Already, YouTube has launched careers, such as that of YouTuber “Brookers” who was hired by Hollywood celebrity Carson Daly because of her zany videos. YouTube has also brought international fame to previously unknown bands such as Sick Puppies, a band popularized by the hugely popular and inspiring “Free Hugs” video set to the Sick Puppies song “All The Same.”

And then there are the hugely successful commercial viral campaigns, such as Blendtec’s “Will It Blend?,” the brilliant video series on various household objects that are run through a Blendtec blender—including marbles, rake handles, and even iPods.

“Will It Blend?” was the brainchild of George Wright, Marketing Director at Blendtec, and Blendtec’s Founder and CEO, Tom Dickson. George Wright recalls the birth of the idea: “Tom likes to run non-standard things through our blenders in the demo room to test out their strength. One day I wandered in to the demo room and saw sawdust on the floor. Tom was testing out the blenders again, this time it was a 2 x 2 jammed into the blender to see if he could destroy the blender or the 2 x 2.”

That gave George an idea: why not post those demonstrations of “extreme blending” online. The trick to creating a viral campaign George reckons is to make it funny and worth watching. They went to work creating the videos back in the fall of last year, starting with five videos: “Don’t Try This at Home Blending.” They built a companion microsite to go with it—WillItBlend.com—and sent an email to all employees to pass on the word of the videos and the Web site.

They also emailed their customer base and asked for suggestions of things to blend. At the time George was traveling and had his Blackberry; all the emails coming in were set to forward to him as well. Calls to his Blackberry wore out the batteries in a few hours, coming in from the media, print magazines, and TV. They were featured on a Today Show segment the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. iVillage Live did a segment on them too. They were interviewed by Newsweek, Playboy Magazine, and the New York Times.

Blendtec had a surprisingly low budget. It happened to have an on-staff video producer and on-staff webmaster, so development of the first five videos ran somewhere between $50-$100—including buying the domain name, a couple of rakes, some marbles, and few other supplies. So it can definitely be done on a meager budget.

George Wright advises that companies wishing to get into YouTube marketing focus on something that is fun, with either the interviewer laughing or scratching his/her head, because only then will they want to pass it on. But don’t force it. It really should be something worth watching.

George’s second piece of advice is to clearly demonstrate the product. For Blendtec, initially it was 100% about branding. After the brand awareness has been established, there has to be a need, a problem in need of resolution. George says a consumer watching a blender that is blending a rake handle would conclude that that make and model of blender would do a pretty good job at blending ice as well.

Blendtec has seen a dramatic increase in sales of at-home and commercial blenders (which are sold to restaurants and coffee shops, etc). The “Will It Blend?” campaign targeted the home market and online Web sales were more than four times greater than in the previous top-selling month. All other channels have seen big increases as well.

George also advises to make sure that the subject of the video is real: no “smoke and mirrors.” Tom Dickson is real. The blender is real. Tom is the owner of the company. He designed the machine. The experiments are reproducible.

Blendtec isn’t the only company having success with YouTube. Intuit, maker of the Quicken, QuickBooks, and TurboTax software, are in the midst of a YouTube campaign, known as the Tax Rap. It was a pretty off-the-wall idea suggested in a brainstorming session; as luck would have it, Intuit was able to secure rapper Vanilla Ice as its front man. After that, it decided to just pull out all the stops—avoiding any corporate marketing feel to the campaign.

Seth Greenberg, Group Manager of Online Advertising and Internet Media at Intuit, says, “Rather than people making fun of our campaign we wanted to poke fun at ourselves.” They went to Vanilla Ice’s house in Palm Beach, Florida, and spent several hours there shooting. Vanilla Ice has been a big supporter of the campaign, according to Seth. What is interesting is that Vanilla ice is a polarizing figure. But that is what is making it a phenomenon on YouTube. (AdCritic.com said “I don’t know how to read this campaign…”)

The campaign has been getting more buzz offline than online. It has been covered at least 50 times by news outlets like CNN, as well as local stations. Entertainment Weekly listed Vanilla Ice’s Tax Rap as #10 on its Hit List. And it made it onto Page Six of the New York Post.

The key to the Tax Rap video campaign is not just that Vanilla Ice is the front man, but that it also encourages participation and viewer support. There is a contest with prize money of $50,000, with users encouraged to create their own rap about taxes to compete for the prize.

Unlike Blendtec, Intuit made a much more sizeable investment, including buying a Contest channel and a Branded channel on YouTube, as well as paying for visibility on the YouTube.com homepage. Those were crucial factors for Intuit’s getting over one million views of its video. Seth figures that it would have been hard to scale virally without it.

Online jewelry retailer Ice.com made its first foray into YouTube marketing this year as well with its “Mr. Cupid” interviews of passersby. Executive VP of Marketing and founder Pinny Gniwisch put some videos up of himself conducting impromptu interviews on the streets of New York City, in Times Square, on the ski slopes of Utah, and elsewhere, prior to Valentines Day. Pinny said the videos did very well for the company, which has even bigger and better plans for Mother’s Day: Those interviews feature celebrities, such as one of the actors from the hit TV show Heroes.

Speaking of Heroes, it was revealed that the hilarious viral spoof posted to YouTube called “Zeroes” actually had NBC behind it. NBC pulled it off brilliantly, but it was somewhat risky, because sometimes the community lashes out at the company behind the campaign when it is revealed as a marketing stunt.

YouTube has been used for effectively brand damage control as well. For example, the CEO and founder of JetBlue Airlines recently put up an apology video on YouTube because of the Valentine’s Day winter storm incident in February—a campaign that was well-received.

One product that got some excellent brand recognition and building from being on YouTube was Smirnoff’s Raw Tea. Smirnoff produced an uproarious music video called “Tea Partay,” with preppies rapping.

Another beverage, Mountain Dew, executed a successful YouTube campaign with its videos of jive-talking octogenarian Sue Teller offering surprisingly hip advice to young viewers.

H & R Block is using YouTube to promote its Tax Cuts software. The promo to the “Me & My Super Sweet Refund” contest is the most linked to comedy video in the history of YouTube.

It’s great to get the links to the video, as it increases the video’s visibility in the search engines. However, social media expert Neil Patel notes that the problem with most popular YouTube promotions is that YouTube gets the links and the original site usually does not. That means that the search engine visibility benefits don’t usually transfer to the company’s Web site. That’s not true of a MySpace marketing campaign, however, because its profile page can link directly to a company’s Web site.

Regardless of this shortcoming, YouTube offers much in the way of brand visibility when the campaign is well-executed. That doesn’t just mean posting a great video; marketers must also know how to take advantage of the social nature of the site—to build up friends and to get on user subscription lists.

