Amazon.co.uk
The Palm Pilot. The novel Cold Mountain. The iMac. Hotmail. FedEx. The movies The Blair Witch Project and There's Something About Mary. According to former marketing exec Emanuel Rosen, they all became successful not through traditional advertising or marketing routes, but through "buzz", that semi-tangible process through which information and commentary jump from one brain/mouth to another, and customer loyalty is built through the advice of friends, colleagues, or trusted "mega-hubs" of information. Rosen has spent the past few years studying the routes, nodes and clusters through which buzz passes and grows, and the result is this well-researched book. While it doesn't throw much new light on the mechanics of buzz, it is at least instructive and entertaining, offering mini-sagas of the successful buzz behind such marketing triumphs as the BMW Z3 roadster. Buzz-seekers be warned, however: with the exception of a short chapter at the end of the book called "Buzz Workshop", you won't find much of a blueprint for starting the gears of buzz for your product or service. What you do get is a trove of real-life stories that, if they don't inspire and guide you toward taking your first buzz-creating baby steps, probably mean you are the type of person who should stick with conventional advertising and PR. --Timothy Murphy
-- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.
Amazon.com
The Palm Pilot. The novel Cold Mountain. The iMac. Hotmail. FedEx. The Blair Witch Project and There's Something About Mary. According to former marketing exec Emanuel Rosen, they all became successful not through traditional advertising or marketing routes, but through "buzz," that semitangible process through which information and commentary jump from one brain or mouth to another. Rosen also ascribes buzz to creating customer loyalty, which he says is built through the advice of friends, colleagues, or such trusted "mega-hubs" of information as Oprah Winfrey and Rosie O'Donnell. Rosen has spent the past few years studying the routes, nodes, and clusters through which buzz passes and grows, and the result is this well-researched book. While it doesn't throw much new light on the mechanics of buzz, it is at least instructive and entertaining, offering minisagas of the successful buzz behind such marketing triumphs as the dELia's catalog for teenage girls, PowerBars, and the BMW Z3 roadster. Buzz seekers, be warned, however: with the exception of a short chapter at the end of the book called "Buzz Workshop," you won't find much of a blueprint for starting the gears of buzz for your product or service. What you do get is a trove of real-life stories that, if they don't inspire and guide you toward taking your first buzz-creating baby steps, probably mean you're the type of person who should stick with conventional advertising and PR. --Timothy Murphy
-- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.
From Booklist
Buzz is what leads to long lines at a movie theater, what makes it impossible to get a reservation for that new restaurant, and what can send a first-time author to the top of the best-seller lists. Buzz is a lot like humor. It is easy to give examples of how it works; but just like dissecting a joke, it becomes an academic exercise, and investigating the anatomy of buzz is no guarantee that successful buzz can be cloned. Examples are myriad, but a definition is elusive. Rosen calls it the "aggregate of all person-to-person communication about a particular product, service, or company at any point in time." Rosen was a marketing vice-president at a software company that developed a product called EndNote, which could display references and citations in any bibliographic style. He observed buzz firsthand as EndNote's popularity spread through the academic and writing communities. While Rosen does discuss networks, nodes, and the diffusion of information, he also offers a fascinating look at our popular and consumer cultures. David Rouse
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.
Pressestimmen
"Clear, lucid . . . The last chapter by itself is worth the entire price of the book!"
–Seth Godin, author of Permission Marketing
"Readable, intelligent, grounded, and, most important, useful. Check it out."
–Paco Underhill, author of Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping
–Seth Godin, author of Permission Marketing
"Readable, intelligent, grounded, and, most important, useful. Check it out."
–Paco Underhill, author of Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping
Kurzbeschreibung
The first guide to creating the word-of-mouth magic that breaks through the skepticism and information overload of today's consumers, and drive sales--and profits--to new heights.
As Newsweek recently proclaimed, "Buzz greases the great conveyor belt of culture and commerce, moving everything from movies to fashions of the body and mind faster and faster."
Now available in paperback, The Anatomy of Buzz, written by former marketing VP Emanuel Rosen, pinpoints the products and services that benefit the most from buzz and offers specific strategies for creating and sustaining effective word-of-mouth strategies. Drawing on interviews with more than 150 marketing executives who have successfully built buzz for major brands, Rosen describes the ins-and-outs of attracting the attention of influential first-users and "bigmouth" movers-and-shakers, and discusses proven techniques for stimulating customer-to-customer selling–including how companies can spread the word to new territories by taking advantage of customer hubs and networks on the Internet and elsewhere.
