What does 10 million Facebook fans mean?
Bryant Simon is a professor of American history and culture at Temple University and the author of “Everything but the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks.” The views expressed here are his own.
Last week, the Harvard Business Review published a long interview with Howard Schultz. The Starbucks CEO talked about the coffee company’s many moves to win back customers and battle against the ill winds of the recession.
As evidence of Starbucks’ rebound, Schultz pointed to the biggest of the social networking sites out there. “We’re the number one brand on Facebook,” he boasted.
Starbucks, in fact, was the first brand to top the 10 million-fan mark. Just to put this in perspective, that’s more fans than the entire population of New York City (8.2 million) and all but seven states in the U.S. That’s more Facebook fans than its closest rival, Coca-Cola (8.3 million fans) and way more than other large global brands.
McDonald’s has 2.5 million fans. Target has 1.43 million, Abercrombie and Fitch 1.37 million, and the trendy teen clothier Forever 21 totals 1.27 million. Among high-end food and food-related brands, Ben and Jerry’s has 1.35 million Facebook fans with Whole Foods lagging behind with just 296,152 fans.
The other day, my Facebook page (I have 302 friends) told me that many people who like Barack Obama also like Starbucks. Turns out the President is one of Starbucks few Facebook rivals. He has 10.9 million fans, a few more than Starbucks. But Starbucks still has more fans than Sarah Palin (1.93 million), Mitt Romney (460,832), and Bill Clinton (353,583) combined.
Most pop culture figures don’t reach Starbucks’ level of fans either. Apart from Facebook leader Michael Jackson (16.6 million) and Lady Gaga (12.9 million), the coffee giant has more online backers than Bruce Springsteen (880,459), Adam Sandler (5.44 million), and even teen idol Justin Bieber (7.88 million).
Big banks not so popular among small businesses
A new study showed the big U.S. banks have some work to do to if they want to improve their image among small and mid-sized businesses.
The annual report, released by Portfolio.com and based on research conducted by American City Business Journals (ACBJ), surveyed 1,762 business owners, CEOs and presidents of companies with more than one employee and asked them to rank 207 brand-name companies, from the technology, telecom, travel, financial and media sectors, on a set of seven different attributes.
Among banks and financial services firms trust remained the biggest issue for the small business owners polled, said Godfrey Phillips, vice president for research at ACBJ.
“Small businesses care about whether the bank they deal with is ethical,” said Phillips, who noted U.S. Bank was voted the top bank brand, but was No. 109 among companies on the overall list. Both Citibank and Bank of America plummeted due to negative publicity. “The bigger the bank, the more it got hit. Regional banks and local banks in our survey did well, just because that’s where people have their relationship with and they weren’t in the news. When you’re in the news you drop substantially.”
Another interesting finding, noted Phillips, was the emergence of online brokerage firms such as TDAmeritrade and E*Trade, which both placed in the top three among financial services firms.
“Another area where we really saw a big jump on was that people started to manage their money more so than before,” said Phillips, adding it was emblematic of the wider trend of people moving away from full-service brokerage firms. “And their perceptions of themselves as investors had substantially improved, because they just started to be more involved in how they handled their money.”
The survey polled entrepreneurs with more then $250,000 in investable assets. Phillips said the poll is the only business-to-business survey as opposed to business-to-consumer polls.
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A quiz about face book popularity. What’s the difference between Starbucks & Obama?
Answer: I can give up my Starbucks today & not think twice about it. With Obama I’ll have to wait until 2012 to dump this brand,and the aftertaste will last a lot longer !