Jonathan Mendez of optimizeandprophesize.com is an evangelist for the power of tags for marketing on YouTube. His advice is to make copious use of tags on your videos (ensuring, of course, that the tags are all relevant to the content), to spread your tags out among your clips, to use adjectives to make your videos more visible to folks searching based on their mood, have some category descriptor tags (bearing in mind that YouTube’s default search settings are Videos, Relevance and All Categories), match your title and description with your most important tags, and don’t use natural language phrases or waste tag space on words like “and” or “to.”

Along with all these great pearls of wisdom imparted from the above-mentioned viral video marketers, I would also interject: Don’t be afraid to make a start, even if it’s modest and has no budget behind it. You won’t get anywhere without experimenting with the medium. No risk, no reward. Who knows, it might be your inroad to Hollywood!

Looking only at indexation, back-links, result snippets, on-page content references, and engine popularity, MSN, Yahoo and Google are put to the ultimate Nostradamus Super Bowl test. Will Yahoo and Google level the playing field or will MSN come up with a flea-flicker at the last second?

Who will emerge triumphant in this battle of the Super Bowl SERPs? Click here to see PJ’s results.

But MySpace is hard for many of us adults to get our heads around. It just doesn’t seem logical: How does it hold the interest of so many young people with short attention spans, despite the fact that the design/usability is so atrocious, the Web page creation platform is so frustratingly restrictive, and it’s chock full of so many profiles that are obviously fake, spam, duplicated, or abandoned?

“Um, it’s about looking cool, fitting in, and hanging out, Duh!” one might imagine a teen MySpace user answering.

Then where do us adults feature in this? Besides offering a tempting place for stalkers and voyeurs to hang out and follow the daily lives of the teenagers who haven’t made their profiles private (can you say “Creepy!”?), MySpace is host to concerned parents trying to keep tabs on their kids, college students, obsessed sports fans, and realtors. In other words, the Average Joe or Jane. MySpace is a real slice of humanity.

Of course within the MySpace ecosystem exist marketers. But most are clueless. One would expect sophisticated MySpace presences from big brand marketers. However, that is usually not the case. And generally those that are present, like Blockbuster UK, 7Eleven, and Meijer, lack key ingredients for MySpace success — like an impressive number of “Friends.”

What is probably horrifying to these brand marketers is that employees and customers think nothing of developing a MySpace presence on behalf of the company — one that may not be very flattering. Consider, for example, these unofficial MySpace pages for Wal-Mart, K-Mart, and Target. Undoubtedly, this leads to customer confusion, because it can be difficult to ascertain the author of a MySpace profile. And such unauthorized pages can tarnish the company’s reputation, depending on their content.

Before you leap in to MySpace as a marketer, you’d best understand it. Because if you don’t, the MySpace community can turn on you the moment you make your first misstep. Just like bloggers can. (Note: many MySpace users are bloggers too. MySpace supports blogging within its platform.) The cardinal rule in MySpace is the same one as in the blogosphere: Keep it real.

Still, despite the hazards, MySpace offers a lot promise as a venue for marketers to hawk their wares. MySpace allows you to interject yourself into existing networks of trust-based relationships and to bond with your visitors in ways not possible elsewhere on the Web. And you can interact with huge numbers of adults, not just teenagers. Surprisingly, more than half of MySpace visitors are age 35 or older, and more than two-thirds are age 25 or older, according to comScore Media Metrix.

Do you have what it takes to crack MySpace? The most unlikely of marketers seem to have it — bars, bands, and quirky dot-coms. One of my favorite examples of MySpace marketing is Project Red. Not only is Project Red a world-changing organization on a mission to defeat AIDS in Africa, its MySpace profile is attractive and engaging.

Other noteworthy examples come from Apple Computer, the Brooklyn Museum, Drumz Clothing, the Orlando Magic, the movie studio that produced Superman Returns, the comedy character Borat, and the musical artist “Weird Al” Yankovic.

A couple of these I’ve been tracking for several months, watching the size of their networks expand. First, consider Apple Computer. Its various flavors of iPod Nano have a place on MySpace, e.g. Pink Nano, which is enjoying a meteoric rise in Friend status. I started tracking Pink Nano on October 15, when it had 1,500 MySpace friends. A week later, on October 22, it had climbed to 7,449 friends. On October 27, it was up to 37,070 friends. Now, on December 3, as I write this article, it has reached 55,776. Not a bad marketing job, Apple!

Now consider the “comeback king” of musical parody — “Weird Al” Yankovic. He’s using social media quite successfully to help breathe new life into his 27-year-long music career — thanks, in no small part, to YouTube and MySpace. Yankovic told Reuters/Billboard in a recent interview that he had accumulated 155,000 MySpace friends since he joined the site in July — all of which he had personally added. He stated, “I used to be a little pickier. Now I just kind of click as fast as I can.” (I can only imagine the Repetitive Stress Injury from that much clicking!) Here’s the kicker: a week after this article came out, he was already up to 219,033 friends! Another seven days later, and Weird Al had gained another 24,000 MySpace friends (up to 243,221). Now, on December 3, it’s at 325,614!

One small company that has enjoyed a degree of success in terms of traffic and sales through MySpace is the online jewelry retailer Pugster. Its mascot, a pug dog named Pinky, is the subject of the MySpace profile—a clever move, as it puts a disarming “face” to the company. The firm built up its MySpace page to a very respectable 8,053 friends. In a recent interview with me, Michael Boldin from its online marketing team revealed some secrets of their success:

1. It’s easy to get overwhelmed with the sheer numbers on MySpace — and important to try to focus on marketing to the “right” group for your product or service — otherwise you’ll be spending a LOT of time on people who will never be interested in you.
2. But, on the other hand, when starting off, you need to get Friends. It’s kind of a bragging right on MySpace. If you have too few friends, it’ll be tough to get the good ones — the ones who will end up buying from you. So, before you go after those, get a few hundred “bad” friends — bands are the easiest. They’ll give you a respectable number on your Friends list, and will leave comments on your page — giving a little realism boost to your profile — making the addition of friends of the “good” type that much easier.
3. Where else could we find a place to actually build relationships with people — who may or may not have heard of us before. We spend time daily emailing people, and guess what, they email back. It becomes the ultimate soft-sell tool.
4. Have patience. Without a huge brand presence, don’t expect to turn profits. The only investment is your time. As long as you regularly give people something interesting — blogs, music, and other tidbits that AREN’T related to your business — then you’ll develop enough trust for them to be interested in what you DO sell.
5. Keep it personal — talk with the people as if you’d email a new friend. Say “Hi,” get to know them, and they’ll want to get to know you. If you try to sell, sell, sell, you’ll have a hard time earning respect on MySpace.
6. As far as layouts, there are a few “schools of thought” — one says make it fancy and high end, but the other, and seemingly more successful one, says simplicity is best. Since people are browsing through so many profiles with the same layout, they look for certain features in certain places. If you move too many things around, you’ll frustrate your visitors and they’ll leave. Make it intuitive and easy, just like a good e-commerce site.
7. If there’s anything a “seasoned” MySpace user hates it is a slow page. The MySpace site has loads of slow loaders. You may get friends with a lot of stuff on your page, but they won’t actually spend the time to interact with you.

