2011 SAMMY Award Finalist, Best New Social Media Platform Innovation, American Express YourBuzz
American Express OPEN
Agency: Crispin Porter Bogusky
Brand: YourBuzz
Executives Involved in The Campaign: Jay H. Lee
Campaign Brief: YourBuzz provides small business owners a comprehensive way to manage their online presence. YourBuzz offers a consolidated view of what customers have to say about their business across the most popular social media platforms and online directories, including Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and CitySearch. Small business owners can monitor customer reviews, ratings and sentiment; receive practical recommendations on managing their online reputation; take part in online conversations; and build customer relationships.
In creating YourBuzz, American Express OPEN partnered with industry experts to deliver a best-in-class social media solution for small business owners. As a result of this partnership and a close understanding of the needs of small business owners, OPEN has enabled small business owners to identify power users and social influencers at a glance; aggregate online contacts; and create promotional offers to distribute to online customers. Moreover, OPEN continues to add new social media platforms to YourBuzz on an ongoing basis in response to new market developments.
As part of the awareness-building campaign for YourBuzz, OPEN emphasized four key benefits – listings, mentions, contacts and offers – that could be communicated to small business owners. These benefits were then matched with core features. For example, in order to know your business is being mentioned online, YourBuzz makes it possible to view existing business listings; claim and edit business listings; create new business listings; and get recommendations on where to list business information.
YourBuzz targets the existing market of small business owners who are looking for faster and more convenient ways of running their business. There are approximately 26 million small business owners in the United States. Of these business owners, the primary design target includes established small businesses with annual revenue of greater than $250,000 per year.
YourBuzz primarily targets the set of small business owners who are looking for a one-stop location to manage their contacts, reputation and company recommendations. As part of a multi-step rollout, OPEN introduced YourBuzz in March 2011, and followed this up with a series of changes and functional improvements to increase the robustness of the product offering (e.g. implementing a new reporting infrastructure, adding new educational features such as videos and a social media FAQ, etc.)
Small business owners using YourBuzz, especially those in the retail industry, have told us that it enables them “to go to one site and see everything.” For example, they can “actually tell how customers have interacted with them” in the past as well as see at a glance the overall sentiment about their business. Businesses new to the monitoring and reputation space can become involved with social media strategy quickly, while more sophisticated small businesses can make YourBuzz part of broader social CRM initiatives.
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American Express OPEN launched YourBuzz as part of a powerful suite of Business Apps Solutions that enable small business owners to manage cash flow, save time and money, grow customer relationships and monitor their presence across social media. These premium digital tools are a way of uniting previously diverse aspects of managing a business into one unified user experience.
Using these Business Apps Solutions, small business owners can adopt an app-centric model for running their business. Instead of purchasing and using costly, complex software packages for tasks such as billing, invoicing, buying search ads or buying insurance for specific business needs, they can purchase applications. Just as they would download streamlined, branded applications for their mobile devices, they now are able to use streamlined, branded applications for running every facet of their small business. Business Apps Solutions are an ever-expanding platform for small business owners. As new business needs appear, American Express OPEN will continue to evolve new apps to meet these needs.
Link to Your Creative Materials: YourBuzz: http://www.yourbuzz.com
YourBuzz on the Business Apps Solutions homepage:
http://www201.americanexpress.com/business-credit-cards/business-solutions/overview
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