and rapper Ja Rule organised a music festival called Fyre Festival in the Bahamas. In order to generate as much buzz as possible for the event, they paid some of the most notable social media influencers, like Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid, and Emily Ratajkowski, to fly down to the Bahamas, act in their promo video, and post the video to their Instagram profiles. The event even promoted festival’s stellar acts, luxury villas, and gourmet meals, and soon after, the festival sold over 4,000 tickets.

Unfortunately for the attendees, when the festival took place, everything didn’t go as planned. Simply put, everything didn’t go as promised. The event was a total disaster. It was poorly managed and disorganised that it was considered as a complete scam a.k.a Fyre Fraud. Instead of providing luxury villas and gourmet meals paid for thousand dollars by the attendees, McFarland and Ja Rule gave them tents and cheese sandwiches. What’s even worse; there was no cell phone service, portable toilets, or even running water at the festival, so basically people were left stranded there. When the truth about what happened in the Fyre Festival started spreading on social media, all of the festival’s acts cancelled. Shortly after Fyre Festival’s epic failure, its parent company, Fyre Media, shut down and Billy McFarland was sentenced to six years in prison and forced to repay $26 million to his company’s investors. From this experience, we see that this is the real life failed buzz marketing strategy.

From the examples above, we can learn that buzz marketing can work as long as you are doing it properly. When applying this strategy, make sure you:

• Prepare everything as detailed as possible
• Do not announce something before it’s fully ready
• Know that it’s better to take long to prepare until it’s perfect than to rush things
• Make everyone involved get comfortable with the project
• Consider a few things that may hinder the project
• Know your budget
• Have a plan B, C, D until F

No matter how effective a strategy is; if you are not well-prepared and well-educated, you might fail if you are not willing to take time to learn and make many plans. The examples above can be your source to learn how to manage your own buzz marketing strategy. Learn both the good and bad parts so that you understand better. Communication and plans are the most important elements when it comes to buzz marketing strategy; therefore, you have to be patient when you are doing this strategy for your own events too.

I had a bit of a scare once when a colleague asked me via text why my Steam account is showing me as playing Arkham Knight when he could clearly see that I’m still working on my desk just a couple of meters where he was sitting. I remember panicking a little bit before I remembered that my brother wasn’t working that day and he texted me that he was fooling around with my computer a little bit. I already have a couple hundred games on my Steam account by then so the thought of that account being hacked completely freaked me out.

It is an unavoidable fact that we’re now relying on digital transactions more than ever and that our personal data and financial information are stored online in the server of an e-commerce platform. It is also an unavoidable fact that data breaches are now more common than ever and that cybersecurity issues have taken on a much greater importance in the world of web development in the past few years. Cybersecurity is a complex and highly technical issue but businesses are required to have a basic understanding on this issue given how reliant we are on the internet to conduct our business.

Web security, simplified

To be perfectly honest with you, an in-depth technical breakdown of cybersecurity would typically require a 4-year education and a college degree and even that wouldn’t nearly be enough given how much cybersecurity changes on a daily basis. As cybersecurity experts close one security loophole, a team of hackers would simply another and this goes on and on for perpetuity as new types of hardware and software are introduced to the market. It is quite simply, a never-ending rat race and the pendulum constantly swing between one side and the other.

The gory technical details of web security aren’t meant to be public consumption, owing to their complexity, but for businesses that regularly handles online transaction and traffic on customers’ data, it’s important to ensure that sensitive information doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. The concept of web security can broadly be divided into two distinct categories, the security of transmitted data and the security of stored data. In the following section, we’re going to take a brief look on these two categories.

Encryption of transmitted data

In the 2014 film The Imitation Game, a dramatization of Alan Turing’s work during World War II, the highly respected mathematician worked with a number of colleagues in decrypting the Enigma machine that was used by the Nazis for wartime communication. In layman’s terms, the Enigma machine works by like an extremely advanced Morse code that encrypts a message so that even if the message was intercepted, the interceptors would have no idea how to read the message without another Enigma and the cipher, the algorithm that was used to encrypt the message.

This practice of encryption is what is now commonly used to encrypt sensitive data across the internet, such as credit card information, address, phone number, etc. Unlike the analog Enigma machine however, we now use Transport Layer Security (TLS) or its more commonly-known predecessor, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). As with the Enigma machine, TLS works by encrypting certain information so that even if bad actors managed to listen in to your communication, they wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails of what the communication is about.