You know who else gets MySpace? Site owners like this one who provide layouts, backgrounds, funny photos etc. to the MySpace community. Those folks are sitting back, sipping pina coladas and watching the moolah from Google AdSense roll in.

Some may say this is not part of marketing. Our panel disagrees. Marketing’s role is to think about how the product can generate buzz. Another example is Lance Armstrong’s campaign to raise cancer awareness, made visible through the yellow Livestrong bracelet. Essentially, it generated conversations—buzz.

Polaroid’s idea to place glue on the back of iZone camera pictures, which then turned into stickers that you could give to kids, soon resulted in their multiplying around schools like an epidemic. It was contagious.

Common mistakes when executing a buzz campaign

We have all been trained to look for a specific audience of consumers to be involved in buzz marketing. But you must look beyond the ideal demographic, beyond your customers. Marketers often talk about targeting customers and capturing them. It is just as important to ask “who is talking to the customer I am trying to reach?” Often, they are different consumers: Moms talk to their kids; husbands buying clothes are influenced by wives….

Some marketers make the mistake of being inauthentic or deceptive, or otherwise trying to fool the consumer. The consumer cannot be fooled. The truth will be revealed. Buzz campaigns must involve honesty and authentic information.

Marketers also frequently jump into word-of-mouth marketing campaigns without planning. Successful programs involve studying the way people already talk about your product and developing your campaign based on that information.

Identifying and targeting the people most likely to spread your buzz is a complex matter. Essentially, any time you stimulate discussion in the buzz networks using the tactics and strategies highlighted here, you are more likely to expose people who also have friends who are more likely to hear these things. Some of them also come to you for information.

One of the characteristics of network hubs is that they are hungry for information. They love information, especially the expert hubs or mavens, because that is what they feed on. It is critical for people in your organization to understand that people who ask a lot of questions should not be scared away. It is not a guarantee that those who ask a lot of questions are a network hub, but there is a good chance they are.

You can also identify them by category. Consider the Power Bar. Coaches are obviously people who influence the decisions of athletes—very simple conceptually, but very complex in execution for a campaign. Sometimes, you can identify network hubs by category, but can you spot them in the field? Even if you can’t find an opinion leader, there are many other opportunities—for example, someone who loves to talk and has many friends or connections.

More and more methods that identify people systematically and scientifically will arrive. Tremor is one organization that has used self-designating methods, with people reporting their own actions. It may not be as reliable as other methods, but it is easy to implement and can deliver good results. A variety of other methods exist to plot the network of people and to whom they are connected.

Consider the phenomenon taking place around traditional influencers. Mom always suggested to other moms what to give their kids for lunch; dad, at the family barbecue, told everyone where to look for a new car. Those people have now moved online; instead of having an impact on 10 people within their personal network, they are now influencing tens of thousands of people.

Study online conversations to find people who talk, not just most actively around a particular topic but also most influentially. Look for the people specifically sought out by consumers within these large communities to answer questions on very specific topics. You might look for people in a professional role who demonstrate knowledge, give relevant advice to others and are read a lot—people whose messages are well received. In the healthcare world, we often see doctors or nurses or dieticians posting to online communities or blogs. Those people tend to carry a lot of influence. Study online conversations to find the people who drive them; then build relationships with those people and involve them in word-of-mouth programs.

Identify your evangelists, the people who not only buy from you and are loyal to you but also spread the word about you—for many organizations, that could be 20-25% of their customer base. To find your evangelists, first measure who is talking about you and referring new customers to you. Go to your call center logs and find out who is calling in most frequently and whether they are calling in with suggestions or ideas on new ways for you to get the word out. Certainly, measuring what the blogosphere is saying and what bloggers or fans on blogs are saying about you is a good way to connect with them. Contact them directly via email or call or invite them to a product demonstration or to a beta program. Pulling them into your marketing planning at the strategy development stage is a good way to spread buzz.

If you don’t have an evangelist base, or your company is new or you have a new product, the best way to find people who are going to spread buzz is category evangelists. Pull them into the planning session and incorporate them into what you are going to do; that way, they will feel ownership in your buzz marketing programs.

Will it ever get any easier?

There is no doubt that buzz marketing can do nothing but get harder, especially as more and more marketers enter the field and new ideas to generate buzz dry up.

Look at Super Bowl advertising. Although there is still buzz about what will air during the Super Bowl, over the last two years the buzz has become more and more about how disappointing the ads were and how they didn’t live up to expectations.

Tide Cold Water (see part one of this article) is an example of how, given the right message, the right product and the right audience—those who really care about that message—it will always be possible to generate buzz.

The role of new technology in creating buzz

With the emergence of blogs, podcasts, peer-to-peer, cell phones, moblogging, iPods and RSS, there has been a lot of talk about how companies will use these technologies in buzz marketing. Perhaps more interesting is the trend of “citizen marketing”: that is, customers or consumers using these technologies to do your buzz marketing for you.

We have seen very skillful people accessing tools to create media that help amplify word-of-mouth for a product. Remember that great shot by Tiger Woods at the Masters? Within hours a fan named Joe Jaffe had made a commercial for Nike based on that shot, and the buzz was all over the blogosphere.

Converse embraced customers to help create buzz; amateur-filmmaker customers created some really great clips that were then showcased on the company Web site, in the Converse Gallery. Some of these clips were made into commercials for broadcast on MTV, VH1 and elsewhere. The key question is, How do we embrace these consumers who are already creating media to help us amplify our message?

One important contribution of technology is that it creates an explosion of so-called weak ties. Many buzz marketers are familiar with the work of Mark Granovetter, The Strength of Weak Ties; the idea is that most information that is new comes to you not from close friends and people whom you spend a lot of time with but from acquaintances—people with whom you have weak ties. Whereas 20 years ago you talked mostly to people around you (people at work, people you see on a daily basis, your family)—and you still do—what the Internet really does is create an explosion of additional, weak ties.

The truth is that all customer-created media adds on to the media that we see via TV and other sources. It allows people to not only talk one-on-one but also broadcast information. People can podcast or broadcast or just send an email to a hundred of their friends or acquaintances about something they are very excited about.

The bottom line is that more people will be spending more time connected to each other. And when people are connected to each other, they talk. While they do not talk primarily about brands, products and services, these are becoming an important part of our lives and so there will be proportionately more time spent talking about them.

