BuzzFeed Marketing Challenge as an Integrative Social Media Experience

BuzzFeed is a well known online American entertainment publisher with a sizeable reach and influence among the Millennial demographic. BuzzFeed allows anybody to contribute content to the website with a free BuzzFeed Community account, which provides access to BuzzFeed’s content management system.
Cowley (2017) examined and discussed the marketing challenge that has been done for graduate and undergraduate students to effectively use marketing strategy and consumer behavior principles to generate articles and content using BuzzFeed.com. The BuzzFeed Marketing Challenge (BMC) is a digital marketing project where students must achieve a target of at least 1000 views of their content on BuzzFeed.com, and they have one week to promote these articles using effective marketing strategy, promotion rules, and consumer attitude. The published articles were verified using BuzzFeed’s article analytics.
The BuzzFeed marketing challenge project objectives were to study consumer behavior, new product development, and promotion, and influencer outreach.
As mentioned by Cowley (2017), this challenge will give the students lessons about the consumer behavior, and how they should concentrate on the role of identity in consumption behavior and the importance of targeting and the role of emotion in generating sharing activity. Mainly identity includes many classifications such as demographics, psychographics, physical attributes, lifestyle, preferences and desires, roles, or shared experiences. Considerably it’s clear that the article headlines create the reader's curiosity.
Cowley (2017) found out that this challenge covers the elements of new product development and how writing a BuzzFeed article should ensure fit with both the target market as well as the website. As well the students were able to understand the online traffic ecosystem, tools to identify channels, communities, and individual influencers within those communities who may be good promotion outreach partners, and a theoretical framework for influencing these communities and individuals.
In my opinion, the learning outcome from this challenge was bigger than reaching 1000 views on the content, because the students at the end of this challenge were able to promote and compete for visibility using social media. Along with understanding the importance of product-market fit (segmentation, positioning, audience research). Besides, the ability to influence of externalities on market timing, speed of diffusion. And examine how to increase self-efficacy in generating product demand. More than that, they examined the importance of using data analytics in decision making.
I believe that the BMC project performs a scalable real-world integrative experience to the marketing lecture and engage the students with the target market promotion and product development process. Personally, I think that the BuzzFeed marketing challenge adapts the students to the market needs in an effective dynamic environment, and they will be prepared with tools and skills for real marketing careers.