Recent surveys show that 74 percent of young people rely to some extent on others when selecting a car, that 56 percent of moviegoers follow the recommendations of friends, and that 65 percent of the people who bought a Palm Pilot were inspired by the enthusiasm of others. With The Anatomy of Buzz, business leaders have what they need to reignite excitement about an existing product or service or turbocharge the launch of a new product.
As Newsweek recently proclaimed, "Buzz greases the great conveyor belt of culture and commerce, moving everything from movies to fashions of the body and mind faster and faster."
Now available in paperback, The Anatomy of Buzz, written by former marketing VP Emanuel Rosen, pinpoints the products and services that benefit the most from buzz and offers specific strategies for creating and sustaining effective word-of-mouth strategies. Drawing on interviews with more than 150 marketing executives who have successfully built buzz for major brands, Rosen describes the ins-and-outs of attracting the attention of influential first-users and "bigmouth" movers-and-shakers, and discusses proven techniques for stimulating customer-to-customer selling–including how companies can spread the word to new territories by taking advantage of customer hubs and networks on the Internet and elsewhere.
Recent surveys show that 74 percent of young people rely to some extent on others when selecting a car, that 56 percent of moviegoers follow the recommendations of friends, and that 65 percent of the people who bought a Palm Pilot were inspired by the enthusiasm of others. With The Anatomy of Buzz, business leaders have what they need to reignite excitement about an existing product or service or turbocharge the launch of a new product.
Über den Autor
EMANUEL ROSEN was Vice President of Marketing for Niles Software for nine years before--like scores of other Silicon Valley success stories--selling the company and retiring on the proceeds. He spent two years researching and writing this book. He lives in Menlo Park, California.
Leseprobe. Abdruck erfolgt mit freundlicher Genehmigung der Rechteinhaber. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.
1.
What Is Buzz?
I first witnessed how buzz travels years ago. In 1988 I was working at a typical start-up software company in California: five people, four Macs, one PC, and a lot of hope. We had a single product, EndNote, a reference tool for researchers, and it was still a few months away from release. We hadn't advertised it. In fact, only a handful of people in California knew it existed. Yet we had just received our first order in the mail--and that order came from Princeton, New Jersey. All five of us stood around that purchase order, staring at it and trying to figure out how someone a continent away had learned of us.
Several months earlier I had joined the company's founder, Rich Niles, to help him market the software. EndNote is designed to help researchers keep track of their references and compile bibliographies at the end of their research papers. Not a very sexy product, I admit, but a very useful tool when you need to organize your research and follow the nitty-gritty requirements of different journals. Rich came up with the idea after he saw how much time his wife, who's a scientist, was spending compiling bibliographies. Every academic journal has its own protocol for the way they want bibliographic information organized. One journal would want a reference to look like this:
Rogers, Everett M. Diffusion of Innovations. 4th ed. New York: Free Press, 1995.
While another journal would want it to look this way:
Rogers, E. M. (1995). Diffusion of Innovations. (4th ed.). New York: Free Press.
Even with a word processor, you can imagine how tedious this task is when you have to go through and make these changes hundreds of times every year. EndNote stores references in a database format and can display them in any bibliographic style.
When the purchase order we got from New Jersey came in, we called the customer who had placed the order. How had he heard of EndNote? Apparently one of the few people who'd attended a sneak preview of our product in Berkeley, California, several days earlier had been so excited about EndNote that he posted an enthusiastic message on an electronic bulletin board used by academics. One of those academics had just become our first customer.
Before I joined that start-up, I was a copywriter in an advertising agency, and in my mind marketing worked like this: Companies advertise, customers see the clever advertisements that copywriters like me worked to create, and then--and only then--customers buy the products. But this obviously was not what was happening with that EndNote purchase order, and in the following nine years I was reminded thousands of times that in the real world things operate very differently. Since that first order more than two hundred thousand copies of EndNote have been sold, and most customers have told us that they heard about the product not from advertising, not from dealers, not from magazines--but rather from friends and colleagues.
That's how I became interested in buzz.
After this experience I started to pay more attention to word of mouth. But I was still not sure how important it was in other markets. Maybe, I thought, word of mouth played a significant role only in the academic market or only for software? Once I started researching the topic, however, it became clear that this is not the case. Buzz plays a major role in the purchasing process of many products:
* Sixty-five percent of customers who bought a Palm organizer told the makers of this device that they had heard about it from another person.