When you forward information to your friends, they know you and know of your credibility on the topic; they know whether they are going to read or ignore what you said.

With weak ties, however, you really have no idea who those sending information are, and whether what they are saying is legitimate. For the new kinds of technologies to ultimately have an impact, at least in relation to consumer-generated media, there needs to be some Amazon- or eBay-type rating system that offers endorsement regarding whether an entry has validity.

Companies that use these tools effectively, particularly among those loyal consumers who can never get enough of their products, will be searching for ways to become more engaged with the brand or product. Feeding it to them via RSS, blogs or podcasts will become an effective way of reaching that group.

Tracking and measuring impact

There are several traditional ways that marketers can measure the impact of word-of-mouth, such as adding questions to tracking surveys, and even phone-based surveys that ask, “How did you hear about this product?”

It has traditionally been difficult to gauge how people are talking about your company and how that talk changes over time. But one of the neat things that’s happened over the last few years is that there is now a database of natural conversations—the ones that consumers are having online: on message boards, in blogs, on email lists, and on product review sites. All those millions of conversations can be archived and studied by companies, which can then start to measure the impact of word-of-mouth on brand.

So, say, if you launch five marketing programs comprising nontraditional and traditional media, you can ask questions like these: “How is the needle moving on our brand word-of-mouth? Is it positive or more negative? Are people talking about our quality more because that is what the campaigns are focused on?” All of those conversations can now be captured because there is that database of word-of-mouth. Unfortunately, you cannot do the same thing offline; it is impossible to capture and quantify the conversations that take place in restaurants or bars. But a lot of those same conversations now take place online; therefore, studying them would gauge the impact of the various marketing programs launched.

Many folks initially lean toward traditional measurement metrics such as CPM or CPA. From a pure metrics standpoint, there are ways to measure the success of a buzz marketing campaign. If a campaign is run regionally, you can measure the lift in the campaign, with word-of-mouth versus without, and whether it integrated with media like direct mail, TV or PR.

Understanding whether people are communicating positively or negatively about your product perhaps starts with the basics—especially if you are a small company. Ask: “How did you hear about us? How likely are you to recommend us to a friend?”

Tap into your customers before, after and during a buzz campaign to glean information.

You can also measure impact on sales by way of a pass-along coupon. Power Bar, in the very early days, did a simple pass-along campaign and so knew exactly how many people actually passed on the coupon to friends.

Companies can fine-tune their knowledge, too. When is the best time after a person purchases the product to ask for a referral? Right after purchase may not be the right time, because the customer still hasn’t seen the impact of the product; it can take time for a consumer to start liking it and getting excited about it.

Many marketers are employing what is called market-mix modeling. These are statistical models that take weekly sales data, which is matched against weekly marketing spending data, with other factors like the economy and consumer confidence thrown in. There is no reason not to throw in some measure of buzz as one of the variables to see how closely it correlates to sales. That is really what marketers are looking for: tying it to sales, not just changes in attitude.

Harnessing the power of buzz marketing

Can a small business with a commodity product effectively harness buzz marketing? Are there companies that are not well suited to using it?

One may say that laundry, fast food and commodity products are not buzz-related categories. But look at Morton Salt. It is the same chemical composition as any other kind of salt, but it has been able to create a brand. Commodity producers need to determine how to create something that differentiates them from the rest, whether it’s service or personality. Yogurt is yogurt, right? But look at Stonyfield Farms. It has created a personality and soul around its brand that people want to talk about and share with their friends.

Counteracting negatives

Consumers are going to talk about you in whatever way they choose.

Therefore, you certainly need to be transparent about what your product does—you need to face the consumer openly and honestly. You certainly need to pay attention to what people are saying and make changes if necessary. One of the powers of buzz and word-of-mouth marketing is the capability to move very quickly because consumers’ thoughts are open to adjustment as new information is revealed.

Marketers need not be worried about negative buzz as much as they are. We see a lot of negative buzz that is essentially positive. When people are saying negative things, a new group of consumers starts popping up—those quiet advocates who come out to support a brand that is not being treated fairly. Negative buzz is also one of the best ways a company can learn what it is doing wrong, and can then work on fixing it.

Negative buzz will happen to everyone at some point. How you respond to it is what’s really important.

Creating an irresistible idea, message or offer

“Forward this pitch to friend” does not seem to cut it, so what does?

Keep it simple, for one. Too often, messages are complicated. Many of the ads and messages that companies put together struggle to reveal what the real consumer benefit is. Sometimes, it’s buried in the small print.

If you do not have a clear competitive advantage, you may want to put together a story that is unique. Outrageous messages, of course, are more likely to be reproduced. Conflict is another thing that gets talked about.

One advantage about this concept is that in the case of word-of-mouth the sender actually knows the recipient and his/her situation. This means that you can create two, three or four unique and simple messages and send the one that is most relevant to your recipient. Make it simple and engaging, and fun as well, and do not let your creativity get in the way. First and foremost, communicate the real benefit to the consumer.

Simplicity makes the spread of buzz so much easier and faster. Simplicity is often dragged down by committees representing multiple departments that feel they have to have their goals and strategies represented in the overall communication plan. The plan gets weighed down by pure mass.

One way that an organization can develop a unique or irresistible offer is to resist making assumptions about what customers think, believe to be true or find irresistible, because much is missed by organizations in which one person believes that he or she speaks on behalf of 10 million customers. You can overcome this problem by involving customers in the buzz creation process. From a small group of some 12 people to a larger panel of 100 or 1,000, people could be enlisted to test out ideas or even generate ideas at the outset and test them, and then democratically give them a vote. This worked pretty well for the Howard Dean Campaign spin-off Democracy for America when it created a billboard campaign targeting Tom DeLay in his own district of Texas. It became a buzz-worthy campaign in some political circles.

The shape of buzz marketing to come

With experts and researchers sharing information, we will develop much more expertise about how to do buzz marketing better.

In a few years, companies with strong marketing and advertising practices will need to have organized word-of-mouth as part of their underlying marketing concept, or even their knowledge and research concept. They are going to need to engage with consumers much more differently. The lines between the company and the consumer are changing. Buzz marketing will look at working with customers, instead of marketing at them, to make things happen.

Then there is the issue of trust. We always talk about the fact that people do not trust the media as much as they used to, but the truth is that people do not trust other people as much as they used to.

If one were to compare, say, 1962 with 1999, a constant decline in trust would become apparent—not because people have changed their minds, but because younger generations are not as trusting. Companies that do unethical things such as encourage people to enter into undercover marketing schemes, which we saw in 2000 and 2001, further reduce the trust that people put into word-of-mouth—at the same time increasing the trust that people have in close friends.

