The first time that I ever heard the term, "buzz" applied to communication was way back in the early seventies. It was a song in Andrew Lloyd Webber's Rock Opera, "Jesus Christ Superstar." The song was, "What's the Buzz? Tell Me What's Happening." When I first heard it, I wasn't sure what "buzz" actually was.
Now you can't get away from the term. It's become slang for word-of-mouth about especially trendy and important issues. And it's become a term for a kind of marketing. Business Week made it the focus of an entire issue. Several books have come out on buzz marketing and its intertwined twin, viral marketing. I'm still not sure I know what it is.
What I am sure of is that the idea of using social networks to communicate advertising and marketing messages more effectively has moved through the marketing community like a virus. Sometimes it's called viral marketing and sometimes it's called buzz marketing.
The two are different but they have enough in common that we can talk about them together. So, let's take a look at them. What are they, really? Where do they come from? And, most important, how do you use them effectively?
What are they?
Viral marketing and buzz marketing are both new ways to think about a basic marketing problem. The problem is how to use the natural way that human beings share ideas with one another, to persuade them to buy what it is you have to sell.
They're incredibly powerful techniques, based on some things we've known for years. First, some ideas just take off. Often we call them fads. They rocket through society. One day they don't exist and then, it seems only a couple of days later, everybody has one or wants to buy one. Viral/buzz marketing looks like it might just provide a way to increase the odds of that happening. That's powerful stuff.
The speed of dissemination and adoption are only one part of the power, though. The other is that these techniques seem to make use of the kind of advertising we've always said was the most powerful: word of mouth. Technically, of course, word of mouth isn't advertising at all. It's what folks say about you and your product. Viral/buzz marketing looks like it might just provide a way to increase the odds of getting powerful word of mouth advertising.
Those twin strengths are also a source of the major weakness of viral/buzz marketing. It's very easy and very tempting to use these techniques in manipulative, unethical, or dishonest ways. For example, several marketers seem to be trying some variant of the following.
You hire some young, hip looking folks. Dress them in the most fashionable way. Then send them out to where potential customers congregate to talk up your product. Only make sure they don't let on that you employ them.
Think that will work? I don't. Not when folks start finding out that the hip young person they talked with was being paid to be positive about your product. Folks don't like to be tricked like that. Tricking people and the consequences of tricking people is the biggest danger in these techniques.
Viral and buzz marketing are both powerful and dangerous. They're also presented as brand new, but an awful lot of what goes under the title of viral or buzz marketing looks like things we've been doing all along.
Take the Lucky Strike team, mentioned by Business Week as an example of buzz marketing. This is a bunch of folks hired by Lucky Strike cigarettes who show up to help smokers exiled to the outside of their buildings by anti-smoking regulations. What they show up with varies with the season. In the summer, it's lawn chairs, umbrellas, and cold drinks.
There's no doubt that this sets people to talking about Lucky Strike. But it's not any new kind of marketing. Back when the earth and I were young we used to call this sort of thing a "publicity stunt." And it's a darned good one. My guess, though, is that the agency that sold Lucky Strike on this idea found it easier and more lucrative to sell the program as part of a new, magical concept called "buzz marketing."
What's really new here is using things we know about how ideas spread through human networks to make our marketing more effective. You'll understand that a bit better if we look at the sources of these ideas.
What's the buzz on where they came from?
Science has often been a source of new thinking about business issues and problems. Here, viral and buzz marketing have two scientific sources.
One source of the ideas behind viral marketing is evolutionary biology. Writers like Peter Dawkins, and Susan Blackwell developed theories about how ideas move through society and viral marketing applies them to the problem of business persuasion.
The evolutionary biology perspective is that ideas propagate in much the same ways that species do. They move from one mind to the next in the same way that species move from one habitat to the next. The successful ones thrive and keep on moving. The unsuccessful ones don't.
I draw two important conclusions from looking at marketing from this evolutionary perspective. The first is that having a good thing to share is very important. It won't matter how effectively you market the product if the product is junk.
Also, in evolutionary biology, it's pretty much assumed that most of the trials that get sent out aren't going to take. The frog lays lots of eggs so that a few wind up surviving. If you're going to do this kind of marketing, you should probably count on lots of trials and few successes in any campaign.
At the same time as this evolutionary biology thinking was going on, freelance writer Malcolm Gladwell, became fascinated with how some ideas spread so rapidly that they seem to appear almost magically overnight. He called this the Phenomenon of a Social Virus. He became fascinated by how diseases spread.
In his book, The Tipping Point, Gladwell likened the movement of a powerful idea, such as a fad, to the way that epidemics develop. In fact, the title of his book is taken from a term in epidemiology, which indicates the moment of critical mass, the threshold beyond which the epidemic spreads with frightening speed.
Take these two ideas together, and you've got a powerful way to influence the spread of word-of-mouth advertising -- the advertising that is most potent.
To do that most effectively, you have to understand something about the spread of diseases; but you also have to understand something about networks, human or otherwise.
One reality of a network, whether it's social network or the Internet, is that while everyone may be able to connect to everyone else, we're not connected to everyone else directly. To make our connection we have to go through other parts of the network. Some of the parts have lots more connections than others. Those places go by several names, but the one I like best is "Hubs."
In social networks, these are the people with many connections. They know lots of people, and talk to them a lot. They're seen as experts. They're what The Most Beautiful Woman in the World calls "boosters," who talk up new ideas that they find interesting.
Gladwell identified three kinds of social hubs in his book. He calls them Connectors, Mavens, and Salespeople. The idea is that if you can get some of these folks to pick up your idea, it will spread faster than you can imagine.
Evolutionary biology and epidemiology may be the source of the ideas behind viral/buzz marketing. But a big source of the excitement is that they look like that ever-illusive "Magic Stone of Marketing."
All you have to do is rub them, it seems, and all your marketing problems will go away. At least that's how it looks. That's what's led the marketing folks to take these concepts and bundle them into something that looks and sounds a little hipper and cooler and more magical than the idea of just using human networks to communicate better.
The fact is that there is no magic. There is power, and danger, too. Like every other tool or technique we have, buzz marketing and viral marketing won't do magic, but they'll probably work if you do things right.
How do you use them effectively?
OK, what do you do with this?
Start by making sure that you have something worth talking about. In the long run you build competitive advantage by delivering value, not by running a slick marketing campaign or two.
Learn about how networks work. Learn how the social networks work in your market. Identify the hubs of influence. Then concentrate on those when you do your word of mouth marketing.
Figure that you have to act like the frog. You have to lay lots of eggs so that a small number of frogs make it all the way to adulthood. Expect to have very few successes that come from lots of trials.
Be scrupulously honest. The potential ill will that you can generate if folks begin to feel like they've been tricked or manipulated will spread through the network as least as fast as your marketing.
This feature appeared on 27 August 2001
Some "Buzz Resources"
Business Week's July 30, 2001 issue had buzz marketing as the cover story. There are several articles about buzz marketing in the issue. Some are available to everyone, while others are available only to subscribers.
Malcolm Gladwell's excellent book, The Tipping Point, is must reading on this topic. While the book isn't specifically about marketing, you'll generate lots of good marketing ideas as you enjoy this reasoned, and well written book.
Once you've read Gladwell, you're ready to get the most out of The Anatomy of Buzz by Emanuel Rosen. These two books make a great pair. Rosen has a solid, practical emphasis, the puts flesh on the theory that you get from Gladwell. Gladwell's book gives you a depth of understanding that helps you wring the most out of Rosen's Book.
