Buzz Off.

Everybody is confused about the term "Buzz," mistaking it for everything from experiential marketing to word-of mouth. I'm not confused at all. "Buzz" is something that people who are popular spread about things that are not yet popular so that they may remain popular by knowing more than those who are not quite as popular. Whether they do it for fun or profit is irrelevant. The point is that they do it in a public setting and as a result, word gets around.

I must admit that there are an impressive assortment of terms surrounding the term "Buzz": buzz marketing, evangelism, viral marketing, advocacy marketing and some I'm sure I'm not quite aware of because whoever coined them is not very good at starting their own buzz.

Actually, the terminology doesn't really matter all that much. I'm sure there are several distinctions between viral and buzz marketing, but the bottom line still comes down to ways and means of engaging a given audience in an informative conversation.

The point is that if something is perceived as "Big News" it can travel pretty damn fast. But the painful truth is that most news about products is nowhere near "Big" and as a result it spreads at the rate of molasses in January. At this point some Buzz Flack is ready to type in the feedback box below: "What about Hotmail? It went from 0 to 12 million subscribers in just 18 months." So what. It's an amazing example of buzz at work... just not a very typical one.

While most people are fairly receptive to messages about products from their friends, they seldom remember such messages--and hardly ever act on them. And that is after people make the difficult choice to even pass something on to their friends. "Forward" is the least used button in most email programs.

Because most people socialize in clusters they self-select the path of the information they spread. This is the greatest single barrier to the universal awareness that buzz marketers like to brag about. So if their efforts get stuck in a social cluster, that's probably where it will die.

It's a given that a great customer experience is the foundation of great word-of-mouth, but seldom is that great experience enough for a buzz to spread. What is essential is a product with some inherent value that makes people talk, and a well coordinated series of activities that can successfully accelerate the process.

A great restaurant like "El Bule" in Spain with 20 tables (and six month waiting list) can rely on word-of-mouth alone if the talk is intense enough to keep these tables occupied ( which it certainly is). But this is not the case in product marketing where companies must act fast to turn their products into the standard channels of distribution or be eaten alive by their cost of sales.

In these situations traditional tools such as advertising and direct marketing need to fuel the buzz, in order for there to be a buzz.

In most cases, distribution, advertising, promotion and other traditional tactics are essential to translate the goodwill surrounding a given product into sales. Buzz efforts are just another tool to create the awareness that inspires consideration.

Buzz is not a closer. A recent study from NOP World confirmed that information distributed via mass media often feeds conversations among consumers. For example, 54% of respondents in that study said that information they found in a magazine contributed to a recommendation they made to another person. Even Hotmail advertised in campus newspapers around the country to help create the initial core group of users in each school and "start little fires all over the place," as one of Hotmail's early executives put it.

Of course working with key influencers is an important part of generating word-of-mouth, but it is is far from the silver bullet buzz marketers would have you believe. In the first place it is the people that they influence that do the major work in sending a trend into distributed acceptance. By their very nature, the "cool kids" cease and desist with a trend once two more people in their world adopt it. Apple in their much covered pricing "fiasco" for iPhone actually forced wider acceptance by selling their early adopters down the river by positioning them as "i-suckers."

The big misconception about buzz is thinking that the "early adoptor" label describes a specific type of person. Although there are as many terms to describe people who are involved firing up buzz as there are buzz marketing firms, not all of these terms are synonymous. Some buzz starters have the propensity to make friends, and talk or influence connector hubs. Others have superior knowledge or expertise and influence maven hubs. Yet other buzz starters have an infectious attitude toward a company and drive evangelist hubs. The key is to never automatically assume that these buzz starters are all the same individual.

Then there is the question as to whether opinion leaders are early adopters. For starters, opinion leaders don't automatically adopt every new product they come across. They are more accurately early adopters of certain products and early rejecters of others.

In fact, the most innovative individuals in a network may have low credibility among the majority fellow network members and not be able to influence others. So when you plan your buzz marketing program, be sure to think beyond the phrase "influence the influencers. When you are promised by some buzz marketer to deliver "opinion leaders" or "connectors," don't forget to ask how the term is being defined and measured.

Stay strong.

Comments from Mad163: Me, Unmasked.

Nobody had anything to say about that one. Ho-hum-HW