* Forty-seven percent of the readers of Surfing magazine say that the biggest influences on their decisions about where to surf and what to purchase come from a friend.
* Friends and relatives are the number-one source for information about places to visit or about flights, hotels or rental cars, according to the Travel Industry Association. Of people they surveyed, forty-three percent cited friends and family as a source for information.
* Fifty-seven percent of customers of one car dealership in California learned about the dealership by word of mouth. "This is not unusual," says Jim Callahan of the Dohring Company, which conducts surveys for about five hundred car dealerships around the country every year.
* Every year we hear about movies such as The Blair Witch Project or There's Something About Mary that are driven by word of mouth. Fifty-three percent of moviegoers rely to some extent on a recommendation from someone they know, according to a study by Maritz Marketing Research. No matter how much money Hollywood pours into advertising, people frequently consult with each other about what movie to see.
* Seventy percent of Americans rely on the advice of others when selecting a new doctor, according to the same study. Sixty-three percent of women surveyed for Self magazine cited "friend, family or co-worker referral" as one of the factors influencing over-the-counter drug purchases.
And yet most of today's marketing still focuses on how to use advertising and other tools to influence each customer individually, ignoring the fact that purchasing many types of products is part of a social process. It involves not only a one-to-one interaction between the company and the customer but also many exchanges of information and influence among the people who surround that customer. Len Short, executive vice president of advertising and brand management at Charles Schwab, summed it up this way: "The idea that a critical part of marketing is word of mouth and validation from important personal relationships is absolutely key, and most marketers ignore it."
What Exactly Is Buzz?
A kid stands outside a school leaning against the fence. He's about thirteen, wearing jeans and a baseball cap, and playing with a yo-yo. He's good. A younger kid walks by, carrying a backpack that may weigh as much as he does. He stops. His eyes follow the yo-yo that now spins in the air in ways that would make Newton go back and check his gravity theories.
"Where'd ya get it?" the young kid asks softly.
The older kid keeps working.
"What kind is it?" the younger kid asks a little louder this time.
"Yomega," says the older boy. "The Brain."
"Brain?"
"They call it 'The Brain.' It knows when to come back to your hand. It's cool."
This type of exchange is the basic building block of buzz. I call it a "comment." When you add up all the comments made at a certain point in time about this yo-yo, you get the buzz about Yomega. In the end, buzz is the sum of all comments about a certain product that are exchanged among people at any given time.
Now, my definition of buzz is broader than others. Newsweek, for example, defined buzz in a 1998 article as "infectious chatter; genuine, street-level excitement about a hot new person, place or thing." This is a journalist's definition of the new: what's hot, what's attracting people's attention not just today but this very hour. Marketers and entrepreneurs, however, have a lot to gain from exploring what customers are saying about their products, not only when they are ultra new but also when these products are established. For this reason I've chosen to discuss buzz in a more general sense. Buzz is all the word of mouth about a brand. It's the aggregate of all person-to-person communication about a particular product, service, or company at any point in time.
People all around the world constantly exchange comments about everything, from golf to the meaning of life. Comments use many vehicles, but whether they move over phone lines, in e-mail messages, on paper, or over the dinner table, comments always start in one brain and end up...
What Is Buzz?
I first witnessed how buzz travels years ago. In 1988 I was working at a typical start-up software company in California: five people, four Macs, one PC, and a lot of hope. We had a single product, EndNote, a reference tool for researchers, and it was still a few months away from release. We hadn't advertised it. In fact, only a handful of people in California knew it existed. Yet we had just received our first order in the mail--and that order came from Princeton, New Jersey. All five of us stood around that purchase order, staring at it and trying to figure out how someone a continent away had learned of us.
Several months earlier I had joined the company's founder, Rich Niles, to help him market the software. EndNote is designed to help researchers keep track of their references and compile bibliographies at the end of their research papers. Not a very sexy product, I admit, but a very useful tool when you need to organize your research and follow the nitty-gritty requirements of different journals. Rich came up with the idea after he saw how much time his wife, who's a scientist, was spending compiling bibliographies. Every academic journal has its own protocol for the way they want bibliographic information organized. One journal would want a reference to look like this:
Rogers, Everett M. Diffusion of Innovations. 4th ed. New York: Free Press, 1995.
While another journal would want it to look this way:
Rogers, E. M. (1995). Diffusion of Innovations. (4th ed.). New York: Free Press.
Even with a word processor, you can imagine how tedious this task is when you have to go through and make these changes hundreds of times every year. EndNote stores references in a database format and can display them in any bibliographic style.
