Starting a Community: Buzz



Hi friends, welcome to my last blog post for this semester! For this week’s post, I am a community manager for a social platform called Buzz. Buzz is an interactive social community designed for people who are visiting Brisbane or locals who just want to discover more about the city. Buzz offers a list of attraction and activities within close proximity depending on the user’s location where they are able to see and potentially meet Buzzers who are close by.

Buzz provides value to users without being dependent on network effects – discussed in one of my previous blogs “The Network Effect: Tumblr”. The non-social benefits facilitate the adoption of early users when a new platform is going to be released. Therefore, Buzz will not need a significant number of users to add value to the platform.

Stage One Benefits

Buzz is aimed at tourists and locals who are eager to explore more of a particular city around the world. The platform offers appropriate tourist rights with eateries available where they can enjoy alone or with friends. Another non-social aspect of Buzz is that each time a place or activity is completed or visited, a badge is awarded to the user, motivating Buzzers to experience more of the city and getting more out of their visit. These features are not dependent on network effects and adds value to the social platform.

Early Adopter Benefits

There are many applications and platforms similar to Buzz – Urbanspoon, Foursquare, The Urban List, etc. So in order to gain users in the early stages, Buzz needs to rise above these platforms in a different and encouraging way. Therefore, the early adopter benefits that Buzz will provide are discounts and perks to the venues listed just for registered Buzz users. This triggers the network effect as each user that is registered to Buzz is constantly sharing the platform with their friends, increasing the Buzz community.

Increasing Success Expectations 

To increase the success expectation of Buzz is to constantly update the venues and activities available on the social platform. This is a very simple way to encourage more people to register and more businesses and companies to branch out and be apart of Buzz.

Are you interested in using Buzz the next time you travel?