There is a difference between people you really know and just other people. It will be interesting to see in 5-10 years where people are in terms of trust. One study from NOP World, conducted in early 2005, showed that most people feel comfortable about a company’s giving someone a product and asking to spread the word about it. They feel that person can still be trusted. But, in the same way that large companies lost trust after a few scandals, the same can happen to buzz marketing. So it is important that the Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) and an ethical code exist.

We all agree that buzz marketing can be a powerful component of anyone’s marketing plan. Of course, wielding it effectively can be tricky. Thanks to our illustrious panel of experts, we have some great fodder for doing a much more effective job at buzz marketing in the future. Marketing’s role is to think about how the product can generate buzz. Another example is Lance Armstrong’s campaign to raise cancer awareness, made visible through the yellow Livestrong bracelet. Essentially, it generated conversations—buzz.

Polaroid’s idea to place glue on the back of iZone camera pictures, which then turned into stickers that you could give to kids, soon resulted in their multiplying around schools like an epidemic. It was contagious.

Common mistakes when executing a buzz campaign

We have all been trained to look for a specific audience of consumers to be involved in buzz marketing. But you must look beyond the ideal demographic, beyond your customers. Marketers often talk about targeting customers and capturing them. It is just as important to ask “who is talking to the customer I am trying to reach?” Often, they are different consumers: Moms talk to their kids; husbands buying clothes are influenced by wives….

Some marketers make the mistake of being inauthentic or deceptive, or otherwise trying to fool the consumer. The consumer cannot be fooled. The truth will be revealed. Buzz campaigns must involve honesty and authentic information.

Marketers also frequently jump into word-of-mouth marketing campaigns without planning. Successful programs involve studying the way people already talk about your product and developing your campaign based on that information.

Identifying and targeting the people most likely to spread your buzz is a complex matter. Essentially, any time you stimulate discussion in the buzz networks using the tactics and strategies highlighted here, you are more likely to expose people who also have friends who are more likely to hear these things. Some of them also come to you for information.

One of the characteristics of network hubs is that they are hungry for information. They love information, especially the expert hubs or mavens, because that is what they feed on. It is critical for people in your organization to understand that people who ask a lot of questions should not be scared away. It is not a guarantee that those who ask a lot of questions are a network hub, but there is a good chance they are.

You can also identify them by category. Consider the Power Bar. Coaches are obviously people who influence the decisions of athletes—very simple conceptually, but very complex in execution for a campaign. Sometimes, you can identify network hubs by category, but can you spot them in the field? Even if you can’t find an opinion leader, there are many other opportunities—for example, someone who loves to talk and has many friends or connections.

More and more methods that identify people systematically and scientifically will arrive. Tremor is one organization that has used self-designating methods, with people reporting their own actions. It may not be as reliable as other methods, but it is easy to implement and can deliver good results. A variety of other methods exist to plot the network of people and to whom they are connected.

Consider the phenomenon taking place around traditional influencers. Mom always suggested to other moms what to give their kids for lunch; dad, at the family barbecue, told everyone where to look for a new car. Those people have now moved online; instead of having an impact on 10 people within their personal network, they are now influencing tens of thousands of people.

Study online conversations to find people who talk, not just most actively around a particular topic but also most influentially. Look for the people specifically sought out by consumers within these large communities to answer questions on very specific topics. You might look for people in a professional role who demonstrate knowledge, give relevant advice to others and are read a lot—people whose messages are well received. In the healthcare world, we often see doctors or nurses or dieticians posting to online communities or blogs. Those people tend to carry a lot of influence. Study online conversations to find the people who drive them; then build relationships with those people and involve them in word-of-mouth programs.

Identify your evangelists, the people who not only buy from you and are loyal to you but also spread the word about you—for many organizations, that could be 20-25% of their customer base. To find your evangelists, first measure who is talking about you and referring new customers to you. Go to your call center logs and find out who is calling in most frequently and whether they are calling in with suggestions or ideas on new ways for you to get the word out. Certainly, measuring what the blogosphere is saying and what bloggers or fans on blogs are saying about you is a good way to connect with them. Contact them directly via email or call or invite them to a product demonstration or to a beta program. Pulling them into your marketing planning at the strategy development stage is a good way to spread buzz.

If you don’t have an evangelist base, or your company is new or you have a new product, the best way to find people who are going to spread buzz is category evangelists. Pull them into the planning session and incorporate them into what you are going to do; that way, they will feel ownership in your buzz marketing programs.

Will it ever get any easier?

There is no doubt that buzz marketing can do nothing but get harder, especially as more and more marketers enter the field and new ideas to generate buzz dry up.

Look at Super Bowl advertising. Although there is still buzz about what will air during the Super Bowl, over the last two years the buzz has become more and more about how disappointing the ads were and how they didn’t live up to expectations.

Tide Cold Water (see part one of this article) is an example of how, given the right message, the right product and the right audience—those who really care about that message—it will always be possible to generate buzz.

The role of new technology in creating buzz

With the emergence of blogs, podcasts, peer-to-peer, cell phones, moblogging, iPods and RSS, there has been a lot of talk about how companies will use these technologies in buzz marketing. Perhaps more interesting is the trend of “citizen marketing”: that is, customers or consumers using these technologies to do your buzz marketing for you.

We have seen very skillful people accessing tools to create media that help amplify word-of-mouth for a product. Remember that great shot by Tiger Woods at the Masters? Within hours a fan named Joe Jaffe had made a commercial for Nike based on that shot, and the buzz was all over the blogosphere.

Converse embraced customers to help create buzz; amateur-filmmaker customers created some really great clips that were then showcased on the company Web site, in the Converse Gallery. Some of these clips were made into commercials for broadcast on MTV, VH1 and elsewhere. The key question is, How do we embrace these consumers who are already creating media to help us amplify our message?

One important contribution of technology is that it creates an explosion of so-called weak ties. Many buzz marketers are familiar with the work of Mark Granovetter, The Strength of Weak Ties; the idea is that most information that is new comes to you not from close friends and people whom you spend a lot of time with but from acquaintances—people with whom you have weak ties. Whereas 20 years ago you talked mostly to people around you (people at work, people you see on a daily basis, your family)—and you still do—what the Internet really does is create an explosion of additional, weak ties.

The truth is that all customer-created media adds on to the media that we see via TV and other sources. It allows people to not only talk one-on-one but also broadcast information. People can podcast or broadcast or just send an email to a hundred of their friends or acquaintances about something they are very excited about.

The bottom line is that more people will be spending more time connected to each other. And when people are connected to each other, they talk. While they do not talk primarily about brands, products and services, these are becoming an important part of our lives and so there will be proportionately more time spent talking about them.

When you forward information to your friends, they know you and know of your credibility on the topic; they know whether they are going to read or ignore what you said.