When the purchase order we got from New Jersey came in, we called the customer who had placed the order. How had he heard of EndNote? Apparently one of the few people who'd attended a sneak preview of our product in Berkeley, California, several days earlier had been so excited about EndNote that he posted an enthusiastic message on an electronic bulletin board used by academics. One of those academics had just become our first customer.
Before I joined that start-up, I was a copywriter in an advertising agency, and in my mind marketing worked like this: Companies advertise, customers see the clever advertisements that copywriters like me worked to create, and then--and only then--customers buy the products. But this obviously was not what was happening with that EndNote purchase order, and in the following nine years I was reminded thousands of times that in the real world things operate very differently. Since that first order more than two hundred thousand copies of EndNote have been sold, and most customers have told us that they heard about the product not from advertising, not from dealers, not from magazines--but rather from friends and colleagues.
That's how I became interested in buzz.
After this experience I started to pay more attention to word of mouth. But I was still not sure how important it was in other markets. Maybe, I thought, word of mouth played a significant role only in the academic market or only for software? Once I started researching the topic, however, it became clear that this is not the case. Buzz plays a major role in the purchasing process of many products:
* Sixty-five percent of customers who bought a Palm organizer told the makers of this device that they had heard about it from another person.
* Forty-seven percent of the readers of Surfing magazine say that the biggest influences on their decisions about where to surf and what to purchase come from a friend.
* Friends and relatives are the number-one source for information about places to visit or about flights, hotels or rental cars, according to the Travel Industry Association. Of people they surveyed, forty-three percent cited friends and family as a source for information.
* Fifty-seven percent of customers of one car dealership in California learned about the dealership by word of mouth. "This is not unusual," says Jim Callahan of the Dohring Company, which conducts surveys for about five hundred car dealerships around the country every year.
* Every year we hear about movies such as The Blair Witch Project or There's Something About Mary that are driven by word of mouth. Fifty-three percent of moviegoers rely to some extent on a recommendation from someone they know, according to a study by Maritz Marketing Research. No matter how much money Hollywood pours into advertising, people frequently consult with each other about what movie to see.
* Seventy percent of Americans rely on the advice of others when selecting a new doctor, according to the same study. Sixty-three percent of women surveyed for Self magazine cited "friend, family or co-worker referral" as one of the factors influencing over-the-counter drug purchases.
And yet most of today's marketing still focuses on how to use advertising and other tools to influence each customer individually, ignoring the fact that purchasing many types of products is part of a social process. It involves not only a one-to-one interaction between the company and the customer but also many exchanges of information and influence among the people who surround that customer. Len Short, executive vice president of advertising and brand management at Charles Schwab, summed it up this way: "The idea that a critical part of marketing is word of mouth and validation from important personal relationships is absolutely key, and most marketers ignore it."
What Exactly Is Buzz?
A kid stands outside a school leaning against the fence. He's about thirteen, wearing jeans and a baseball cap, and playing with a yo-yo. He's good. A younger kid walks by, carrying a backpack that may weigh as much as he does. He stops. His eyes follow the yo-yo that now spins in the air in ways that would make Newton go back and check his gravity theories.
"Where'd ya get it?" the young kid asks softly.
The older kid keeps working.
"What kind is it?" the younger kid asks a little louder this time.
"Yomega," says the older boy. "The Brain."
"Brain?"
"They call it 'The Brain.' It knows when to come back to your hand. It's cool."
This type of exchange is the basic building block of buzz. I call it a "comment." When you add up all the comments made at a certain point in time about this yo-yo, you get the buzz about Yomega. In the end, buzz is the sum of all comments about a certain product that are exchanged among people at any given time.
Now, my definition of buzz is broader than others. Newsweek, for example, defined buzz in a 1998 article as "infectious chatter; genuine, street-level excitement about a hot new person, place or thing." This is a journalist's definition of the new: what's hot, what's attracting people's attention not just today but this very hour. Marketers and entrepreneurs, however, have a lot to gain from exploring what customers are saying about their products, not only when they are ultra new but also when these products are established. For this reason I've chosen to discuss buzz in a more general sense. Buzz is all the word of mouth about a brand. It's the aggregate of all person-to-person communication about a particular product, service, or company at any point in time.
People all around the world constantly exchange comments about everything, from golf to the meaning of life. Comments use many vehicles, but whether they move over phone lines, in e-mail messages, on paper, or over the dinner table, comments always start in one brain and end up...