Even if your website doesn’t deal with financial transaction, as long as your business collects users’ and visitors’ information, you’re probably going to need a TLS/SSL certificate. Blogs that requires visitors to create an account to comment for example would still require a TLS/SSL certificate since personal data are being sent. The good thing about TLS/SSL certificates is that they’re as simple as buying them, usually on a yearly basis, from the plethora of certificate providers from around the world. The cost varies from couple hundred dollars/year to thousands depending on the level of security so you’re bound to find something that suits you perfectly.

Security of stored data

In popular culture, there are two kinds of bank jobs we regularly see. The first kind is the one you can see in the opening of the 1995 classic Heat. In that film, a group of criminals led by Robert De Niro steals millions of dollars in bonds from an armored car in transit. The second one is more in line with our imagination of a bank heist, such as the one portrayed in the 2006 film Inside Man, a personal favorite of mine, where a team led by Clive Owen performed a very elaborate heist to steal the contents of a safe deposit box inside a bank vault.

As an analogy, the former involves the security of transmitted data while the latter involves the security of stored data. In the past few years, whenever there’s a story on data breaches you see online, that story usually concerns the latter. It doesn’t matter if you spend enough money securing the transmission of data if your webserver lacks the proper security that allows hackers to get inside your server and steal the data stored inside that server. This is why you should take proper precaution when looking for a webhost provider as they’ll be instrumental in ensuring the security of your server.

On your side, you also have to ensure that the CMS you use to access your website is properly secured and configured and that the password you’re using for your administrator account is strong enough. If you want to be extra cautious, there are CMS that provides user with the option of two-factor authentication, which requires the use of a limited-time code during the sign-in process for an extra layer of security. Data breaches are more common because there are multiple vulnerable angles than can be taken advantage of and that you can never be too cautious when it comes to data storage.

There are many things in the world that you can do yourself. The healthy drink you usually buy from the supermarket? You can actually make your own healthy drink at home. The Vietnamese spring rolls you usually order in the restaurant? You can make your own Vietnamese spring rolls. The skincare products you usually buy in the department store? You can make one too for yourself. Face toner can actually be made out of a mixture of water and rice – the rice water can simply be your face toner. The concept of self-made creations has been popular among YouTubers and social influencers thus came the term “Do It Yourself” or in short, “DIY”. The DIY concept is usually done in order to reduce expense and promote more natural self-made products that are environment-friendly and chemicals-free. One of the common examples I can provide you is how Vloggers post videos of them showing how to make DIY skincare products. While this is easier, cheaper and more efficient, there are also the drawbacks of making things on your own. In this case, if you make your own skincare product without the professionals’ supervision, you may not know what your DIY skincare product might do to your skin. I think the same concept and perspective can also apply to web design. Almost all business owners know the importance of having a website for business. However, due to the cost of web design and web development process that may be higher than expected; some business owners prefer to make their own website – their DIY approach on web design to cut their budget. That being said, this can both make and break the business. While DIY approach on web design may cut your budget, this can also backfire you in the long run. Why? Keep reading to know what kind of mistakes you could make if you apply the DIY approach on your business web design.

Poor site structure and navigation

A novice designer will often choose templates and themes purely based on how they look. However, some unique and good looking design can also be the most confusing when it comes to navigation, and this is bad for both your SEO and your UX. When you create a site yourself, navigation is actually considered one of the hardest aspects to get right. Unless you graduated from graphic design department in your university, then it is more advisable for you to hire a professional web designer.

Slow loading website

Non-expert person who tries to do web design will usually not be aware of the fact that some designs are going to cause slow loading on website’s pages. If you want to design your own website, you must have experience with compressing images, limiting server calls, or using caching; otherwise, the speed of your site will undoubtedly suffer. A professional knows how to manage all aspects of website development to make sure the page speed and loading times is user friendly.

Negligence in making responsive website

Most people who don’t know the first thing about website often only see ‘looks’ instead of optimising both ‘looks’ and ‘functions’. When you are visiting a good looking and uniquely designed website, you may often think, “Oh, I want my website to look like this too!” and so you came home trying to make it. However, what you fail to see is that the website you have visited may or may not be indexed by Google for certain reasons. One of the reasons is whether or not that website is responsive and adjustable to any device. This is why leaving web design to the professional is the best bet you can ever make.

Although a DIY web design approach can work, you still have to be aware of some of the common mistakes and really think about where you see your company in a few years as well as think whether or not this is easy for you. In most cases, spending the money now to have a great website that is ready for growth and can draw your readers’ attention is going to be well worth it in the long run, instead of creating your website yourself and having to make changes later.