With weak ties, however, you really have no idea who those sending information are, and whether what they are saying is legitimate. For the new kinds of technologies to ultimately have an impact, at least in relation to consumer-generated media, there needs to be some Amazon- or eBay-type rating system that offers endorsement regarding whether an entry has validity.

Companies that use these tools effectively, particularly among those loyal consumers who can never get enough of their products, will be searching for ways to become more engaged with the brand or product. Feeding it to them via RSS, blogs or podcasts will become an effective way of reaching that group.

Tracking and measuring impact

There are several traditional ways that marketers can measure the impact of word-of-mouth, such as adding questions to tracking surveys, and even phone-based surveys that ask, “How did you hear about this product?”

It has traditionally been difficult to gauge how people are talking about your company and how that talk changes over time. But one of the neat things that’s happened over the last few years is that there is now a database of natural conversations—the ones that consumers are having online: on message boards, in blogs, on email lists, and on product review sites. All those millions of conversations can be archived and studied by companies, which can then start to measure the impact of word-of-mouth on brand.

So, say, if you launch five marketing programs comprising nontraditional and traditional media, you can ask questions like these: “How is the needle moving on our brand word-of-mouth? Is it positive or more negative? Are people talking about our quality more because that is what the campaigns are focused on?” All of those conversations can now be captured because there is that database of word-of-mouth. Unfortunately, you cannot do the same thing offline; it is impossible to capture and quantify the conversations that take place in restaurants or bars. But a lot of those same conversations now take place online; therefore, studying them would gauge the impact of the various marketing programs launched.

Many folks initially lean toward traditional measurement metrics such as CPM or CPA. From a pure metrics standpoint, there are ways to measure the success of a buzz marketing campaign. If a campaign is run regionally, you can measure the lift in the campaign, with word-of-mouth versus without, and whether it integrated with media like direct mail, TV or PR.

Understanding whether people are communicating positively or negatively about your product perhaps starts with the basics—especially if you are a small company. Ask: “How did you hear about us? How likely are you to recommend us to a friend?”

Tap into your customers before, after and during a buzz campaign to glean information.

You can also measure impact on sales by way of a pass-along coupon. Power Bar, in the very early days, did a simple pass-along campaign and so knew exactly how many people actually passed on the coupon to friends.

Companies can fine-tune their knowledge, too. When is the best time after a person purchases the product to ask for a referral? Right after purchase may not be the right time, because the customer still hasn’t seen the impact of the product; it can take time for a consumer to start liking it and getting excited about it.

Many marketers are employing what is called market-mix modeling. These are statistical models that take weekly sales data, which is matched against weekly marketing spending data, with other factors like the economy and consumer confidence thrown in. There is no reason not to throw in some measure of buzz as one of the variables to see how closely it correlates to sales. That is really what marketers are looking for: tying it to sales, not just changes in attitude.

Harnessing the power of buzz marketing

Can a small business with a commodity product effectively harness buzz marketing? Are there companies that are not well suited to using it?

One may say that laundry, fast food and commodity products are not buzz-related categories. But look at Morton Salt. It is the same chemical composition as any other kind of salt, but it has been able to create a brand. Commodity producers need to determine how to create something that differentiates them from the rest, whether it’s service or personality. Yogurt is yogurt, right? But look at Stonyfield Farms. It has created a personality and soul around its brand that people want to talk about and share with their friends.

Counteracting negatives

Consumers are going to talk about you in whatever way they choose.

Therefore, you certainly need to be transparent about what your product does—you need to face the consumer openly and honestly. You certainly need to pay attention to what people are saying and make changes if necessary. One of the powers of buzz and word-of-mouth marketing is the capability to move very quickly because consumers’ thoughts are open to adjustment as new information is revealed.

Marketers need not be worried about negative buzz as much as they are. We see a lot of negative buzz that is essentially positive. When people are saying negative things, a new group of consumers starts popping up—those quiet advocates who come out to support a brand that is not being treated fairly. Negative buzz is also one of the best ways a company can learn what it is doing wrong, and can then work on fixing it.

Negative buzz will happen to everyone at some point. How you respond to it is what’s really important.

Creating an irresistible idea, message or offer

“Forward this pitch to friend” does not seem to cut it, so what does?

Keep it simple, for one. Too often, messages are complicated. Many of the ads and messages that companies put together struggle to reveal what the real consumer benefit is. Sometimes, it’s buried in the small print.

If you do not have a clear competitive advantage, you may want to put together a story that is unique. Outrageous messages, of course, are more likely to be reproduced. Conflict is another thing that gets talked about.

One advantage about this concept is that in the case of word-of-mouth the sender actually knows the recipient and his/her situation. This means that you can create two, three or four unique and simple messages and send the one that is most relevant to your recipient. Make it simple and engaging, and fun as well, and do not let your creativity get in the way. First and foremost, communicate the real benefit to the consumer.

Simplicity makes the spread of buzz so much easier and faster. Simplicity is often dragged down by committees representing multiple departments that feel they have to have their goals and strategies represented in the overall communication plan. The plan gets weighed down by pure mass.

One way that an organization can develop a unique or irresistible offer is to resist making assumptions about what customers think, believe to be true or find irresistible, because much is missed by organizations in which one person believes that he or she speaks on behalf of 10 million customers. You can overcome this problem by involving customers in the buzz creation process. From a small group of some 12 people to a larger panel of 100 or 1,000, people could be enlisted to test out ideas or even generate ideas at the outset and test them, and then democratically give them a vote. This worked pretty well for the Howard Dean Campaign spin-off Democracy for America when it created a billboard campaign targeting Tom DeLay in his own district of Texas. It became a buzz-worthy campaign in some political circles.

The shape of buzz marketing to come

With experts and researchers sharing information, we will develop much more expertise about how to do buzz marketing better.

In a few years, companies with strong marketing and advertising practices will need to have organized word-of-mouth as part of their underlying marketing concept, or even their knowledge and research concept. They are going to need to engage with consumers much more differently. The lines between the company and the consumer are changing. Buzz marketing will look at working with customers, instead of marketing at them, to make things happen.

Then there is the issue of trust. We always talk about the fact that people do not trust the media as much as they used to, but the truth is that people do not trust other people as much as they used to.

If one were to compare, say, 1962 with 1999, a constant decline in trust would become apparent—not because people have changed their minds, but because younger generations are not as trusting. Companies that do unethical things such as encourage people to enter into undercover marketing schemes, which we saw in 2000 and 2001, further reduce the trust that people put into word-of-mouth—at the same time increasing the trust that people have in close friends.

There is a difference between people you really know and just other people. It will be interesting to see in 5-10 years where people are in terms of trust. One study from NOP World, conducted in early 2005, showed that most people feel comfortable about a company’s giving someone a product and asking to spread the word about it. They feel that person can still be trusted. But, in the same way that large companies lost trust after a few scandals, the same can happen to buzz marketing. So it is important that the Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) and an ethical code exist.

We all agree that buzz marketing can be a powerful component of anyone’s marketing plan. Of course, wielding it effectively can be tricky. Thanks to our illustrious panel of experts, we have some great fodder for doing a much more effective job at buzz marketing in the future.

MarketingProfs recently convened a Thought Leaders Summit to get the answers to these questions and more. On hand were Dave Balter, founder and president of BzzAgent and founding member of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association; Luanne Calvert, founder of Mixed Marketing; Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba, authors of Creating Customer Evangelists: How Loyal Customers become a Volunteer Sales Force; Jim Nail, principal analyst with Forrester Research; Jerry Needel, vice-president of client services at BuzzMetrics; and Emmanuel Rosen, author of Anatomy of Buzz. What follows is their collective wisdom.

What is buzz marketing?

Emmanuel Rosen, author of Anatomy of Buzz, defines buzz as “all the person-to-person communication about a brand.” More specifically, all your company’s activities and efforts geared to stimulate positive person-to-person communication about your brand, products and services.

Sure, that’s a broad definition. But his definition is broad for a reason—buzz marketing is the responsibility of everyone in a company. It’s not only about creating products that people will pass on to their friends, but it encompasses all our efforts to stimulate person-to-person communication about our brand.

People are always searching for (and sharing) honest opinions about a product or service. Buzz marketing is about getting your product noticed by creating an event or experience that will get people talking. Tactically and for the short-term, it’s great for product launches. It’s authentic. It can be online and offline. And you can leverage PR and publicity along with it. The bottom line: Buzz can differentiate your company on a grand scale.

Buzz vs. evangelism vs. viral

Buzz marketing is about creating an event. Viral marketing targets people and places to spread the word. As an example, the launch of Tide Cold Water appealed to the Coalition for Energy Efficiency by playing up the product’s inherent energy savings. And the approach proved to be very successful. The Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, which actually started in Chicago in 1936, is still out there today creating buzz.

Customer evangelism, meanwhile, is a long-term strategy that is designed to build, over time, an emotional connection with customers so they will sing your praises to others. Quick buzz campaigns normally do not incite immediate evangelism.

Buzz marketing in action

The Greenpeace project, in which two Minnesota men are attempting to cross the North Pole on foot and in canoes, is designed to raise awareness about climate change—in other words, it is designed to get people talking. Behind it is an important strategic message. For example, the explorers will offer periodic updates on their Web site, urging people (and their friends) to contact Congress. Finally, there will be an opportunity to win a five-day tour for two to the Brazilian Amazon.

The Greenpeace effort is a story worth repeating. And from a marketing standpoint, it is a winner because it encompasses all angles: charitable, promotional and online. Here is viral marketing at its best, and just one of many opportunities that people are using to get the word out and create buzz.

Product sampling is another way to spread buzz, such as the Wrigley Company’s handing out gum samples on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue.

SalesForce.com took its software product to a new sampling level by making the product freely available for an entire year. It became the basis of the entire company launch and eventually led to a fairly successful IPO.

Blogs are another example of how you can use buzz to spread word-of-mouth. Yogurt maker Stonyfield Farms is an oft-cited example.

Publicity stunts are also buzz marketing. Just about anything Richard Branson does, for example, is a publicity stunt—garnering a pretty good amount of press and certainly a lot of word-of-mouth. Tapping a really great spokesperson like Branson is sure to create buzz for your campaign.

There’s also the standard (but still effective) technique of the “tell-a-friend” functionality built into so many Web sites these days.

At its core, buzz marketing comprises a range of decisions and activities that effect word-of-mouth, starting with the spirit or attitude of your company. Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell describe it well in their book, Creating Customer Evangelists, when they talk about how the attitude of your company can influence word-of-mouth in a big way. Company climate affects customer service and what your customers tell their friends about how they were treated, for example. One of our experts was convinced that this was the number-one factor in whether customers recommend products to others.

Short- or long-term strategy?

Buzz marketing requires short-term input to create an event or experience that delivers a long-term benefit.

Every product—no matter how great—has a finite window of opportunity. To build a brand over the longer term, companies need to be integrating buzz marketing or word-of-mouth into their overall marketing strategies. It’s important to get the balance right.

Buzz also ties into a larger trend in consumer behavior. As individuals take more control over their media, marketing and entertainment consumption decisions, marketers need to find new ways to connect with those who really love your product and use them to help spread the word. Marketers need to focus on incorporating short-term tactics that identify those evangelists so they can be cultivated over the longer term.

Word-of-mouth can be quite dangerous if used in isolation. Once people start talking about your product or service, the focus of those conversations can change very quickly. Word-of-mouth is authentic—so the conversations that begin as positive can quickly change to the negative and work against you as well.

Remember, you cannot fool the consumer, no matter how good an event you create, or how much noise or how much excitement. The consumer will always share honest, authentic word-of-mouth. The real magic in generating buzz and word-of-mouth is picking a product that people are going to like once they get it.

The piece in the puzzle

What should you be doing to incorporate buzz marketing into your marketing mix? Many marketers have great ideas around a specific buzz marketing event, but they are not looking at how they can apply buzz marketing across the entire marketing mix.

It is not just about stimulating conversation, after all. It’s about making it easy for consumers to share their thoughts, feedback and comments with other consumers. We also see a lot of people sitting on assets they don’t know they have: information that may appear trivial or uninteresting to you but would attract thousands of evangelists or enthusiasts who would just love to talk about it.

When in campaign development mode, it is a legitimate question to ask “Is this is a buzz-worthy product launch event that we are doing?” And then ask “How do we put the media and PR plan in place to get that kind of buzz happening?”

Customers are now in control. Engaging them is definitely part of the overall marketing picture.

Traditional media still works, but it’s harder to get your messages heard. And it no longer creates credibility. Consumers are very skeptical; therefore, only buzz and word-of-mouth can lend credibility. A company marketing manager should ask himself or herself: “How can I improve the chance of a customer passing on a positive word-of-mouth about our company?”

Buzz has to reflect a company or organization’s overall feel, its philosophy or its cause. It is not a one-off buzz for the sake of buzz building, tactic or gimmick, but rather continues to build a solid marketing foundation. Think of taking an airplane trip on Southwest, and the flight attendant is singing at the end of the flight. That’s a terrific buzz-building tactic. Buzz needn’t cost a lot of money, but it sure gets people talking about you.

Buzz marketing also provides very fast feedback to companies to latch on to what people are saying, and how they are saying it. They then can use that information to direct additional buzz marketing tactics, make rapid product improvements or target new markets.

A question of ownership

Who should own word-of-mouth and buzz marketing? The PR industry? Direct marketers? Media specialists? Ad agencies? Corporate in-house departments? There’s an intense battle right now about whose “discipline” it is.

Of course, it needn’t belong to a single entity. When you are talking about evangelists and influencers and encouraging direct relationships with consumers, PR might direct the buzz.

On the other hand, media planners combine an understanding of where word-of-mouth fits into the overall marketing mix and a knowledge of the audience, focus on ongoing tracking and their ability to develop channel-agnostic marketing approaches.

Advertising agencies have become brand stewards. With word-of-mouth taking place online as well as offline, interactive agencies are becoming much more involved in buzz marketing as well.

In other words, we are seeing all disciplines starting to develop dedicated word-of-mouth practices. In the end, it may be big enough for all groups to have a stake in, but it is going to be interesting to watch over the next year or so.

When it’s not the right solution

If you are desperate to create a message that is going to be exciting and you have no other great ideas other than launching a buzz marketing campaign, you know you are in trouble.

If you have a bad product, do not get anyone buzzing about it. Advertising guru David Ogilvy said years ago: “The best way to kill a bad product is great advertising.” Word-of-mouth marketing is another great way to kill a bad product. Ideally, your product is new, exciting and effective.

If your brand or product does not have “soul” and your campaign does not have authenticity and genuineness to it, your buzz marketing is going to fall flat.

Avoid creating a buzz campaign in a contrived way. Two examples come to mind, both from the fast-food sandwich world. The first is Subservient Chicken, Burger King’s attempt to goose up sales for its chicken sandwich. Subservient Chicken had absolutely nothing to do with how good the chicken sandwich was, and the campaign didn’t sell sandwiches.

The second example is the McDonald’s campaign that put out a bounty to rappers to mention Big Mac in their songs. Trying to buy culture in a highly contrived and inauthentic manner can instead serve up a backlash online.

The question does linger, however: If Burger King had not done Subservient Chicken, which changed its image dramatically, would people have ever come and witnessed the changes afoot at Burger King? Tracking immediate sales of a product may overlook some of the bigger affect that a good buzz campaign can have on a brand image.

If you are trying to reach an audience that is very chatty, like young people, it makes a lot of sense to use buzz marketing. But if you want to market paper clips to Trappist monks who have taken a vow of silence, buzz marketing is not the way to go. Likewise, when the players in your audience are disconnected, it is probably not the right solution for you.

The biggest obstacles to creating buzz

The biggest enemy of buzz is routine. It is sad when events follow a standard formula because of the missed opportunities. Companies often put a lot of money and effort into creating an event where there is nothing to talk about. Products that are neither truly remarkable nor unique don’t help, either.

Sometimes the biggest obstacle can be the person sitting at your front desk annoying your customers—somebody who doesn’t return phone calls or respond to emails. People will not buzz about a company that does not treat them well. Your company may be acting on several fronts and intriguing me, maybe through some clever viral marketing. But if I really do not like your company I am not going to recommend your product.

Marketers, too, can create barriers because they get so wrapped up in their products and fail to take a step back to ask, “Is this going to be important to the customer?”

Real performers

Who does buzz marketing well? Red Bull for one. Whether you like it or not—once you taste it, you have to say something about it.

Red Bull keeps innovating by coming up with events like its Flugtag, an event that involves the customer in trying to fly manpowered flying machines over a body of water. Involvement is a very important part of creating buzz. The more someone thinks about the product and the more you allow someone to be creative, the more that person is going to talk about it. Red Bull also works with network hubs or opinion leaders through the Red Bull Music Academy, which is its way to recruit DJs in different countries.

Red Bull uses a well known phenomenon called “uneven distribution” of information. When something is not available to you, you tend to want it and definitely want to talk about it. When Red Bull enters a new market, it does not go for mass distribution immediately. First, it allows selected outlets to carry their product. Its advertising focuses on reinforcing a message rather than introducing the product in the marketplace.

As a concept and idea, it is as much about cool events, how the product is mixed, where it all started, the amazing CEO and how hard it was to get it approved. Red Bull combines all these elements, not just the product itself, to get people talking.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) wins the category for consistency and strategy in buzz marketing. About six months ago, The New Yorker ran a thoughtful article about the kinds of strategies PETA developed to create its brand. PETA is not a big spender, but it is always in the news and it gets people talking about its stunts.

A few years ago, Taco Bell placed a target in the middle of the Indian Ocean and said if the Mir space station hit it everyone in America would get a free taco. It got an insurance company to cover it, just in case. The campaign was as smart as it was low cost.

Target also does a great job. To generate sales on Black Friday, it gave people a wake-up call, with selected celebrities calling early in the morning and reminding people they could shop Target at 6:00 am.

Anyone can do something shocking or different and get a lot of buzz on TV, but it may not tie back to the product and to product sales.

Remarkable campaigns

One of the best examples of a very well-integrated buzz marketing campaign was the launch of the Mini Cooper, for its consistent and strategic message about the joy of driving. The “Let’s Motor” campaign played off the terrific design of the car and the fact that it is still the smallest car on the road.

Instead of launching millions of dollars in TV advertising, which we often see with a new car launch, the company bolted a Mini Cooper on top of an SUV and drove it around cities with a sign saying, “Let’s Motor.” It also placed cars in the stands at Major League baseball games. While the car itself is buzz-building when you see it, placing it in certain contexts compels you to talk about it.

Its website encouraged you to design your own Mini, add all the different features, customize and then, of course, send that design to a friend. Even the print ads were different and people took notice. The result was long waiting lists for the Mini Cooper.

Another, albeit smaller, example of a remarkable campaign was the previously mentioned campaign for Tide Cold Water. Determining that one of the benefits of using cold water was energy savings, Tide did not try to convert the entire world into cold water washers. It did not try to create 14 million unique visitors to the Web site. It zeroed in on people who were concerned about high-energy consumption and put the product in their hands. It was an intelligent way to scale buzz marketing to an appropriate level for the product.

Perhaps the ultimate buzz campaign was the introduction of Trivial Pursuit to the US market in 1983. The woman behind that campaign was Linda Pezzano. What accelerated the campaign and got people talking about the product was uneven distribution of information, sending advance copies to celebrities who were mentioned in the game, and sending mystery envelopes with one card from the game at a time to buyers in toy stores.

People went to bars and other places and started playing the game with each other. Celebrities hosted trivia parties. Approximately 150 radio stations staged a trivia event, giving away games. It was a well-planned and well-executed campaign.

Trivial Pursuit sold 20 million copies in 1984, and it was not a cheap product. But it was a unique product. There hadn’t been a game like it before. It was totally new and different.

And to top it all off, someone with a lot of energy and creative ideas capitalized on countless conversations around the product.